Word: sandinistas
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Easter Week is a major holiday throughout Latin America. But in revolutionary Nicaragua there were a few differences in the seasonal festivities. The Sandinista government announced that it would ban all radio broadcasts of Easter Masses unless the regime could censor pastoral sermons. Then, as half the country prepared to flock to the beach after their religious observances, the others girded...
...open secret that the contras, as they are known, were receiving advice and logistical assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Yet, by Western diplomatic estimates, only 2,000 to 3,000 rebels were involved in the insurgency, far too few to oust the increasingly unpopular Marxist-led Sandinista government, which is named after a Nicaraguan nationalist rebel of the 1930s, Augusto César Sandino, and took power in 1979 after the overthrow of Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
Some of that opposition may also be exaggerated. The latest Nicaraguan claims of covert U.S. aid to the insurgents came as the rebels made a series of melodramatic radio broadcasts in which the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (F.D.N.), an alliance of anti-Sandinista guerrillas that includes many members of the late Dictator Somoza's hated National Guard, said that "the hour of the struggle has arrived." For more than a year, these counterrevolutionaries (known as contras) had staged hit-and-run attacks on the Sandinista regime from sanctuaries across the Honduran border. Their targets were principally...
...third guerrilla faction includes Edén Pastora Gómez, a Sandinista hero who became disillusioned with growing Soviet and Cuban influence over the revolution and defected from the Nicaraguan government in 1981. The group that includes Pastora has been biding its time in the democratic oasis of Costa Rica and has refused, in public at least, to deal with any of the other dissident groups that include former National Guard members, notably the F.D.N. Several weeks ago, Pastora slipped secretly into Nicaragua, and late last week he suddenly re-emerged in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa...
...deeply involved with the attacking contras. According to those sources, the U.S. control is indirect. At the top, they say, the Nicaraguan Democratic Front has a "political coordinating committee" made up largely of conservative and moderate Nicaraguans who fled their country during the last three years of Sandinista rule. Also included is Colonel Enrique Bermúdez Varela, a former member of the Somoza National Guard who was his country's military attaché in Washington until the Sandinistas took over...