Word: sandinistas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Secretary Haig had earlier been caught in an embarrassing situation when he sought to discredit the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Testifying before Congress, he referred to a picture that had appeared in February in the weekend magazine of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, which showed bodies being burned in a city street. The caption described a massacre by the Nicaraguans of the country's native Miskito Indians...
Enders is determined that the U.S. keep struggling toward "away between Somoza and Sandino" a referance to the late U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza for Nicaragua and the anti-American guerrilla Augusto Cesar Sandino, for whom Nicaragua's ruling leftist Sandinista movement is named. The alliterative phrase He as an Enders aide said, a rueful reminder that Nicaragua is "gone." He considers El Salvador pivotal because if moderates fail to maintain power there, then to Guatemala and even Costa Rica are vulnerable to insurgency...
Lopez Portillo also called for the disarming of bands of anti-Sandinista guerrillas who are launching harrying attacks into Nicaragua from neighboring Honduras. At the same time, he suggested that the Nicaraguans cease the alarming military buildup that they have carried on since their revolutionary victory...
Lopez Portillo's last suggestion drew a stony silence from members of Nicaragua's Sandinista directorate, who sat next to him on the speaker's platform. Directorate Member Daniel Ortega Saavedra offered Nicaragua's five-point plan for better relations with the U.S. and its Central American neighbors, including regional nonaggression pacts, joint patrols by the Hondurans and Nicaraguans of their border, and a commitment to free elections and political pluralism in Nicaragua. Washington responded politely but noncommittally to the proposals of Lopez Portillo, who later called the economic aspects of Reagan's Caribbean plan...
According to Sandinista documents, Miskito leaders have been involved with anti-Sandinista exiles in at least 26 cross-border raids against Nicaraguan forces since November. During one of the antigovernment actions, insurgents are claimed to have driven a stake into the chest of a wounded soldier, disemboweled him and slit his throat. That grisly incident may be pure propaganda. But there is little doubt that the offensive it was intended to justify-an undeclared war on the mostly peaceful, independent Indians who only recently were among the Sandinistas' friends-marks a new, brutal and tragic phase in Nicaragua...