The Pieces on the Board
THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE NOT COMmitted to Central America; I don't think they care;' mused the U.S. diplomat, a senior official and veteran of the Vietnam pacification program, now based in...
...I always thought that was a lot of crap...
...Their importance is political...
...Alvarez pushed an ambitious program of cooperation with El Salvador, collaboration with the contras, a buildup along the Nicaraguan border and extensive U.S...
...the number of aircraft and naval patrol vessels was inadequate...
...Only in one exceptional case did a Nicaraguan sit in on a political council...
...This March, a Salvadorean intelligence officer showed the author four classified G-2 (military intelligence) files, containing more than 350 pages of unpublished documents purportedly captured from the FMLN...
...diplomat, a senior official and veteran of the Vietnam pacification program, now based in Honduras...
...Most of the emergency U.S...
...Defense of its hegemony lies at the heart of U.S...
...Thousands of contras, Honduran troops and CIA controllers saturate the Honduran-Nicaraguan frontier...
...As long as the "umbilical" theory remained viable, it offered hopes of a solution by limited means-political pressure, covert action and a large-scale U.S...
...instead, it was an object of derision...
...Geography and history made the country a near perfect foil for Administration plans to squeeze Nicaragua and its Salvadorean allies...
...The contras were still fragmented into at least four different minute groups, poorly equipped ON THE AMERICAS REPORT ON THE AMERICAS and organized, but their political impact was striking...
...The "dissent paper" by former State Department and security officials contends that the CIA was already working with a multinational force involving Somocistas and right-wing Central Americans based in Guatemala...
...military and diplomatic officials throughout Central America have all but abandoned the "umbilical" premise...
...There was still hope that U.S...
...The domestic political groundwork had not been laid...
...This was a valid national goal, but the government overestimated how important this was to the American people...
...The fallacy of the military approach alone or in excess is that it seems to be the most easy way for the United States to convince itself of a determination to prevent further setbacks, but it fails to meet the fundamental pressures of the invisible political warfare that is the real challenge...
...desires that in many ways exceeded what it demanded of El Salvador-the country where the fighting was actually taking place...
...a peasant army with a small officer corps, desperately short of noncommissioned and lower level officers...
...8. The Washington Post, May 8, 1983...
...training programs...
...surveillance ships that regularly ply the gulf...
...Nicaragua lies on the far shore the border...
...At the height of tensions in May 1981, Sandinista Interior Minister Tomas Borge warned that "a military confrontation with Honduras could come at any moment...
...In June, Carazo rejected a $330 million IMF loan agreement, declaring that the social cost of an austerity program would be unacceptable...
...If at any point the cord were cut, the fledgling revolution would die aborning...
...3 The Honduran military hierarchy was also plagued by a lingering reluctance to collaborate with its erstwhile Salvadorean enemies, with whom it had fought a ruinous four-day war in 1969...
...Either the United States, the other democracies, and moderate governments in the regions will cooperate against extremism, terror and violent political change or there will be a fundamental, perhaps irreversible shift in the global balance of power within the next few years...
...Honduras was the cornerstone of the strategy...
...Robert Leiken of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) described it as...
...84, Summary Paper," National Security Council document printed in The New York Times, April 7, 1983...
...The nature of our ally is also important...
...If this worked, Washington believed it could escape with a low-cost solution in El Salvador...
...Testimony of Fred Ikle before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December 14, 1981...
...objectives in Central America could be achieved through third parties...
...Pearl Harbor was the classic example...
...THE WEAK HONDURAN OLIGARCHY HAD its counterpart in a military widely regarded as the most inept and corrupt in the region...
...Yet these proposals exceeded what the Administration was initially willing to commit...
...The government was grappling with an empty treasury, a $2 billion plus foreign debt, capital flight and war damage, on top of Central America's general economic depression...
...If they took Managua, wonderful...
...policies toward these regions...
