Word: somozaism
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...could we hide 2,000 Cuban soldiers in a country this size?" Agriculture Minister Jaime Wheelock, who was in the U.S. for his own publicity offensive, called the Hughes briefing, a bit redundantly, a case of "excessive hysteria"; he noted that the airport expansion program was actually begun by Somoza at U.S. insistence. They justified the military buildup as necessary in the face of American belligerency. Said Bayardo Arce, a member of the Sandinista nine-man national directorate: "Your leaders are forcing us to take dramatic measures. We expect an invasion any day. Look at these declarations of Haig! After...
During the Carter Administration, there was high-level interest in organizing pro-Somoza exiles in Florida and elsewhere into a counterforce that would "keep the Sandinistas off guard and on the defensive," as one of TIME'S sources puts it. That idea was abandoned fairly early during the Reagan presidency, after CIA station chiefs weighed in with persuasive arguments that it would be against U.S. interests in Central America to appear to be associated with a Somoza restoration movement. With Administration approval, the agency has apparently concentrated on recruiting disgruntled Sandinistas and other anti-Somoza Nicaraguans for the paramilitary...
...awful. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, as the CIA'S attention shifted to Southeast Asia and Washington relied more on space-age technology than undercover agents, intelligence operations in Central America deteriorated. In 1973 U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Turner Shelton consistently underplayed the opposition to President Anastasio Somoza in his reports home, thus blinding Washington to the signs of rising turmoil. Complains one U.S. specialist on Central American affairs: "Too often [our] ambassadors in the region felt it was their job to play poker with dictators...
Throughout the Nicaraguan civil war, which ended in the overthrow of Somoza in 1979, Washington was able to follow the turmoil quite well. Since the Sandinistas have taken control, however, undercover agents in Nicaragua have been stymied, partly because so many Cubans are engaged in counterintelligence there...
...Moscow). Still Sontag says she "passionately supports" their cause, and so should the rest of us. Sandinista Nicaragua is no waystation on the road to nirvana: still and all, there are considerably fewer deaths-by-government-violence, and considerably more well-fed citizens (both certifiably good things), than in Somoza Nicaragua. The problem with announcing that communism is fascism and then sitting down is that capitalism can be fascism too, at least that corrupted sense of the word that means "shitty...