Word: haig
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Late last week Haig told a congressional committee that Salvadoran troops had captured a "Nicaraguan military man" who was advising local rebels. Officials in the Salvadoran security forces charged that the man, Ligdamis Anaxis Gutierrez Espinoza, had been trained in terrorist techniques in Mexico. He managed to escape from the Salvadoran authorities, they said, and reach sanctuary in the Mexican embassy in San Salvador. In Mexico City, a Foreign Ministry official said that there was indeed a Nicaraguan in the embassy, a student who attended university in Monterrey, Mexico...
Secretary Haig had earlier been caught in an embarrassing situation when he sought to discredit the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Testifying before Congress, he referred to a picture that had appeared in February in the weekend magazine of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, which showed bodies being burned in a city street. The caption described a massacre by the Nicaraguans of the country's native Miskito Indians...
...Haig was misled. The picture in Le Figaro was actually taken more than three years ago, during the Sandinistas' successful rebellion against Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and showed bodies being burned by the Red Cross as a sanitation measure after an attack by Somoza's National Guard. Le Figaro admitted that its picture had been incorrectly captioned. The State Department insisted, however, that U.S. charges of Sandinista repression were correct. The Nicaraguans denied the claim, but TIME has independently verified that killings and forced reset dements have occurred...
That specter has reinforced the Reagan Administration's determination to resist what it calls "a gift of power to the left." Pledged Secretary of State Alexander Haig last week: "We are not going to be active participants in the distribution of power that would abuse the interests of he people...
...then Al Haig's boys got involved, and the whole show went down the tubes. Promising a real-live captured guerrilla who would admit that he was Nicaraguan, had trained in Cuba and Ethiopia, and had fought for the rebels in El Salvador, the State Department called a briefing of its own. To the very apparent distress of the organizers this guerrilla refused to do his tricks...