William D. Stewart (1941 – June 20, 1979) was an American journalist with ABC News who was murdered by Nicaraguan government National Guard ("Guardia") forces while reporting on the Nicaraguan Revolution as Sandinista rebel forces were closing in on the capital city of Managua in 1979. The footage was also used in From the Ashes: Nicaragua Today, a documentary released in 1983.

A fictional version of Stewart's murder was told in the 1983 film Under Fire, starring Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte, and Joanna Cassidy. By 1984, the park had fallen into disrepair as the government diverted funds from municipal budgets to the war effort against the Contras, and the park was maintained only by the volunteer Ricardo Gonzalez, an elderly man who lived nearby and witnessed Stewart's murder. That year the American internationalist engineer Ben Linder, who lived in the area, and American nun Nancy Hanson persuaded the Committee of U.S. Citizens Living in Nicaragua to donate tools to Gonzalez and pay him a monthly stipend for his work. In 1987, Bill Stewart Park was described as "not unlike the hundreds of street-corner memorials that pay tribute to neighborhood martyrs of the insurrection."

Joan Kruckewitt in The Death of Ben Linder provides an account of Stewart's death and its impact, as well as the creation and maintenance of Bill Stewart Park.

References

</references>

Bibliography

  • Kruckewitt, Joan, The Death of Ben Linder: The Story of a North American in Sandinista Nicaragua, Seven Stories Press, 1999.
  • Bill Stewart on WCCO-TV, August 4, 1975
  • ABC-TV News report of the murder of Bill Stewart, June 20, 1979
  • President Carter's statement on Stewart's murder