...Haig now acknowledges that this buildup reflected a concern for Cuba's own survival...
...media, the number of U.S...
...For Vietnam there was the Tonkin Gulf incident and that did produce a measure of anger...
...They] lack flexibility, reliability, discipline and esprit de corps.' 0 Although anti-guerrilla warfare is best conducted with small units of no more than a few dozen men, the Salvadoreans were compelled to work with company-sized units of 100...
...Finally, Cancian concluded that the American public's view of war is directly related to the U.S...
...Both diplomats mentioned the use of Managua as an FMLN "command and control center"' although both recognized that Salvadoreans, not Nicaraguans or Cubans, made the decisions...
...military involvement was premature...
...Billions for military aid but not one drop of American blood," he wrote, "may be a wise, though unheroic, guideline...
...When you get right down to it:'," he went on, "our only interest worth mentioning comes down to one thing...
...And if we can't do that, forget it, Salvador is going nowhere...
...buildup designed to intimidate the Sandinistas and Cuba...
...Thanks to Carter era policies, a transition to formal democracy was underway in Tegucigalpa when Reagan took office, along with a military buildup and a quantum leap in U.S...
...investors, provided a captive constituency for the Pentagon's buildup and the tens of millions of dollars in aid and services that would come in its wake...
...The problem, he said, stemmed from the arcane nature of the United States' objective military interests in the region, and the difficulty in explaining or justifying them to a skeptical public...
...The official, speaking in September 1983, was touching on a problem that had hindered the Administration from the start...
...As proof, Cancian contrasted the moral outrage over the bombing of North Vietnam, which in eight years claimed 65,000 lives, to public acceptance of the bombing of Tokyo in 1945, which killed 72,000 in a single night...
...Southern Command arrived in Honduras to propose a campaign of combined operations with the Salvadorean Army...
...interests in Central America should be defined almost exclusively as subjective interests...
...No U.S...
...If the Sandinistas fell, it would be a devastating blow to the guerrillas and their people in the field...
...What motivates America to fight...
...Though Haig's calls for military action against Cuba fell on deaf ears, he did win Administration support for maneuvers in the Caribbean and a barrage of rhetorical threats...
...It alone encompasses no strategic importance, but by virtue of events, it has taken on a great deal of political importance...
...IN SEPTEMBER 1983, TWO U.S...
...Interests and Policies in the Caribbean and Central America;' American Enterprise Institute, 1982...
...The Salvadorean strategy seemed to have adherents in the Pentagon in 1981...
...and Cuba...
...The Pentagon study argued that its size advantage over the guerrillas-just four to onemade it impossible to contemplate annihilating the insurgents...
...military involvement...
...We've had to build them up from scratch...
...What Nicaragua does is not crucial...
...This drawback was compounded by the fact that fully 60-80 % of the troops were tied down guarding fixed installationsdams, power stations, bridges and banks...
...John D. Waghelstein, "How to Win in El Salvador," Policy Review, Winter 1984...
...troops on REPORT ON THE AMERICAS """" "" """ 32maneuver, including a 300-man intelligence battalion at Palmerola...
...But short of that, an actual overthrow of the Sandinistas, the only thing that's going to finish up the Salvador problem, or even improve the situation, is one hell of a jump in our military role...
...Mexico, warned Menges, "is the potential, hostile 'Iran next door.' " Direct military action, however, was not the answer...
...The Honduran elite, whose relatively modest fortunes depended on their historic subservience to U.S...
...The starting point is a clear understanding that the invisible political paramilitary war can be deadly and that moderate groups must work together using a variety of political, ideological, economic and covert resources As Reagan's strategists surveyed the Central American sand table in 1981, they saw a plethora of unused resources and opportunities to gain ground discreetly...
...In the event of a war in Europe where we'd have to reinforce NATO, we'd already have to watch Cuba to guard the shipping lanes from the Gulf ports...
