Word: nicaragua
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...Norte, a remote Nicaraguan village of some 950 people that once served as a haven for the 17th century British pirate Henry Morgan. The attackers were part of the 4,000-member Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (A.R.D.E.), whose leader is Eden Pastora Gomez, a famed defector from the ranks of Nicaragua's Sandinista government. A.R.D.E.'S objective in seizing the settlement was twofold: to secure a toehold on the jungle fringes of Nicaraguan territory as the first step toward winning international recognition as a contra provisional government, and to win a port of entry for military supply...
...involvement "absurd." When asked if any such ship or ships were either operated or supported by the CIA, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane told TIME: "I cannot comment on intelligence operations." As a matter of policy, the CIA refused to confirm, deny or even discuss any of its operations. Nicaragua's neighbors, Honduras and Costa Rica, have the wherewithal to provide naval assistance, but it is unlikely that either would risk such a direct challenge to the more powerful Sandinista regime...
Meanwhile, in Honduras, the contra leader in charge of the northern front of the covert war against Nicaragua insisted, somewhat implausibly, given the information leaking out in Washington, that "no U.S. citizen ever has been involved" in the mining of Nicaraguan ports. At a press conference in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Adolfo Calero Portocarrero, leader of the rebel Nicaraguan Democratic Front (F.D.N.), said that his organization reserved the right to undertake similar actions in the future. The aim, said Calero, was to halt the massive flow of Soviet bloc weapons to the Sandinistas and, only incidentally, to prevent a portion...
Some of Calero's confidence seems to derive from a revamping of his contra organization after months of setbacks blamed on internal rivalries. In the past year, the F.D.N.'s forces have been almost entirely reorganized into small, tough fighting units operating in seven military sectors of Nicaragua. The F.D.N. has adopted the guerrilla tactics used by Marxist-led insurgents in El Salvador, taking over Nicaraguan villages for a few hours, then arranging ambushes of pursuing Sandinista soldiers. Contra leaders claim that Sandinista military morale is drooping. At a "war room" in a campsite near a Honduran army...
...them are in a border salient close to the spot where a U.S. military helicopter was shot down last January by Nicaraguan border guards. Helicopter flights link the F.D.N. camps with the interior of Honduras and, according to some of the contra leadership, with rebel task forces inside Nicaragua. (An unmarked helicopter also removed A.R.D.E. casualties from the battle at San Juan del Norte.) The F.D.N. has no helicopters; the apparent conclusion is that the aircraft are supplied by the Honduran government, by the CIA or by both...