Word: pastora
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...confirm some of Ortega's worst fears, the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.) announced last week that it had launched a new "general offensive" against the Sandinista government. Meanwhile, a Nicaraguan radio station claimed that several hundred contras who support former Sandinista Leader Edén Pastora Gómez were massing on the Costa Rican border. The rebels said they were fighting in ten separate locations in southern Nicaragua, though the Sandinistas acknowledged fighting in only one. The rebel announcement came as something of an embarrassment to Costa Rican President Luis Alberto Monge. Even as the attacks...
Last April a fourth contra group, the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE), opened a second front along Nicaragua's border with Costa Rica. ARDE is a coalition of four organizations led by Eden Pastora, a Sandinista war hero who quit as a member of Nicaragua's government in 1981 and left the country because he thought the Sandinistas had "betrayed the revolution." Pastora's army has grown from 300 last April to about 2,000. Unlike the northern contras, who do not have any sizable base within Nicaragua, ARDE currently controls a 30-mile-long stretch of land...
...Pastora claims that he has not directly received "one penny" from the U.S. But TIME has learned that Israel has been supplying him with arms captured from the Palestine Liberation Organization. The CIA may also be channeling funds and equipment to Pastora through El Salvador, which last month may have served as a base for ARDE air attacks on Nicaragua...
Members of some of the rival groups met in Caracas, Venezuela, last month to discuss the possibility of future military coordination, but the momentum toward unity has not continued. The main stumbling block appears to be Pastora, who insists that the F.D.N. purge its military leadership of all former National Guardsmen. Pastora also wants to be recognized as undisputed leader of the contras. As he told TIME, "The other organizations have to join us, operate by our laws and under our political beliefs...
...Muller, an air force deserter. Nicaraguan authorities said that flight plans and other documents found in the wreckage showed that the two aircraft had taken off from a small airport near San José, the capital of Costa Rica. Spokesmen for both the Costa Rican government and Pastora's rebels denied that the planes had come from Costa Rica. A.R.D.E. sources claimed that the flights had originated at a dirt airstrip that the rebels had recently captured in southeastern Nicaragua. Nicaraguan leaders placed the blame for the attack not on A.R.D.E. or Costa Rica but on the U.S., calling...