...As we look around the world today at the foreign governments which may require our aid in a limited war, we would do well to keep this in mind...
...In April 1981, Alvarez was brought to Washington for talks on his country's military needs...
...When, in May 1981, the Salvadorean guerrillas began to recover from their January setbacks, Haig attributed the revival to a "massive" new influx of arms from Cuba via Nicaragua...
...There was nationalist and populist appeal in the move, but Carazo's repudiation of the IMF drew heavy fire from business and an increasingly broad spectrum of politicians...
...These "moderate forces" in Central America and the Middle East should "take the lead in changing the tide of events in both regions...
...Neither man brought up the question of arms supplies...
...advisers supervise arms interdiction patrols in the Gulf of Fonseca...
...This view from Col...
...It's a strategic consideration that has a chance in a hundred or one in three hundred that it will ever come into play...
...They polarized daily political discourse with questions of loyalty and treason, and provided the rationale for a major internal security buildup aided by Cuban and East German advisers...
...In one influential analysis, Future Conflict and the Lessons of Vietnam, Captain Mark F. Cancian, a systems analyst in the office of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, noted the perils of direct involvement in the absence of clearly recognized national interest...
...Its very success in isolating Nicaragua and surrounding it with a military cordon sanitaire has been paradoxical---"successful" in drastically cutting back the arms flows that existed in late 1980 and early 1981, and fruitless in strangling the Salvadorean guerrillas, for whom it was the purported lifeblood...
...With the possible exception of Haig, the national security agencies appeared to agree that direct U.S...
...emphasis added)2 At stake in Central America was less the reality of threat than the appearance of influence...
...In a way, that one was even better-or so the idea went 9 N EL SALVADOR, THE ADMINISTRATION'S Hopes rested with an Army that, like the proverbial glass of water, could be seen as either half-empty or half-full...
...AC-130 spy planes out of Panama and OV-1 "Mohawks" from Palmerola overfly El Salvador 24 hours a day...
...5 Haig's memoirs contrast dramatically with the public posture of the Administration at the time...
...Honduras was assigned four functions: "* a backstop for operations against the Salvadorean guerrillas...
...presence here," declared National Party Congressman and businessman Rafael Callejas, "until we evolve conditions of economic development and political maturity...
...The private sector, though it still controlled more than 60% of the GNP, was increasingly at loggerheads with the Sandinista leadership...
...Indeed, the idea of "cutting the links"--from the FMLN to Nicaragua, from Nicaragua to Cuba, and thence to the Soviet Union-was one of the unifying concepts behind the Administration's Central America strategy...
...advisers in Honduras had jumped to 100...
...Since late 1979, contra bands had staged sporadic raids out of Honduras and threatened more from their camps in Guatemala and Florida...
...Many in the Administration recognized, and others came to learn, that it would be a laborious task to rally public opinion behind military action in support of abstract, non-military objectives...
...As for Nicaragua, the United States could simply apply pressure and watch as the Sandinista revolution withered...
...Guatemala's regional importance derived mainly from its continued internal stability, as the nation with the region's largest economy, best trained Army and most economically strategic location, next to the rich Mexican oilfields...
...So feeble was it that it even failed to do the customary Central American job of inspiring fear in the populace...
...Jose ("Chele") Medrano, Godfather of the Salvadorean death squads...
...Whether or not operational work was in fact underway, the principle of cooperation was established early on...
...TN NICARAGUA, THE SANDINISTAS WERE Fundamentally strong in political terms, but their economic base was perilously weak...
...Whatever the precise relationship of the FMLN to its revolutionary allies, the Administration's own practice has invalidated the basic premises of its "umbilical" theory...
...At the behest of Southern Command and the Pentagon, MilGroup head Col...
...The death toll among the civilian population would also be unpopular if there was no agreed moral consensus for the war...
...John Waghelstein later, "when we were unable to force a Clausewitzian main battle against an enemy who, when confronted, would either melt into the jungle or retreat across a border...
