N.Y. Mayor de Blasio Active Supporter of Brutal Communist Regime

With Bill de Blasio making headlines for fanning the flames of racial tension between police and protesters it’s worth recalling newsworthy information about the New York City mayor’s dark past; that he was an active supporter of a brutal communist regime well known as one of the worst human rights abusers in Latin America.

Judicial Watch uncovered and reported the scandalous details last year. De Blasio was an active supporter of the communist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s. He was so enamored with Soviet-backed revolutionaries that he traveled to the capital city of the war-torn country, Managua, to aid their cause by participating in a relief mission. Upon de Blasio’s return to the United States, he joined the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (NSN).

JW examined the records of the NSN at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, located on the campus of New York University (NYU) in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. The archive is also the NYU “Reference Center for Marxist Studies.” According to the archive record guide: “The Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York (1985-2002), and its member organizations worked to support the Sandinista Revolution and to protest U.S. support of the counter-revolutionary military movement, aka the Contras, who also killed civilian supporters of the revolution, targeting medical and educational personnel in particular.”

The records show de Blasio was an ardent supporter of the communist revolutionaries in Nicaragua, who raised funds for the Sandinistas and was a subscriber to the party’s newspaper, “Barricada” (The Barricade). He traveled to Nicaragua in 1988 and became active in the NSN upon his return to the U.S. New York’s mayor has been unapologetic about his involvement with a foreign Marxist political movement accused of slaughtering innocent civilians and practicing the “disappearance” technique of eliminating political foes.

In fact, the Sandinistas were renowned as one of Latin America’s worst human rights violators. During three years of revolution they carried out thousands of political executions and the disappearance of thousands more who were considered anti-revolutionary, according to a Russian-born scholar cited in a news article. By 1983 there were about 20,000 political prisoners held in the Marxist regime’s jails, the highest number of political prisoners of any nation in the hemisphere with the exception of Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba.

This information is relevant because de Blasio is in the midst of a major crisis involving the city’s police department. For starters he got rid of a successful crime-fighting program called stop-and-frisk because it disproportionately affects minorities. The initiative directed officers to stop and search people suspected of criminal activity. Leftist organizations, and de Blasio, claim it violates civil rights because a disproportionate amount of blacks and Hispanic were getting nabbed. Axing the program was the beginning of the war between de Blasio, who took office this year, and the police union.

The mayor’s popularity further plummeted during the national furor over the point-blank murder of two police officers in Brooklyn. Because de Blasio has supported anti-police protests nationwide, cops in his own city accuse him of fomenting an anti-police fervor that contributed to the cold-blooded murder of the two officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. The mayor also said that, as the parent of a biracial teenage son (de Blasio’s wife is black), he worries that his son won’t be treated fairly by cops. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani says de Blasio has to apologize to his officers for suggesting that there’s a substantial and systemic racism in the New York City Police Department when there simply isn’t.