Word: wars
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That gloomy forecast reflected Somoza's growing diplomatic isolation as well as his deteriorating military position. The first setback came when the Andean Group (Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Venezuela) abandoned its efforts to negotiate a truce in the latest flare-up of the 19-month-old civil war. Instead, the five countries declared that a "state of belligerency" existed in Nicaragua and that they considered the Sandinistas to be "a legitimate army." The declaration was designed to allow the group to supply arms to the rebels without violating international laws against intervention in the internal affairs of another...
...more ominous from Somoza's viewpoint was a U.S. request for intervention that would end both the civil war and his family's 46-year dictatorial rule over Nicaragua. The day after a national guardsman wantonly murdered ABC-TV Correspondent Bill Stewart (see PRESS), the Carter Administration spurned the dictator's emotional appeal for the U.S. to "pay back the help we gave in the cold war"-referring to the launching areas that Nicaragua provided for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Instead, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance urged the Organization of American States...
Because of the civil war, Nicaragua's economy, already reeling from an almost total withdrawal of foreign investment and a cutoff of U.S. economic assistance, has been dealt a blow from which it will take years to recover...
Many of them feel they have no choice. As one officer put it: "If we give up, the Sandinistas will kill us." But there is a growing recognition that the civil war cannot be stopped as long as Somoza reigns. As an American-trained national guardsman put it last week, "In this war, nobody gives an inch. The current round could cease in two weeks. But when it does, both sides will just rearm, and we'll be fighting again in three months or so, just like before...
...nothing more than a Communist plot aimed at unseating him. "As long as the Communists in Cuba and Panama continue to supply the weapons, there will be a battle," he maintains. The Carter Administration is also concerned about Fidel Castro's influence on Nicaragua's civil war and on the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a broadly based collection of Marxist and non-Marxist leftists held together mainly by hatred for Somoza's regime. The evidence of such influence is scant, though U.S. intelligence reports indicate that since late May a Panamanian DC-6B cargo plane...