...body count...
...It also notes that the CIA could hardly have been unaware (or likely to disapprove) of the frequent movement of contra leaders between Central America and the United States...
...each in turn should be drafted into the larger U.S...
...This was that the actions of the Cubans, the Nicaraguans and the Salvadorean guerrillas could all be laid directly at the Kremlin's door...
...The reason was simple: they lacked the officers needed to command smaller platoons...
...In Costa Rica, relations with Managua had cooled sharply since a wave of support for the Sandinistas' drive to oust Somoza...
...6. Constantine Menges, "Coping with Radical Destabilization in the Middle East and Central America/Mexico: Trends, Causes and Alternatives," Conflict, vol...
...In December 1980, Salvadorean Deputy Defense Minister Col...
...ELSEWHERE IN CENTRAL AMERICA, THE United States faced a mixture of problems and opportunities...
...In the face of the Sandinista victory and "the assaults by the leftist terrorists," Guatemala and El Salvador might succumb by 1982...
...radar installation...
...Each was imagined to rely for its inspiration, leadership and armament on the patronage of an established radical regime (in this case Cuba) whose survival in turn depended on Moscow...
...12 MAY/JUNE 1984 29REndgam o e Amcas Endgame The fact remains, nonetheless, that this ill-prepared Army was able to turn back the "final offensive" of January 1981...
...Institutionally, Honduras was far better prepared for political submission than for military mobilization...
...He went on to his second point...
...Washington expected a degree of open acquiescence to U.S...
...War with Nicaragua would be the end of the Honduran Army," warned one dissident officer in 1981...
...When the Army swept through the zones of control, the long, porous Honduran border offered the FMLN sanctuary...
...The Honduran Army is shit," complained one...
...What then were the main changes the United States would like to see on the part of the Sandinistas...
...Basic training, intelligence collection, communications and coordination among forces were all found wanting...
...Yet some top officers still held back from a major commitment...
...Castro had fallen between the two superpowers...
...The whole thing is a little too sophisticated to get American support for...
...Southwestern Honduras is peppered with U.S...
...even today, it remains the official public line...
...a platform for a U.S...
...In an article prepared shortly before Reagan took office, Constantine Menges-soon to be the CIA's National Intelligence Officer for Latin America-made the strategic case for mobilizing local client governments...
...Third, since the arms interdiction programs were put into effect, the Salvadorean guerrillas have doubled in numbers...
...But it was not really enough...
...Clearly," as Haig puts it in his memoirs, "the Cubans were very anxious:' In apparent fear of imminent U.S...
...Junta leader Gen...
...It seemed to muddle the Administration's thinking as well-a classic case of being taken in by one's own propaganda...
...1, 1981...
...The Washington Post, November 10, 1981...
...Washington also began to detect in the FSLN what many military psychological warfare specialists see as the Achilles' heel of left-wing groups in power-a systematic tendency to overreact on the assumption that the enemy is about to do his worst, a hypersensitivity to threat that may border on paranoia...
...2. Capt...
...Privately, however, many U.S...
...It would take several years to discover the most effective tools of influence, cultivate internal constituencies, assess the political and military potential and limitations of the various client states and then set the changes in motion...
...For Honduras, it is the long border with Nicaragua which guarantees that in time the dominant communist elements in Nicaragua will aid an upsurge of radical violence and pressures despite the Honduran transition to democratic government...
...If the Army could just be shored up enough to hold the line, the idea went, the guerrillas would eventually fade as their outside supply lines dried up...
...In Vietnam we committed the United States militarily in a country where we had no inherent interests except to prevent Communist encroachment...
...trainers specializing in civic action...
...In Vietnam, he received this award from the 25th Infantry Division, nicknamed "Tropic Lightning" A The contras are strictly an instrument of pressure...
...They would probably collapse under the weight of bad morale and political momentum...
