Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diplomacy left little doubt that Central America will be a major topic of debate in Congress this fall. Indeed, a struggle is already shaping up in the corridors of Washington over the very survival of the contras, the U.S.-supported guerrillas who are fighting the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. As if to launch the battle, President Reagan last week strongly repeated his support for the foundering contra cause, pledging that "we will not abandon our friends in Central America." Secretary of State George Shultz then went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to plead for $270 million...
...more troublesome adversary than the 65,000 armed soldiers of the Sandinista People's Army. Now a homegrown peace plan hatched in the capitals of Central America has upstaged the war. Even some contra civilian leaders have caught peace fever, declaring their intention to re-enter politics in Nicaragua and leave those in fatigues to fret about the future of the struggle. "This could be it," concedes a senior contra official in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. "If we are cut off by Washington now, we may be finished for good...
That ambivalence owes much to Honduran jitters that an end to hostilities in Nicaragua might send a tidal wave of contra refugees crashing across the border. Costa Rican officials believe that in the event of peace, the peasant soldiers in their country would return to Nicaragua, with only the former National Guardsmen of Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle and upper-class Nicaraguans choosing to remain abroad. Honduran officials are less sanguine. As it is, they must cope with some 150,000 Nicaraguan refugees. They fear that most of the roughly 12,000 contras would want to set up shop in Honduras...
Surprisingly, the announcement stirred little notice in Washington. A Western diplomat in Nicaragua speculated that the Soviets had insisted on high-level representation at the anniversary festivities. "It wasn't an invitation, it was a summons," he said. Envoys elsewhere in the region observed that Ortega's announcement followed a Soviet decision to supply Nicaragua with an additional 100,000 tons of badly needed oil this year, and questioned whether recent strains between Moscow and Managua had been anything more than a propaganda ploy...
...moderates, Reagan's tentative endorsement of the peace plan signed in August by five Central American Presidents may have seemed grudging and tepid. But to the right it sounded like the crack of doom for any effort to save Nicaragua from Communism. Some conservatives are also aghast at what they view as the Administration's headlong rush into a missile treaty with the Soviets, and in particular by its retreat from strict verification demands. Says Patrick Buchanan, once Reagan's communications director: "We are better off with 574 missiles that can land on the Soviet Union than we are with...