Who was Ben Linder?

a story i just came across...worth reading...

Who was Ben Linder?

Benjamin Ernest Linder (July 7, 1959—April 28, 1987), born in California, was a young American engineer who was killed in an ambush on April 28, 1987, by a group of CIA-funded Contras while working on a small hydroelectric dam that was to bring electricity and running water to a village in the middle of Nicaragua's war zone. Linder's death made front-page headlines around the world and polarized opinion in the United States.

Linder graduated from the University of Washington in 1983 with a degree in mechanical engineering. He left his Oregon home that summer and moved to Managua. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town.

Linder and two Nicaraguans -- Sergio Hernández and Pablo Rosales -- were killed in the Contra ambush while working at the construction site for a new dam for the nearby village of San José de Bocay. The autopsy showed that Linder was first wounded by a grenade, then shot at point-blank range in the head. The two Nicaraguans were also murdered at close range, Rosales by a stab wound in the heart.

Linder's electrification project was typical of Contra targets. Near El Cuá, the agricultural cooperative of El Cedro had been attacked three times resulting in a number of deaths. On March 19, 1987, four coop members tried to fend off a Contra attack, providing cover for residents as they escaped. Two of them were killed, one a close friend of Linder's. The health clinic at the coop, its food supply center, and a house were burned to the ground.

The ambush was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Contras to undermine support for the Sandinistas by engaging in a campaign of sabotage against the nation's economy, and demonstrating the cost to the people if they continued to support their government.

The murder of Linder and the growing distaste in the U.S. for the covert war in Nicaragua finally led to the U.S. Congress prohibiting military aid to the Contras. But the Contra attacks, conscription into the army, the complete U.S. economic embargo on the impoverished country, and the Sandinista response of eliminating civil liberties in the mid-1980s all combined to cause the defeat of the FSLN in February 1990 elections.

In July 1995, Joan Kruckewitt, an American journalist who lived in Nicaragua from 1983 to 1991 and covered the war between the Sandinistas and the Contras for ABC Radio, located and interviewed one of the men who killed Ben Linder. The story became the basis for an article in The New Yorker and was later expanded into a book, The Death of Ben Linder.
Benjamin Linder, Sergio Hernández, y Pablo Rosales, presente!