Word: sandinistas
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Version 1: The scene is a clearing in Nicaragua controlled by the anti-Sandinista contra guerrillas. "We're going on a rescue mission," shouts Dana Parker, a captain in the Alabama National Guard, as he jumps into a green Hughes 500 helicopter, joining James Powell, a Viet Nam veteran and flight instructor from Memphis. They take off with a contra pilot at the controls. The two Americans are unarmed. The chopper's rocket pods are empty. The visitors, who have no ties to the CIA, are bringing boots and uniforms for the contras. Their aircraft crashes...
Sweating profusely in the Nicaraguan heat on a March day in 1983, Pope John Paul II was forced to demand silence from a crowd of Sandinista hecklers present at an outdoor Mass in Managua. When Ernesto Cardenal Martinez, a Roman Catholic priest who also serves as Minister of Culture in Nicaragua's Marxist government, knelt to receive the Pope's blessing, John Paul wagged his finger in Cardenal's face and chided him, "You must straighten out your position with the church." These episodes, and his own keen observations during an eight-day-long visit to Central...
Behind such expressions of State Department impatience is a feeling that Nicaragua's ruling nine-member National Directorate is split over the strategy that it should pursue in the negotiations. The prevailing speculation among U.S. policymakers is that Junta Coordinator Ortega, who is also the Sandinista candidate for President in the November elections, leads a pragmatic faction that is tempted to make concessions. According to that analysis, Ortega's hard-line opponents on the Directorate are led by Interior Minister Tomás Borge Martinez. Other experts are less certain of the Ortega-Borge division, but according...
Ultimately, that point of view depends on the assumption that Nicaragua is a country backed close to the wall and that the Sandinistas are aware that their plight might worsen if Ronald Reagan is reelected. There is, in fact, little doubt that Nicaragua is now in trouble economically, and has suffered from attacks by the marauding contras. Robert Leiken, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, describes Nicaragua's economic situation as "really rough, just unbelievable." Leiken cites food shortages in the countryside, wildcat strikes in Sandinista-controlled trade unions and widespread protests against...
That may still be either wishful or self-serving thinking. Whatever the Sandinistas may be saying in the discussions with Shlaudeman, they served notice last week that the issue of internal democracy may be beyond such negotiation. The Managua regime announced that it would uphold a ban on political privileges for a coalition of opposition parties, labor unions and business groups known as the coordinadora. The coalition, led by Arturo Cruz Sequeira, a onetime junta member, had refused to register for the Nov. 4 elections, charging that Sandinista restrictions on political freedom made a truly democratic race impossible. Said Democratic...