Word: pastora
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...days earlier, an assassination attempt had rocked one of the less successful pillars of U.S. policy in Central America. Eden Pastora Gómez, the redoubtable leader of one flank of the CIA-sponsored contras, had invited about 15 reporters to his headquarters inside Nicaragua. The group was driven from San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, to the San Juan River, which serves as the border between the two countries. There the reporters climbed into two long dugouts with outboard motors and chugged up the river for two hours, until they reached a two-story wooden building. Ushered...
...fall and recapture of San Juan del Norte are not so much military struggle as they are psychological warfare. Before the battle, fighting on Nicaragua's southern front had seemed little more than the personal crusade of Edén Pastora Gémez, 47. The charismatic "Commander Zero" of the Sandinista revolution, Pastora went into exile in 1981 when he became disillusioned with the growing Soviet and Cuban influence in Nicaragua. Within months the fortunes of ARDE had reached such a low point that his financially strapped army moved into Costa Rican refugee camps. Critics joked that...
...What Pastora did not say is that ARDE'S new-found muscle is largely due to help that he is receiving through CIA channels. The contra commander had long refused, publicly at least, to accept American "conditions" for aid. But last November he traveled to Washington and since then, food and uniforms are no longer in short supply, and ARDE has even built up a small air fleet of three used helicopters and eight light planes. Pastora insists that he made no deals with the "gringos" and that the funds for the equipment come from private donors in Miami...
...Unlike the large cylindrical mines, these "homemade" devices are not commercially produced. But then" manufacture indicates a relatively high level of technical sophistication. Some are disguised with a rubberized cap that makes them look like rocks, and are set off by the wake of a passing ship. Says Eden Pastora, commandant of the wing of anti-Sandinista rebels that claims responsibility for setting explosives in Lake Nicaragua: "We made all the mines ourselves with simple materials that can be purchased on the worldwide black market." A Nicaraguan military official, however, says that most of the activity is directed...
...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 step toward winning international recognition as a contra provisional government...