Word: sandinistas
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...choice of Honduras was yet another sign of that country's growing role in the Reagan Administration's Central American strategy. Since 1982, the government of President Roberto Suazo Córdova, 56, has allowed American-backed anti-Sandinista rebels to use Honduras as a staging ground for raids into Nicaragua. The U.S. has built new concrete runways capable of landing C-130 military transport planes and has installed a radar station on Tiger Island in the Gulf of Fonseca, while 6,000 Honduran soldiers, roughly half the nation's army, are being taught American field tactics...
Already shaken by the assault on Grenada, the Sandinista regime responded to last week's U.S. muscle-flexing by claiming that an invasion was imminent and stepping up the nation's preparations for war. Since the beginning of the month, Managua has echoed with the sound of rifle fire as civilians crawled on their stomachs and practiced elementary combat maneuvers under the eye of military instructors. Last week large headlines in the government-controlled newspaper Barricada and the pro-government daily Nuevo Diario shouted EVERYONE TO THE DEFENSE and BOMBS CAN FALL ON EVERYONE. Radio stations regularly announced...
...alert may have been part of an attempt by the Sandinista regime to revive flagging popular support for its policies. But Nicaraguan leaders also seemed convinced that an attack is in the offing. Officials said they would guarantee the safety of all foreign nationals, including U.S. embassy personnel. Such assurances were presumably aimed at preventing invaders from justifying an assault on the grounds of rescuing citizens. During a visit to Panama for talks with President Ricardo de la Espriella, Nicaraguan Junta Leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra laid out a number of possible scenarios for an invasion, including an incursion by rebels...
...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...
...LAFEBER'S analysis of post-Somoza Nicaragua, for example, is questionable. Like many liberal and left wing critics of current U.S. policy, LaFeber asserts that American over-reaction to Sandinista actually pushed Nicaragua into the arms of Cuba and the Soviets. A closer reality in the explanation given by former junta members that argues that Nicaraguan shift to the left was the result of the Marxist inspired Sandinistas emerging from an anti-Somoza coalition as the predominant political power. One fact LaFeber doesn't cite is that only eight months after rebels poured into Managua...