Word: nicaraguan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More than two months after Congress approved $27 million in nonmilitary, "humanitarian" assistance to help Nicaragua's contra rebels in their fight against the Sandinista government, money is finally flowing to the insurgents. As of last week the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, which was set up by the Reagan Administration to distribute the funds, had dispensed $400,000 in aid. But rebel leaders are complaining that supplies, such as food, clothing and medicine, are still not reaching their troops. As a result, they claim, some guerrilla units have had to abandon their hit-and-run war against the Sandinistas...
...government of Honduras, which claims it does not harbor contras, even though several bases are located there. The Hondurans have been placated by the decision not to allow the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa to distribute the aid. Says Adolfo Calero, head of the largest rebel group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force: "We have very little. It is a good time for the aid to come...
Some protesters even performed student skits designed to demonstrate CIA wrongdoing in Latin America. The Nicaraguan Affinity Group sponsored a skit which portrayed CIA agents as trenchcoated communist killers who accuse and kill an innocent Nicaraguan school teacher...
...field-kitchen conditions are terrible. The sleeping accommodations are even worse. Yet morale appears to be high among the 800 officers and enlisted men in the Santos Lopez counterinsurgency battalion, an elite Nicaraguan army unit stationed on the banks of the northern Bocay River. "I enjoy what I am doing," says Filemon Avilez Alfaro, 36, the battalion's commander. "None of us is obliged to be here. We want to be here." Similarly, despite reports of widespread draft resistance in Nicaragua, the 1,200 reservists of the less glamorous southern command who were recently summoned to the front in Juigalpa...
...moment, the Sandinista army seems to have the upper hand in its four-year-old war against the U.S.-backed opposition forces known as the contras. "When we are attacked, we have to respond with fire," declares Defense Minister Humberto Ortega Saavedra (see box). The main insurgent group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), declared earlier this year that it had infiltrated 14,000 of its guerrillas into Nicaragua from Honduras and positioned an additional 3,000 along the border. Last week the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry charged that the border forces were poised to invade Nicaragua with the support...