I understand that this passage of the Message has provoked much
unfavorable comment and criticism. These imprisonments and expulsions
were formally considered at a recent meeting of the Executive Committee
(Junta Directiva) of the Conservative Party and La
Prensa, the organ of that party, published in the same issue
with which it published President Moncada’s Message a Manifesto of the
Executive Committee in which the Party protests against these arbitrary
acts. A translation of the Manifesto is transmitted herewith.
As though it were a sequel to the President’s Message and the Manifesto,
the papers of today which published both documents also gave prominent
space to an account of the prospective expulsion of the following seven
additional Nicaraguans: Noel Ernesto Pallais, Arturo Vega, Agustin
Sanchez Salinas, Salvador Morales, Ernesto Centeno, Domingo Conrado and
Marco Antonio Benavente. I understand that three of these are
Conservatives but that the remaining four are Liberals who were recently
made prisoners in Leon on evidence indicating that they were engaged in
Communistic activities in cooperation with Bolsheviki organizations in
Latin America and elsewhere. One of these two individuals, Doctor Noel
Ernesto Pallais, is a son-in-law of
[Page 704]
the prominent physician of Leon, Dr. Luis H.
Debayle, and a brotherin-law of General Anastasio Somoza, Under
Secretary of Foreign Affairs. President Moncada has told me that a
Liberal Senator was also implicated in this Communistic plotting and
that he would have been expelled from the country with the others were
it not that his position as Senator makes him immune.
[Enclosure]
Manifesto of the National and Legal Board of
Directors of the Conservative Party
To the People of Nicaragua: The pacific
attitude of the Conservative Party has been consistent, considerate,
open, and notorious in the time which has elapsed since the first of
January, 1929, the day on which it yielded the public powers into
the hands of its adversary and descended to occupy the field of the
opposition in the active politics of the Republic.
Conscious of the obligations which it incurred when it accepted the
bases which Mr. Henry Stimson, as personal representative of the
President of the United States, proposed to it in a well-intended
and friendly mediation to put an end to the last destructive civil
war, Conservatism has lent the collaboration of its kindness,
moderation, and mildness in order that the High Powers, free from
worry, might be able to obtain the effective peace of the Republic,
and that the citizens might be able to enjoy that peace in the
atmosphere of a true social tranquility.
The Conservative Party knows very well that one of the immovable
bases on which the new situation rests is that of the intangibility
of the mandate conceded by the people for the entire time which the
Constitution provides. As that mandate was entrusted to the Liberal
Party by the result of the elections which were supervised by
General Frank R. McCoy45 commissioned by the
President of the United States, the Conservative Party which
attended those elections voluntarily, cannot by any conception nor
by any operation direct or indirect violate it (the mandate), and
the Conservative Party is resigned to its fallen situation
throughout all the Presidential period which is covered by the
verdict of the polls of 1928.
Resigned to that idea it has dedicated itself to reorganizing its
ranks and to bettering the elements which it will be able to direct
tomorrow in order to take part in political activities, within the
enjoyment of the necessary liberties which were guaranteed to it in
the same afore-mentioned agreements and by word of the mediator Mr.
Stimson himself, and which it feels it has the right to enjoy
through having been the party which instituted them in the Republic
[Page 705]
and which has restored
them as often as they were impaired, injured, or destroyed.
The Conservative Party has not decided to resign itself passively in
that new position, but it has operated as an opposition by correct
methods, agreeing on the causes which it has fallen to it to
support, without violence and advocating its points of view opposed
to those of the men now in charge of the High Powers. It does not
wish to be even censured as obstructionist, because it is trying to
leave all the responsibility for the present administrative
situation on the shoulders of the Liberal Party.
Always in the service of public tranquility and stimulated by the
desire to contribute to the realization of the plans which were
drawn up on the occasion referred to of putting an end to the civil
war, it resolved to go to the polls in the elections of Senators and
Deputies which have just passed. When it was announced that the
elections were going to be supervised by impartial elements, this
National and Legal Board of Directors removed the abstention which
it had previously decreed, and proceeded to set forth before the
electoral Mission what it felt necessary for the free action of the
party in its attendance at the polls.
In the spirit of conciliation which it has taken as a cardinal point
it presented its claims on the very points which the Liberal Party
had demanded of General McCoy in 1928 as necessary and indispensable
and which the Conservative Government granted it without discussion.
This Board of Directors felt that it would thus facilitate the
relations of the Electoral Mission with the Executive Power, which
could not deny the justice of the requests which it itself had
formulated in like circumstances. However, the majority of those
very just petitions were denied us notwithstanding the goodwill with
which the National Board of Elections proceeded, presided over by
the Honorable Captain Johnson commissioned by the President of the
United States.
In spite of such acts of opposition, capable of overwhelming the best
efforts of democracy, the Conservative Party, desirous of the good
success of the Electoral Mission, did not abstain from attendance at
the polls. It prepared itself for an absolutely unequal struggle
because it felt that its abstention on such an occasion would upset
the political organism of the Republic and would be a cause of
uneasiness. To such an extreme it has carried its attachment to
peace.
