Word: nicaragua
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sporting a shamrock in his lapel, Ronald Reagan was about to get his hair cut in the White House basement when he took time to talk to Washington Contributing Editor Hugh Sidey. As the subject turned to Nicaragua, the President's St. Patrick's Day cheer evaporated and he became unusually intense and passionate. Excerpts from the interview...
...goal. The cancer that has to be excised is Nicaragua. We can try and help those people who want freedom to bring it about themselves. We have a right to help the people of Nicaragua who are demanding what we think are any people's rights--the rights to determine their own government...
...Sandinista regime. What happened there was a hijacking. The people of Nicaragua set out to get rid of a, certainly you could not call it a totalitarian government, but an authoritarian government: the Somoza dictatorship. The revolutionaries appealed to the Organization of American States and said, "Would you ask Somoza to step down so we can end the killing?" The OAS asked them, "What are your revolutionary goals?" They told them democracy, pluralistic society, free trade, freedom of religion. But among the revolutionaries there was an organization that had existed before the revolution--the Sandinistas, a Communist organization...
...night. At government-hosted "Face the People" forums, citizens bellyache about everything from food shortages to the draft without fear of reprisal. Moreover, the country has an array of political parties, church groups and civic organizations from which to choose. In comparison with many East bloc countries, Nicaragua is not the "totalitarian camp" of which President Reagan speaks...
...there is no denying that the Sandinistas have imposed severe totalitarian restraints on the Nicaraguan people. Nina Shea of the New York City-based International League for Human Rights recently led a small delegation to Nicaragua to try to answer the question, How free is a Nicaraguan not to be a Sandinista? Some members of the Roman Catholic Church, opposition political parties and labor organizations, she says, suffer "undisguised and hidden repression." Her team heard repeated accounts of arbitrary arrests and interrogations that included food and water deprivation, simulated executions, and detention in dark cells. "The country...