Word: contra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Throughout the five years that the Reagan Administration has made common cause with the rebels, the most decisive skirmishes have taken place outside the jungles of Central America. On Capitol Hill a wavering Congress, turning the aid spigot on and off, has sometimes seemed to the contras a more troublesome adversary than the 65,000 armed soldiers of the Sandinista People's Army. Now a homegrown peace plan hatched in the capitals of Central America has upstaged the war. Even some contra civilian leaders have caught peace fever, declaring their intention to re-enter politics in Nicaragua and leave those...
...Both contra and U.S. officials say the rebels have sufficient funds and supplies in the pipeline to survive through the end of the year. Moreover, since U.S. aid began to flow again last October, the contras, armed with shoulder-fired Redeye missiles, have demonstrated an ability to sustain a war of attrition that could irritate the Sandinistas for years to come. But contra officials fear that a total shutdown of aid might propel many guerrillas to give up the fight and either head for the border or return home under a Nicaraguan amnesty program. Some of their leaders may even...
...avert a total aid drought, contra leaders are trying to keep open the nonmilitary pipeline. "We are prepared to agree to a cease-fire," says a senior contra official. "But not to an unconditional cease-fire." The Guatemala peace accord, however, does not compel the Sandinistas to negotiate directly with the rebels. At a meeting last week in Tegucigalpa, the contras' six civilian leaders accepted an offer of mediation from Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, who pioneered the Guatemala plan. They have asked Arias to persuade the Sandinistas to accept a cease-fire that would enable the rebels...
That ambivalence owes much to Honduran jitters that an end to hostilities in Nicaragua might send a tidal wave of contra refugees crashing across the border. Costa Rican officials believe that in the event of peace, the peasant soldiers in their country would return to Nicaragua, with only the former National Guardsmen of Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle and upper-class Nicaraguans choosing to remain abroad. Honduran officials are less sanguine. As it is, they must cope with some 150,000 Nicaraguan refugees. They fear that most of the roughly 12,000 contras would want to set up shop in Honduras...
...lame duck. That perception comes on top of long-standing nervousness about the U.S. commitment to its allies, a fear fueled by the American example set in recent decades in Cuba, Viet Nam and Lebanon. "The U.S. has no long-term policies anywhere," says a contra official. "If the problem can't be solved quickly and easily, Americans lose interest and move on to something else...