Word: contra
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
UNDENIABLY, the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf is a military mistake. Yet it is also an overpowering political necessity, a much-needed opportunity for the US to restore credibility lost in the Iran-contra affair. And so far America has met that challenge...
...Central American leader can expect a warm reception. Arias commands respect as a regional peacemaker; moreover many Congressmen share his conviction that the U.S.-backed contra war is a misconceived strategy for prodding Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista regime toward democratic reform. Most Democrats hope that Arias' visit will further undermine the Reagan Administration's dual policy of pursuing peace while trying to secure $270 million in new funding for the contras. Last week congressional leaders tentatively agreed to a stopgap provision of some $3.5 million in nonlethal aid to hold the rebels through a cease-fire scheduled...
Meanwhile the peace cavalcade proceeded in fits and starts. Contra leaders gathered in Guatemala City to examine their own future. In an unexpected gesture of goodwill, they released 80 Sandinista prisoners of war at an airfield in Costa Rica, 30 miles from the Nicaraguan border. Several days earlier, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra pardoned 16 Central Americans, none of them Nicaraguans, who had been imprisoned for rebel activity...
...Sandinistas said last week they might declare a unilateral cease-fire in the contra war and continued to drop hints that the opposition daily La Prensa might be allowed to publish soon. Managua and Washington, however, exchanged sharp words after U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett encountered anti-U.S. protesters while on a visit to the Nicaraguan capital. In El Salvador a meeting between President Jose Napoleon Duarte and the country's leftist guerrillas failed to occur, aborted by Duarte's demand that the rebels first lay down their arms. Yet all hope was not lost. Leaders of the guerrilla...
Woodward visited Casey in the hospital "and asked, almost rhetorically, whether he knew all along about the Contra diversion," the U.S. News & World Report article says...