...president has been willing for long to allow it to appear as if the United States will not defend hegemony over the American Mediterranean for the sake of Moscow's understanding and restraint, even if other evidence suggests that Soviet behavior in the region is quite limited...
...Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, at that time one of a seven-man board running the armed forces...
...The mobilization of local regimes was necessarily a complex and painstaking process...
...First, it was too small...
...Columnist Joseph Kraft put the challenge succinctly in February 1981: "If this country cannot sustain the [Salvadorean] Junta by a limited application of muscle:' Kraft wrote, "then it should get out of the Great Power business...
...Many Administration officials appeared to believe profoundly in a kind of "umbilical" theory of Third World insurgencies...
...Finally, since 1981, Marine Corps and SEAL advisers have been training the Salvadorean Navy in arms interdiction patrols and leading them on searches for hidden weapons in the swamps of the gulf basin...
...The Washington Post, May 16, 1981...
...Reagan came to office with a clear political commitment to reverse leftist gains in Central America...
...In May, the two countries formally re-established diplomatic relations, and State Department envoy Gen...
...Managua, they indicated, was the scene of frequent guerrilla meetings and intermittent political talks with Nicaraguan officials and Cuban advisers...
...3. The Washington Post, February 24, 1981...
...At the strategic level, it meant building walls around El Salvador and Nicaragua but refraining from direct intervention...
...He identified three crucial variables...
...Foreign debtsthe heaviest in Latin America at more than $1,500 per capita -were pushing the country toward the brink of economic collapse...
...Salvadorean airspace by a radar facility on Tiger Island in the Gulf of Fonseca and U.S...
...On March 18, 1981, in testimony otherwise renowned for his announcement of "a priority target list-a hit list, if you will-for the ultimate takeover of Central America," Haig called for the repeal of a 1976 law banning covert aid to South African-backed rebels in Angola...
...The New York Times, February 25, 1981...
...Cancian asked...
...Tracey had many adherents in the Pentagon...
...VIETNAM HAD INSPIRED A DEEP-SEATED public unease about U.S...
...The nature of the CIA's relationship to the contras during this period is still unclear...
...Our only complaint about the American troops is that there aren't enough of them...
...By March 1982, virtually unnoticed by the U.S...
...As soon as the November presidential elections were out of the way, the Alvarez faction cemented its dominance within the armed forces...
...The Washington Post, May 5, 1981...
...Second, simple facts of geography prevented the Army from surrounding the guerrillas...
...aid-guns, ammunition and helicopters-reached the field when the guerrillas were already in retreat...
...After Carter's dispatch of Green Beret Mobile Training Teams to the Honduras-Salvador border in 1980, Honduran troops had participated in several pincer operations and sustained casualties...
...On the one hand, the 15,000-man force was riddled with deficiencies...
...The Reagan Administration moved quickly to shore up the more aggressive officers, notably Col...
...AMBASSADORS in Central America told the author that Nicaraguan arms flows to El Salvador had been insignificant for about a year-this just days before the FMLN's most successful offensive to date...
...Vernon Walters arrived to finalize a new military aid package...
...officials in El Salvador and Honduras, they map every acre of guerrilla territory with radar and infra-red computer-analyzed photographs...
...They're not doing that much now...
...IF NICARAGUAN AID IS CUT, IF THE FLOW .through Honduras is cut off, and if the entry of arms from the sea is cut, then the present level of military aid and training should be sufficient...
...Meetings involving basic political and military decisions were, according to the minutes, attended only by Salvadoreans...
...By all accounts, they have greatly enhanced their military capabilities, territorial influence and overall strategic position relative to January 1981...
...Some degree of military force would clearly be necessary if these armed radical movements were to be halted or dislodged, but it was hard for Reagan to argue that the Sandinistas and El Salvador's FMLN constituted any military threat to the United States or its overseas interests...
