Word: nicaragua
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WASHINGTON -- The Democratic-controlled House last night rejected 248-180 President Reagan's proposal for $14 million in direct military aid to contra insurgents seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. The same resolution was approved 53-46 by the Republican-led Senate only a few hours earlier...
...series that began in 1983 and has become nearly continuous. In between the big maneuvers, U.S. and Honduran soldiers nearly always have some small-scale training exercise in progress. Never before, however, have so many U.S. soldiers participated in the games or used such heavy equipment so close to Nicaragua (some of the tanks maneuvered within three miles of the border). Next week's amphibious landing, named Universal Trek '85, together with Big Pine III, represents the most intricate military exercise the U.S. has conducted in this hemisphere...
...region and complains loudly that Washington's military embrace has failed to bring the kind of economic aid that has been given to El Salvador, Honduras' traditional enemy. Hondurans worry about a collapse of the contra campaign that would cause all 12,000 or so rebels to flee Nicaragua and wander through their country in bands, toting American arms. Already, the country is feeling the strain of serving as a haven for Nicaraguan youths who flee the Sandinista military draft and arrive penniless in Honduras. Fundamentally, though, Honduras has cast its lot with the U.S. One of its most insistent...
Training is a genuine goal of the exercises, but it is not the only one. Some of the maneuvers look like a rehearsal for an American invasion of Nicaragua. But even the Sandinistas, who have raised alarums about a U.S. attack when past exercises were held in Honduras, have stopped talking about one. Intimidation is another matter. "It's a show-the-flag operation," says House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Dante Fascell, a Florida Democrat. The main purpose, he says bluntly, and approvingly, is "to scare the Nicaraguans...
...reason for this view is that the Sandinistas have not hesitated to intimidate their neighbors. Washington sometimes inflates the menace posed by Nicaragua's Soviet-aided military buildup; Reagan was simply wrong when he declared in 1983 that Managua's armed forces exceed those of all other Central American countries combined. But, counting full-time soldiers and militia on active duty, the Nicaraguan army of 62,000 is by far the largest of any single country in the area. Nicaragua has 150 tanks; Guatemala has ten and the other Central American nations none at all. Though the Sandinistas are deficient...