Word: ortega
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...outcome is too close to call, and some Washington officials point out that previous votes were also accompanied by dire predictions about the fate of peace in the region. But Republicans and Democrats agree that much will depend on Ortega's performance over the next few days. Two weeks ago, in an eleventh hour attempt to keep a five-month-old Central American peace process alive, Ortega offered several striking concessions, among them promises to lift Nicaragua's state of emergency and to hold direct talks with the guerrillas. Last week he moved to honor those pledges, restoring civil liberties...
Certainly, Ortega has used well-timed gestures in the past to sway Congress. Shortly after the Reagan Administration made known its intent last September to seek $270 million in contra funding, Ortega went on a public-relations offensive. He announced the reopening of two opposition news outlets, the newspaper La Prensa and Radio Catolica, and pardoned 16 jailed rebel sympathizers. Sensing defeat, the U.S. Administration scaled back its request to just $30 million. Still, Ortega pressed on. He agreed to indirect talks with the contras and designated Miguel Cardinal Obando y Bravo as the mediator. In the end, Congress granted...
...Ortega is not letting up as the Reagan Administration presses its current campaign. His proposal last week for an international commission that would include members of the U.S. political parties was coupled with an offer to ( permit the contras to continue receiving humanitarian aid from the U.S. and other foreign sources. By offering the U.S. a role as both guarantor and benefactor in postwar Nicaragua, Ortega seems to be playing to a pet theme of the President's that Reagan has applied to arms treaties with the Soviets: trust, but verify...
...peace in Costa Rica, Nicaraguan security agents in Managua arrested four prominent opposition leaders as suspects in an alleged CIA conspiracy. Opposition sources saw the move as a sign that hard- line Interior Minister Tomas Borge Martinez was unhappy with the concessions being made at the peace talks. And Ortega's aim was not purely altruistic. His main goal, apparently, was to ensure that the U.S. Congress turns down a Reagan Administration request next month for some $150 million in new contra aid. By agreeing to take the very steps sought by Washington and Nicaragua's neighbors, Ortega sought...
...three, Alfonso Robelo, Alfredo Cesar and Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, sit on the six-member board that directs the contras' political affairs and produces a steady stream of anti-Sandinista propaganda. The next day Arias counterbalanced his anti-contra blast with a blunt four-page letter accusing Nicaragua's Ortega of failing to comply with the peace agreement. While the Sandinistas allowed a single opposition newspaper, La Prensa, to reopen last October, they have shown little readiness to allow broader political freedoms. Admonished Arias: "There is no room for legal structures that deny democratic process...