Word: nicaragua
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There is solid evidence that Nicaragua is actively supporting insurgencies in neighboring countries. The country maintains warehouses of arms that are available to every Communist insurgency in the region except Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso, according to Alvaro Baldizon, a former key official in the Sandinista regime who fled to Honduras last year. To minimize their involvement, says Baldizon, the Sandinistas require neighboring guerrillas to ferry their own arms shipments. Visiting guerrillas are trained at bases in Nicaragua, he further claims, and are even provided with free plane flights on Cubana Airlines to Havana for more specialized instruction...
...past four years, Salvador President Jose Napoleon Duarte insisted in an interview with TIME last week that the Sandinistas are still providing the rebels with support as well as sanctuary. Said he: "There is no doubt that there is a whole centralization of the guerrillas' efforts in Nicaragua." In Guatemala, the Sandinistas have helped leftist guerrillas make a modest comeback after their insurgency was nearly exterminated by a massive campaign launched by the Guatemalan military...
Honduras is the one anomaly in Central America: though it is somewhat wary of its southern neighbor Nicaragua, in fact it is more fearful of its historic rival, El Salvador. Indeed, some Hondurans fear that if Duarte ever mops up the Salvadoran rebels he will turn his American-trained army on Honduras in order to settle some long-standing border disputes...
...contras, in fact, are a source of great uneasiness to the countries they use as a haven, Costa Rica and Honduras. Costa Rica has even agreed to join Nicaragua in creating a border patrol to stop contras from moving back and forth between the two countries. The fear that the contras might turn against their hosts in Honduras is "a nightmare for all of us," admits a CIA official...
Reagan's special envoy to the region, Philip Habib, has insisted that privately most of these governments, as well as those of Nicaragua's immediate neighbors, support the U.S. policy. They cannot say so publicly, he asserts, for fear of provoking the Sandinistas. In their hearts, says another Western diplomat in the region, most Central American leaders "wish the Sandinistas would disappear...