Word: managua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fighting between the Sandinista government and the U.S.-inspired contra guerrillas sputters along Nicaragua's northern border, skirmishes between Washington and Managua continue to rage on broader battlefields: in newspapers, at fund-raising offices, in college classrooms and along the corridors of Congress. Through legal challenges, diplomatic maneuvers and public relations jabs, Nicaragua's Marxist-led government and the Reagan Administration have been fighting for the hearts and minds of the international diplomatic community. In this not-at-all-secret war of words, the U.S. last week suffered an embarrassing setback. The 16 judges of the World Court...
Meanwhile, the Sandinistas' own recent flurry of false alarms about an imminent U.S. invasion was, in a sense, silenced by the World Court. Said one West European observer: "The mood in Managua suddenly switched from one of contrived invasion hysteria that most of the populace chose to ignore to one of quietly triumphant legality...
Once again the familiar tremors swept through Nicaragua. In the streets of Managua, the capital, dozens of Soviet-made T-55 tanks clattered into defensive positions. Antiaircraft crews manned their batteries, while zealous neighborhood defense committees scurried to dig air-raid trenches. Some 20,000 volunteer coffee pickers were reassigned to local militia units as the Sandinista government announced a "state of alert" affecting the country's 100,000-member military and security forces. For the third time in two years, the Sandinistas were loudly convinced-or so they said-that U.S. troops were about to invade their soil...
Most Nicaraguans, however, remained calm. Despite the government's repeated alarms, residents of Managua made their way to work as usual on the city's overcrowded buses. Schoolchildren played outdoors, even gathering in clusters around the squat, forbidding tanks. Occasionally the civic mood was shattered by a sonic boom, which the government attributed to high-flying U.S. SR-71 spy planes violating Nicaraguan airspace. Despite the noisy interruptions, few Nicaraguans seemed concerned about the putative Yanqui invasion...
...same fractiousness is evident in the Administration's solutions for Central America. Hard-liners in Washington, including CIA Director William Casey and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, seem to believe that in the long run it is impossible to deal with the Sandinistas. They would prefer to see the Managua regime ousted from power, although any action by the U.S. toward that end is expressly forbidden by a 1982 resolution of Congress. More moderate officials, including Shultz, believe that diplomacy can play a role in curbing Nicaragua's radical tendencies. In their view, the U.S. must show that...