Destination Nicaragua (Film Review)

Destination Nicaragua (also released as “Viva! – Destination Nicaragua”); c1985 ; 60 minutes; English ; Directed by Barbara Trent ; narrated by actress Tyne Daly. Documentary about a group of Americans who go to Nicaragua to learn about the conflict between the Contras and the Sandinistas.

Before filming her award-winning “Cover-Up” (Iran-Contra scandal) and “Panama Deception” (Operation Just Cause – the capture of Manuel Noriega) Barbara Trent set off to examine U.S. foreign policy in Central America, and Nicaragua in particular, as seen and heard through the eyes of ordinary Americans who are trying to understand the conflict, the suffering, and the U.S. justification for President Ronald Reagan’s Latin American policy.

Trent does this by setting up a cross-country itinerary, where the curious and conscience-driven Americans engage in interviews the family members of those dead Sandinista fighters, as well as observe Contra units preparing and launching various missions. They see the costs of the conflict, in not just financial terms in the amount of money which surely must be being expended in any civil-revolutionary war, but more importantly the human costs, as they try to fathom what it would take to reconcile matters in a way which would salvage Nicaragua, as Nicaraguans know it.

Trent not so much offers a study of war per se, but of what options people have when confronted with it, and what would be the fundamental prerequisites for a peaceful Nicaragua.

While not one of Trent’s films which accumulated a long series of awards and accolades (though it was, among other things, Silver Award Winner, at the Houston International Film Festival) it is reasonably web done, and it offers not only a moral framework, but a time-capsule look into what observers saw in the mid-1980’s.

Trent’s work here on “Destination Nicaragua”, and in her other two Central American documentaries (U.S. foreign policy in Panama, and Nicaragua), is discussed in interview fashion in another documentary film, “Raw Footage 1 – The Films of Barbara Trent” – where she is interviewed at length by actor Alec Baldwin. Trent’s films are routinely shown at festival, aired on television in many countries (rarely if ever in the U.S.), and are usually also available for download-renting via:

http://www.nowshowingonline.com/index.html