In order to understand the unjust inequality of footing in which the
two parties were placed in the last civic campaign, it will be
enough to recall that in the Departments of strongest Conservative
population the municipalities had been usurped, depriving the cities
and towns of their municipal governments, substituting for them,
contrary
[Page 706]
to the
Constitution and the laws, “de Facto” officials, created by a decree
of the Executive, which can well be called a partial “coup d’etat.”
The tradition of our democracy is essentially municipal as a people
of Spanish origin which the Nicaraguan people is. It is
inconceivable that there can be fair elections when the original
organs of democracy were corrupted and destroyed. The obstacles
which the usurping officials placed in the way of the victory of the
Conservative majority were innumerable. Withal, through devotion to
a far-reaching work of which the party considers itself the founder,
we went to the polls in order to pave the way of the Republic in its
evolutive march.
In order that peace may be a possession of all, real for the masses
and beneficial for society, it must be developed within the bounds
of order, which run parallel on the respect of the governed for
authority, and on the justice of the governors toward everyone and
toward all the citizens. The Conservative Party in its character of
opposition has fulfilled in the most rigorous manner the part which
belongs to it in the maintenance of that balance of order. It has
given its respect to authority and to the laws of the Nation. But
from the other side there has not been given to it that which
belongs to it through the obligation of justice in which authority
is established, and it has constantly been molested, its citizens
being denied the individual guarantees which our Fundamental Charter
grants them.
Immediately after the Electoral Mission had taken its departure, as
if to exhibit the failure of a system, with the impossibility that
the aforesaid Mission could effectively guarantee the citizens who
are opposed on any grounds to the opinions of the Executive,
although it is done according to the forms of law, Conservative
citizens have been persecuted, imprisoned, and deported, among them
candidates of the Party in the last elections and members of this
National and Legal Board of Directors.
Without proceeding in any way according to legal procedure, without
respecting the rules which the constitutions of all free and
civilized peoples have laid down for reducing a citizen to prison,
Conservatives have been seen continually arriving at the
penitentiary as criminals without crimes, prisoners by governmental
orders emanating from the Commander in Chief, as if martial law were
in force. This movement of honorable citizens who enter and leave
the prisons without sentence being passed and by arbitrary mandate
can only fill society with uneasiness. Peace continues unchangeable,
but the calm which must be its child and companion has taken its
leave of the Conservatives, who cannot devote themselves to their
tasks, because they feel themselves within the risk of the action
without reason of the authority. With the Conservative Party, which
comprises so
[Page 707]
large a part
of the Republic, thus harassed, its ill-being will end by
disquieting and afflicting the entire Nicaraguan society.
In order to explain such imprisonments and deportations without form
of judgment and without hearing those accused, there is talk of
conspiracies with criminal inclinations toward an attempt against
individuals determined on. The history of the Conservative Party
constitutes a precedent which by itself refutes such accusations.
Neither in the times in which the Party has suffered the most
persecutions, nor when guarantees for life and property were
lacking, nor when the families were persecuted and life was
impossible did Conservatism give consideration to thoughts of that
kind, and it always refrained from criminal transactions even to
free itself from any kind of tyranny.
In the presence of these events the National and Legal Board of
Directors of the Conservative Party, which at present directs its
political destinies and which is its official organ, has felt itself
obliged to make before the Nicaraguan people the following
declaration of the intentions of the Party and of the protest at the
mutilation of its rights:
The Conservative Party insists that it will not deviate a bit in its
pacific intentions. It will be a factor for the maintenance of
public peace while this rests on the system along which the Republic
travels on the axis of the institutions of rotation in office and of
free polls.
The Conservative Party protests against the lying accusations that it
is fomenting banditry or has understandings with it. All Nicaragua
knows what the origin of this evil is and the efforts which
Conservatism made when it was in power to attain a complete
re-establishment of peace.
The Conservative Party denies as insulting and slanderous every
accusation which may be directed against it in the attempt to
exhibit it as a participant in traitorous plans and in every kind of
criminal attempts against those who exercise the High Powers of the
Republic.
The Conservative Party protests at the unjustified persecutions of
which some of its honorable citizens are victims, who have been
reduced to prison and banished from the territory of the Republic
illegally and against all right, driving them from their homes,
without submitting them to judicial procedure, and violating the
laws and the Constitution of the Republic.
Managua, December 14, 1930.
Adolfo Diaz, Emiliano Chamorro, Carlos
Cuadra Pasos, N. Lacayo, F. Guzman, C. Rivers D., G. Reyes
Montealegre, D. Calero B., Luis Elizondo, Ismael Solórzano,
Alej. Cardenas, José María Siero, H. Zuñiga Padilla, D.
Stadthagen
(There are lacking more signatures which have not been
collected.)
