Word: nicaraguan
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Whatever the level of the fighting in the Nicaraguan countryside, there could be little doubt that the Reagan Administration was in some way involved. One of the worst-kept secrets in Central America is that the U.S. has been helping to arm and aid some of the Sandinistas' most active opponents. But that fact alone could not explain what was happening in Nicaragua. Distaste for the increasingly repressive Nicaraguan regime has been growing. Many of the government's thoroughly disaffected opponents would probably be taking up arms even without U.S. assistance or encouragement. State Department Spokesman John Hughes...
Some of that opposition may also be exaggerated. The latest Nicaraguan claims of covert U.S. aid to the insurgents came as the rebels made a series of melodramatic radio broadcasts in which the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (F.D.N.), an alliance of anti-Sandinista guerrillas that includes many members of the late Dictator Somoza's hated National Guard, said that "the hour of the struggle has arrived." For more than a year, these counterrevolutionaries (known as contras) had staged hit-and-run attacks on the Sandinista regime from sanctuaries across the Honduran border. Their targets were principally...
...third guerrilla faction includes Edén Pastora Gómez, a Sandinista hero who became disillusioned with growing Soviet and Cuban influence over the revolution and defected from the Nicaraguan government in 1981. The group that includes Pastora has been biding its time in the democratic oasis of Costa Rica and has refused, in public at least, to deal with any of the other dissident groups that include former National Guard members, notably the F.D.N. Several weeks ago, Pastora slipped secretly into Nicaragua, and late last week he suddenly re-emerged in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa...
Whatever their strength, the contras claim to have achieved a number of major, but unproved, triumphs over the past weeks, including the brief capture of some largely deserted northern and central Nicaraguan towns. They also say that they "control" (meaning, actually, that they enjoy freedom of movement in) an area covering the northern quarter of the country. The contras' campaign began to attract international attention when their clandestine radio station reported heavy fighting near the provincial center of Matagalpa, only 70 miles north of Managua...
...fact, TIME has learned from F.D.N. sources that the Reagan Administration has been and is deeply involved with the attacking contras. According to those sources, the U.S. control is indirect. At the top, they say, the Nicaraguan Democratic Front has a "political coordinating committee" made up largely of conservative and moderate Nicaraguans who fled their country during the last three years of Sandinista rule. Also included is Colonel Enrique Bermúdez Varela, a former member of the Somoza National Guard who was his country's military attaché in Washington until the Sandinistas took over...