Word: somozaism
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...figures and claims of triumph were trumpeted confidently, but without verification, by both sides. Only one fact was certain in Nicaragua last week: a new level of clandestine guerrilla warfare was under way in the tiny Central American republic. Ironically, the Marxist-led Sandinista government that overthrew Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979 now seemed to face an insurrection very similar to the one that brought the Sandinistas to power. At a hastily arranged press conference in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, Defense Minister Humberto Ortega Saavedra declared last week: "We consider the situation to be critical...
...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 in the adjacent Nicaraguan departments of Jinotega...
...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...
...presence of Israeli arms in the region is not new. During the Nicaraguan civil war that ended with the overthrow of Dictator Anastasio Somoza by Sandinista rebels in 1979, both sides fought with Israeli guns. In the 1976 border skirmish between Honduras and El Salvador, the two countries used Israeli infantry weapons. Since 1976, Israel has become a leading supplier to Guatemala, Honduras and to a lesser extent Costa Rica...
...Nicaraguan exiles kept a silent vigil on a grassy knoll, holding up banners denouncing the Sandinista regime. Said one: IN NICARAGUA RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION EXISTS! Another, referring to harassment of early Christians in Rome, read: NO CATACOMBS IN NICARAGUA! Though Nicaragua's Catholic leaders supported the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, moderate clerics have now grown wary of Sandinista-supported efforts to meld Christianity with Marxist ideology...