Word: managua
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Already shaken by the assault on Grenada, the Sandinista regime responded to last week's U.S. muscle-flexing by claiming that an invasion was imminent and stepping up the nation's preparations for war. Since the beginning of the month, Managua has echoed with the sound of rifle fire as civilians crawled on their stomachs and practiced elementary combat maneuvers under the eye of military instructors. Last week large headlines in the government-controlled newspaper Barricada and the pro-government daily Nuevo Diario shouted EVERYONE TO THE DEFENSE and BOMBS CAN FALL ON EVERYONE. Radio stations regularly announced...
...anxiety. The successful invasion of the flyspeck island of Grenada, they insisted, provided no precedent for an offensive against Nicaragua's well-armed and well-trained combined regular army and militia force of 100,000. "The fears of the government are exaggerated," insisted U.S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton in Managua. "You have to understand that Grenada and Nicaragua are completely different countries and situations." Said a State Department official in Washington: "It's a terrible idea. It's impractical and impolitic. It's also absolutely unnecessary...
Still, the rattled nerves in Managua could only have pleased the Reagan Administration in Washington, which has long sought to curb Nicaraguan support for leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The four nations that form the so-called Contadora Group (Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela) announced last week that all the region's governments, including even a wary Nicaragua, had agreed on a schedule for substantive discussions about a comprehensive Central American peace plan. If the Big Pine II exercises and Grenada invasion have encouraged Nicaragua's cooperation, said a State Department official tartly, "so much the better...
...explanation given by former junta members that argues that Nicaraguan shift to the left was the result of the Marxist inspired Sandinistas emerging from an anti-Somoza coalition as the predominant political power. One fact LaFeber doesn't cite is that only eight months after rebels poured into Managua, and as U.S. aid was still coming in on a steady basis. Sandinista members of the junta declared that Marxism and Leninism would guide the Nicaraguan revolution...
...when the U.S. Navy destroyed the Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Norte to avenge an insult to the American minister. Until now, such propaganda seemed shopworn. "This would appear to prove everything the Sandinistas have been saying about the intentions of the U.S. here," one American official in Managua said last week. "It gives them the chance to consolidate their support...