Word: sandinistas
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...year for the past two years, the House has voted to end U.S. funding for the contras, the 10,000 or so antigovernment guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua. To a majority of the House, supporting the rebels has seemed wrong on principle, or counterproductive as a check on Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders, or both. Just as regularly, the Administration has insisted that the contra war, in which some 5,000 Nicaraguans died last year, provides Washington with essential leverage in its efforts to moderate the Sandinistas' excesses. Last week the policy to and fro resumed as Congress began considering a White...
...measure will probably come to a vote next month, after the White House releases a comprehensive anti-Sandinista report. A continued ban on funding would be a "serious mistake," warned Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley last week in testimony before a House foreign affairs subcommittee. Nicaragua, he argued, would then "have no reason to compromise." Maybe so, Massachusetts Democrat Gerry Studds told Motley, but "whether you like it or not . . . support for the rebels is dead...
...Nicaragua, four Roman Catholic priests remain as officials in the Marxist- led Sandinista government in defiance of canon law, which prohibits priests from holding public office. One of the priests was expelled from the Society of Jesus in December; the other three priests were forbidden in January by the Vatican to perform their sacerdotal duties if they did not resign in two weeks. Insists Fernando Cardenal Martinez, the former Jesuit and Nicaragua's Education Minister: "There is no basic religious problem between the church and the revolution. What exists is a political confrontation...
...armed insurrection and military dictatorship spread across Latin America, liberation theology took on a more explicitly political dimension. The radical fringe of liberation theology eventually seemed to find its model of change in the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution. Priests and Catholic laymen united with the Marxist-Leninist Sandinistas to overthrow Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. In the ensuing euphoria of the Sandinista triumph, the Rev. Paul Schmitz, a U.S. priest who is now a bishop in Nicaragua, declared that the country "is a laboratory for all of Latin America...
CENTRAL AMERICA. The Reagan Administration views the Sandinista government now running Nicaragua as a group of Soviet-allied Marxists, and fears that consolidation of the Sandinistas' hold on Nicaragua would pose a deadly danger of leftist revolution spreading not only to neighboring Central American countries but eventually even to Mexico. Washington's strategy to prevent that has been to sponsor the anti-Sandinista contras, with the avowed aim of putting pressure on the Sandinistas to stop exporting revolution. U.S. diplomats claim some success. Asserts one: "This (Sandinista) government is in trouble. It has gone 180 degrees from preaching 'revolution without...