Word: sandinistas
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...Salvador, Marxist guerrillas scored a psychological triumph with a surprise raid on the country's economic heartland; for the first time a U.S. military adviser was wounded. In Honduras, a major display of U.S. military logistics was intended to send an intimidating message to neighboring Nicaragua's Sandinista government. At the same time, the covert border war against the Sandinistas heated up, even though the Marxist leadership seemed more entrenched than ever. Reports from the scenes of battle...
...Bismuna last week. Bullet holes pocked the wooden sides of the tiny thatched huts that cluster on stilts along the bank of a small river, 20 miles from the Honduran border. A concrete schoolhouse stood blackened and gutted by mortar fire. Brown-shirted members of Bismuna's Sandinista militia defense force gathered up unexploded mortar rounds and other debris of battle. Jorge Vargas Lopez, 38, a combat veteran who fought in Nicaragua's Marxist-led Sandinista revolution of 1979, pointed to boot tracks near the river. Said he: "Those are Honduran military boots they were wearing...
...When the Sandinistas toppled Anastasio Somoza Debayle and seized control of Nicaragua in 1979, many in the country hailed the victory as an end to the tyranny of the Somoza years. Yet over the past year evidence has surfaced showing that the Sandinistas are equally capable of repression and brutality. According to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear. Roberto Guillén, 23, served as deputy chief of military counterintelligence for the Defense Ministry, but grew so disenchanted...
...beginning, we were trained to work against terrorists and spies from other countries. But then we were instructed to work against comrades within the Ministry of Defense. Every individual who was not in agreement with the politics of the Sandinista National Liberation Front was considered to be an excessively dangerous element. For example, people who had disagreed politically with the National Directorate [the nine-member body that oversees the ruling three-man junta] began to face trumped-up charges of theft, even murder...
...Directorate had published an article in Barricada [the official government newspaper] boasting that Sandinista soldiers had killed counterrevolutionaries coming out of Honduras. This was the same shooting I was reading about. The report I was reading said the people were searching for food and lived in Nicaragua. They had gone from Waspán [a town on the river] to Bilwaskarma in their canoes. I couldn't understand this. I fought against the barbarities Somoza committed against the Nicaraguan people. But as the revolutionary process increased, the level of class hatred increased. Among the officers, an attitude was created...