Word: costas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Forty weatherbeaten shacks and a grassy airstrip by a swampy river delta may not seem like much of a military stronghold. "But in the year-old guerrilla war along Nicaragua's southern border with Costa Rica, the jungle hamlet of San Juan del Norte has taken on a symbolic importance well beyond its dubious strategic value. After three days of pitched battle two weeks ago, contra guerrillas from the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE) overwhelmed the Sandinista garrison in the town and scored their first major military victory. After a few uneasy days of quiet, Nicaraguan troops counterattacked last week...
...charismatic "Commander Zero" of the Sandinista revolution, Pastora went into exile in 1981 when he became disillusioned with the growing Soviet and Cuban influence in Nicaragua. Within months the fortunes of ARDE had reached such a low point that his financially strapped army moved into Costa Rican refugee camps. Critics joked that the "zero" in his title stood for the number of battles he had fought. After taking San Juan del Norte, the bearded commander could finally add some bite to his bluster. As Pastora told TIME, "San Juan del Norte means more than a beachhead to us. It represents...
...such ship or ships were either operated or supported by the CIA, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane told TIME: "I cannot comment on intelligence operations." As a matter of policy, the CIA refused to confirm, deny or even discuss any of its operations. Nicaragua's neighbors, Honduras and Costa Rica, have the wherewithal to provide naval assistance, but it is unlikely that either would risk such a direct challenge to the more powerful Sandinista regime...
...According to their commanders, the new 82-mm mortars and 50-cal. machine guns that the contras used at San Juan del Norte were delivered ten days earlier by a U.S.-built C-47 transport, which also dropped pallets of food and ammunition under cover of darkness at a Costa Rican site ten miles south of the Nicaraguan border. An A.R.D.E. soldier who is a U.S. citizen, George Davis, of Great Falls, Mont., claimed the pilot was an American. "I'm here to fight Communism, and I guess the pilot is too," said Davis...
...revolution without frontiers," and their 50,000-man army is a larger force than needed for self-defense, according to military experts. Before his death last year, Salvadoran Rebel Leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio declared: "The revolutionary process is a single process ... Guatemala will have its hour. Honduras its. Costa Rica, too, will have its hour of glory." To hasten that hour along, the Soviets shipped Nicaragua 15,000 tons of arms last year, while the Cubans stand near by with 153,000 troops. The borders of every country in the region are porous. Honduras, flanked by El Salvador and Nicaragua...