...After all, our ships had been sailing off the North Vietnamese coast on missions that were hardly friendly...
...In the wake of this success, and through the spring of 1981, military planners were hopeful that the Salvadoreans could at least hold their own with only modest infusions of U.S...
...military officials in the region were disgusted...
...Cuba curtailed arms shipments to the Salvadorean guerrillas after March 1981 and immediately MAY/JUNE 1984 31Honduras' new democracy was menaced from the outset by a major military buildup began seeking negotiations with the United States...
...a base for stepped up contra raids into Nicaragua...
...Congress rebuffed the appeal, but it could not prevent the subsequent approval of a $2 million covert program of CIA activities for Guatemala.1 4 The best opportunities were in the south...
...Two thousand four hundred troops were dispatched to the border...
...In May 1981, the State Department declared that a "major insurgency" was afoot in Guatemala and sought military aid to repel it...
...Policarpo Paz Garcia reportedly demurred, but was overruled by the high command...
...0 NE ASPECT OF ADMINISTRATION STRATEGY, however, promised-and delivered-more immediate results...
...The Honduran-Salvadorean border has been regularly patrolled since 1982 by Honduran Army teams specifically trained to stop gunrunning...
...It's more trouble if we have to watch Nicaragua too...
...policies may be carried out in Central America or the Caribbean, but the true targets of its policies are in Moscow, Paris, Bonn, Seoul, Beijing and so on...
...But it would be an extra annoyance, a marginal one, in that kind of contingency...
...President Rodrigo Carazo expelled Cuban diplomats in May 1981 on charges of fomenting internal subversion...
...From this, Cancian drew a significant conclusion: "It is worth remembering for further conflicts that the way we get involved is crucial for long-term public support...
...Either they'd liberalize and stop exporting revolution, which is fine and dandy, or they'd tighten up, alienate their own people, their international support and their backers in the United States, in the long run making themselves much more vulnerable...
...Even more conveniently, clashes between Honduras and Nicaragua, spurred by cross-border contra raids, were feeding political fears and jingoism and encouraging the ascent of a hard-line faction within the Honduran military...
...REndga o me Amerc Endgame THE PIECES ON THE BOARD 1. Author's interview, Tegucigalpa, September 1983...
...Eldon Cummings was pressing for 75 advisers...
...Adolfo Castillo visited Tegucigalpa to seek Honduran aid against the anticipated guerrilla offensive...
...all that would change, however, if consensus were established...
...Author's interview, Tegucigalpa, March 1984...
...The Reagan Administration was prepared to defend that...
...And that same month, officials from U.S...
...But in any event, the theory was that we couldn't lose...
...Compared to Cuba, Nicaragua could never amount to anything...
...military involvement overseas...
...He later recalled that, in a series of meetings with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, "I continued to press the question of Cuban adventurism...
...Ultimately the American people decided that our limited interest in South Vietnam was not worth the price we were paying...
...Linn, "The Cuban Threat," Marine Corps Gazette, February 1983...
...On a strategic level, the Army had two fundamental disadvantages...
...The documents did indeed speak of occasional individual or small group training visits to Cuba...
...A Pentagon report to Congress in February 1981, designed to secure military aid, called it a "19th century constabulary" with "no hope" of winning a counterinsurgency war...
...By July, Salvadorean helicopters were reported making frequent incursions into Honduran airspace, landing on occasion to deploy troops back across 30REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30 REPORT ON THE AMERICASignum U.S...
...Dobrynin's response convinced me that Cuban activities in the Western hemisphere were a matter between the U.S...
...His point was to prove that Cuba and Nicaragua were behind the guerrilla movement...
...Each of these factors was indispensable, for the role envisioned for Honduras was truly immense...
...They also caused diplomatic sparks to fly with Honduras...
...One local businessman tells of a beauty pageant at a Tegucigalpa hotel, where a platoon of ostensibly crack security troops were trampled by a mob of teenage girls...
