Word: sandinistas
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...Washington is committed to support the Duarte government at a time when its survival is by no means cer tain. But the Administration fears that any slackening of U.S. support might lead to a major opportunity in Central America for Soviet-sponsored Cuba, abetted by the neighboring, Marxist-dominated Sandinista government of Nicaragua. U.S. policy is therefore to aid and encourage the Salvadoran government in its anti-guerrilla efforts, while simultaneously supporting economic and political reforms...
...largest such U.S.-based operation is a fly-by-night encampment run by Jorge Gonzalez, 50, a Cuban exile who is the head of something called the Inter-American Defense Force. Gonzalez, whose Spanish nickname Bombillo translates as light bulb, boasts that he is training "thousands" of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans in South Florida. But that claim is more wishfulness than military threat, as TIME Caribbean Bureau Chief William McWhirter discovered on a tour of Gonzalez's training center...
...multibillion-dollar standards of the international arms trade, the deal that came to light last week was almost unworthy of notice. The Socialist government of French President Francois Mitterrand had quietly agreed to sell $17.5 million worth of "nonoffensive" military equipment to the Marxist-dominated Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The items: two patrol boats, two Alouette III helicopters and 15 trucks. Paris also contracted to train a dozen Nicaraguan pilots and an equal number of sailors in the use of the equipment. Yet when word of the deal reached Washington, both Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Defense Secretary Caspar...
...force, as it illustrated unmistakably last week during a skirmish in the remote swamplands of eastern Honduras. Some 75 members of the revolutionary army of Nicaragua collided with roughly equal numbers of Miskito Indians, members of a Nicaraguan tribe that has rebelled against their country's Marxist-dominated Sandinista government. When the shooting stopped at least eight Indians were dead, according to sketchy local reports, and the Honduran government was enraged at a clear violation of its borders by the Sandinista forces. The ill-equipped Honduran army went on full alert, Honduran troops sped to the trouble zone...
There was no immediate danger of a war between the two countries, but the flare-up was yet another sign of the tense atmosphere in a region that is increasingly aboil with Marxist guerrilla activity. The aims, ambitions and military preparations of the Sandinista regime worry Washington and Nicaragua's neighbors. Says Lieut. General Wallace Nutting, head of the Panama-based U.S. Southern Command: "All of a sudden, Nicaragua has become a military base of substantive potential. It's a whole new universe...