Word: nicaraguan
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...there was ever any doubt that President Bush and former President Reagan were intricately involved in running the covert operation to arm the Nicaraguan rebels during a Congressional ban on such aid from 1985-86, government documents released last week should help dispel it. The documents strongly suggest that Bush, while vice president, played a more direct role in covertly arranging aid for the Nicaraguan Contras than he has previously acknowledged...
Ironically, the U.S. is finding it easier these days to deal with Nicaragua. Late last week the White House announced a "gentleman's agreement" with Congress to allot $4.5 million a month in humanitarian aid to the Nicaraguan contras for the next eleven months while diplomats work at pushing the Sandinista regime toward democracy. The bargain ends, for the moment at least, a fractious eight-year battle between the Democrat-controlled Congress and the Executive Branch over how to handle Central America. The product of intense lobbying by Secretary of State James Baker, the agreement to fund the contras...
...contras is clearly a kind of mustering-out pay designed to keep the contras, currently bivouacked in Honduras, fed and clothed for another year, until a more permanent solution is worked out. To that end, the plan calls for the "voluntary reintegration" of the contras into Nicaraguan political life or their "voluntary regional relocation," language that makes it evident they are finished as a fighting force, barring an act of major treachery by the Sandinistas...
...American Presidents that the contras, who number about 11,000, should be dislodged from Honduras and disbanded. Although the rebels are pretty well finished as a fighting force, Bush and Baker want to keep them in place and continue supplying them with food, clothing and medical supplies until the Nicaraguan elections, which the Sandinistas promise to hold next February. "Without the contras," says a Baker aide, "there will be even less incentive for Managua to fulfill its commitment to democratize, as it said it would when it signed on to the peace plan ((of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez...
However incontrovertible the logic, even Baker admits the Administration will have no Nicaraguan policy "without Congress being a full partner." Last week he met privately with key congressional leaders to urge that support for the contras, scheduled to run out on March 31, be extended at the rate of about $4 million a month. The Democrats haven't said yes yet, but they have been willing to listen. "There's a lot more trust with these guys than there ever was with the Reagan crowd," says Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, a persistent critic of Reagan's Central America policy...