Word: nicaraguan
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...intriguing and potentially inflammatory question of seaborne support arose after a contra assault column stormed into the settlement of San Juan del 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...
...contras told TIME'S Jon Anderson, who accompanied the assault group, that prior to their daylight attack San Juan del Norte had been hit by gunfire from the sea. At one point in the fighting, the contras said, they used mortars to drive away a Nicaraguan patrol boat accompanied by two fishing trawlers. The rebel commander said one of the boats had later been sunk and that "your countrymen did it." According to the A.R.D.E. officer, the feat was accomplished by a small boat launched from a ship offshore. Said the rebel officer: "We don't have...
...mortars and 50-cal. machine guns that the contras used at San Juan del Norte were delivered ten days earlier by a U.S.-built C-47 transport, which also dropped pallets of food and ammunition under cover of darkness at a Costa Rican site ten miles south of the Nicaraguan border. An A.R.D.E. soldier who is a U.S. citizen, George Davis, of Great Falls, Mont., claimed the pilot was an American. "I'm here to fight Communism, and I guess the pilot is too," said Davis...
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...
...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 base outside Tegucigalpa, the contras displayed wall-size military maps charting the progress of their latest offensive...