Word: somozas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...Miskito populations began to rise up. The Ministry of Defense said in its propaganda that the people who were fighting us were former national guardsmen [Somoza supporters], not Miskitos. On June 5, I participated in a firefight that was said to be with guardsmen, but it was really with Miskitos. They lost no one. We lost 19 men, officers as well as enlisted men. Twenty-two more were wounded. Only I and one other man were not hurt or killed. The regional chief of staff and his escort staff ran when the fighting started. When he decided to leave...