Word: junta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nicaraguan insurgents, known as contras (counterrevolutionaries), whose hit-and-run attacks along Nicaragua's northern and southern borders have, according to the Sandinistas, claimed more than 700 lives. President Reagan has justified U.S. support for the contras by accusing the Sandinistas of having "betrayed" their countrymen, calling the junta members "counterfeit revolutionaries who wear fatigues and drive around in Mercedes sedans...
...blew up two bridges near the Honduran border. Among the law's provisions: prior censorship and detention without due process. As the contra attacks have continued, the Sandinistas have successfully appealed to nationalist sentiment while using the external menace as an excuse for not fulfilling earlier promises. Says Junta Coordinator Daniel Ortega Saavedra: "For a country to achieve democracy, it needs stability." The Sandinistas have also discovered that the fervor of their young people has provided them with an effective, albeit inexperienced corps of militiamen eager to confront the enemy...
...troops in some of the most intense fighting in months. In El Salvador, the U.S. supports the government, while in Marxist-led Nicaragua the U.S. has, through the CIA, helped finance the insurgents. To no one's surprise, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, 37, coordinator of Nicaragua's ruling junta, lashed out at the U.S. during his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York City last week, charging that the Reagan Administration had "declared war on the people of Nicaragua." He claimed that U.S.-backed contras (counterrevolutionaries) had killed 717 Nicaraguans and caused economic damage totaling $108.5 million...
...third attempt by the military to impose national amnesia. Last November it disingenuously urged Argentines to show "greatness of spirit" so as to "attain national unity." Translation: the next civilian government should refrain from investigating military crimes. That clumsy ploy was ridiculed into oblivion. Last April the junta tried again, publishing a "final document" in which it simply declared that those who disappeared were legally and administratively dead. Explaining that any "excesses" committed by the government were purely in the line of duty, the government did not bother even to account for individual cases. Again, the maneuver provoked national...
...with national elections scheduled for Oct. 30, the junta is apparently becoming more desperate. The law has been constructed so that the courts cannot question its provisions and an incoming civilian government cannot reverse the blanket amnesty it grants. Nonetheless, most election candidates rejected the law. Italo Luder of the Peronists and Raul Alfonsin of the Radicals confidently promised to repeal it, if elected. Said Argentine Novelist Ernesto Sabato: "I think that this is the only case in the history of international law in which the guilty dictate a law exonerating themselves...