Was Bernie Sanders inappropriately, even disloyally, supportive of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government 34 years ago? Sanders, like many liberals and leftists, opposed the United States’ support for the hard-right Contras rebelling against the revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s. Two weeks ago, a New York Times report drew particular attention to his attendance at a 1985 Sandinista rally in Managua, in which people chanted “Aquí, allá el Yanqui morirá” [here and there the Yankee will die]. “Do you think if you had heard that directly, you would have stayed at the rally?” reporter Sydney Ember asked him in a follow up interview. She also questioned his support for Daniel Ortega who led the Sandinista revolution in the 80s, and now as Nicaragua’s current president is highly authoritarian and faces widespread opposition: “Do you believe you had an accurate view of President Ortega at the time?” His responses have drawn criticism. “Sanders went well beyond mere opposition to funding the war,” Jonathan Chait subsequently wrote at New York magazine. “This is all highly relevant to his presidential campaign.”

How one views this controversy depends mainly on one’s understanding of Nicaragua in the 1980s. Take, for example, “Aquí, allá Yanqui morirá.” The slogan had a specific meaning at the time. The crowd chanted it defensively as a warning against a possible invasion by U.S. troops, an option that was always on the Pentagon’s table. Despite the lens through which today’s Americans are likely to read it, the slogan was not at all equivalent to “Death to Americans” shouted by Al Qaeda supporters, nor was it meant as a statement of intent, as evidenced by the fact that thousands of Americans volunteered in Nicaragua during the 1980s without being harmed by Nicaraguan citizens or government authorities. (By contrast, the U.S.-supported Contra in their widespread campaign to execute Sandinista officials and supporters did kill American volunteer Benjamin Linder.)

It’s important to evaluate Sanders’s support for Ortega in the context of the 1980s, as well. Ortega’s regime today is certainly dictatorial and deplorable. But was that an accurate characterization at the time? The Sandinistas, after all, led the overthrow of a 43-year dictatorship. Most Nicaraguans at that point, including Sandinistas, wanted the new society to be free. During the mid 1980s I was doing dissertation historical research in the northwestern region of Chinandega, Nicaragua. I spent most of my time interviewing peasants in relatively remote areas and to get to their homes I often traveled on crowded buses also carrying off-duty police and soldiers. I can remember on several occasions hearing passengers casually curse the Sandinista government right in front of a policeman or a soldier. Neither the state agents nor the passengers ever showed the slightest concern. This bore little resemblance to the Reagan administration and media portrayal of a totalitarian society—although, to be sure, there were numerous examples of arbitrary repression in the war zones of Central and the Atlantic Coast regions of Nicaragua.

The U.S. media during the 1980s was mainly interested in Nicaragua within a Cold War frame. I recall a conversation in 1983 with a brilliant and creative former classmate of mine who was reporting for a major American daily. She, or possibly her editor, seemed only interested in a putative shipment of Soviet fighter jets rather than the major social transformation taking place in the western countryside. Under the Sandinista government in this period, many peasants participated actively in grassroots organizations that were rooted in decades of peasant and rural worker mobilizations in demand of land and living wages. Their antagonists, the agrarian elite, had depended for decades on the repressive force of the U.S.-equipped National Guard, intended as a bulwark against communism. “Before, the rich ruled and we had to obey,” one peasant told me. “Now it’s our turn to speak and that’s why they’re so pissed off.”* Along with the legacy of their defeat of Somoza’s National Guard in 1979, the Sandinistas presided over striking improvements in health and education during the early years of the revolution. By 1981, the illiteracy rate had dropped from over 50 percent to under 15 percent. By 1986, the infant mortality had dropped from 120 per 1,000 live births to 65. Such testimonials and figures usually did not make it into the news in the U.S.

The Sandinista Revolution was highly contradictory, at once emancipatory and repressive. In addition to stimulating positive reforms and social mobilization, the Sandinistas also instituted some truly misguided policies, such as mandating that all peasants sell their produce to a state distribution agency. Similarly, they often created state collective farms despite peasant desires for individual plots. But the revolutionary government did respond to popular protest, too, eliminating the distribution center and, by 1985, distributing significant portions of state-owned property to peasants. Such responses did not fit into the U.S. narrative about a “communist dictatorship.”