...Salvador could drag on forever at the rate we're going now:' says one diplomat...
...If not, the idea was that the Sandinistas would react one of two ways...
...military presence confined to non-belligerent countries such as Honduras...
...Alvin H. Bernstein and Col...
...MilGroup chief Col...
...Larry Tracey of the Pentagon's Inter-American Planning Division, said in April that El Salvador needed 20 to 30 additional U.S...
...Honduran airspace is controlled by a major U.S...
...At the same time, it had led Pentagon and national security circles to reassess the domestic political preconditions for a successful overseas war...
...national security...
...While the country's treacherous mountain terrain and lack of roads had spurred the development of a competent Air Force, the 12,000-man Army was a different story...
...The problems lay mainly in the north, where Guatemala's Lucas Garcia regime was in deep trouble against a powerful guerrilla movement with an extensive infrastructure in the country's western highlands...
...8 As the U.S...
...strategic campaign as a matter of self-defense...
...That's it...
...According to U.S...
...6 Such claims of Soviet control reflected more than political posturing...
...Second, none of this has produced a single consignment of incoming Cuban-Nicaraguan arms...
...Some people around here and in Washington really thought-and still do, I guess-that they could incite an insurrection and overthrow the Sandinistas...
...Most of these concerned specialized gear such as radios...
...They give them political advice and moral support, but the whole thing is mainly psychological...
...The average infantry company contains one officer, one or two noncoms and 100 illiterate and ill-trained peasants, grievously deluded as to what they will encounter on the battlefield...
...diplomat in Honduras subsequently explained, the contras were an attractive tool...
...Cuba is already a major Soviet base, of course...
...As the Marine Corps Gazette noted in 1983: "It is El Salvador that has now become the key issue in Central America...
...5 The task for the incoming Reagan Administration in 1981 was to take effective security-related steps on the ground in Central America without undermining the political effort to build a consensus at home...
...The actual evidence of Cuban and Nicaraguan aid is complex and contradictory...
...That's what it's all about...
...Traditional counterinsurgency theory, based largely on the British 1950s campaign in Malaya, prescribes a 10:1 ratio...
...In El Salvador, the theory implied that limited military aid could suffice...
...Mark F. Cancian, "Future Conflict and the Lessons of Vietnam," Marine Corps Gazette, January 1983...
...And you have a high command that would send them out to fight, then take off for Miami the minute things got bad...
...We are motivated by righteous anger...
...The documents referred, however, to nothing more than minor equipment transactions involving Nicaragua, Cuba or the Soviet bloc...
...There were no American casualties in that incident and there was little feeling of outrage...
...the eventual guarantor of regional stability, using its Air Force (already Central America's largest) and Army to serve as successor to Somoza's old National Guard...
...By 1982, Nicaragua's southern neighbor was ready to serve as the base for Eden Pastora's ARDE, and as the spearhead of an antiSandinista offensive on the diplomatic front...
...The "umbilical" theory did more than muddle public debate and the historical record...
...Far more prominent were black market arms deals in Miami, Texas and Western Europe...
...The American military should stay at least until we've had two or three democratically elected governments...
...action, Cuba also stepped up the mobilization of its own armed forces and received major new arms shipments from the Soviet Union...
...4. Jorge I. Dominguez, "U.S...
...But three fundamental points stand out: First, the United States has exerted immense pressure on Cuba and Nicaragua to curtail their support and has built a large apparatus to interdict arms flows...
...3 no...
...Col...
...5. Capt...
...CIA officials quoted in The Washington Post dismissed the claims as vastly exaggerated, but the die had been cast...
...Menges argued that the Sandinistas should be seen as a threat to every government in the region...
...Alexander Haig, Op Cit...
...Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Fred Ikle made the point sharply, attributing the Salvadorean insurgency to the "Soviet-Cuban effort presently underway to expand the reach of Soviet imperialism...
...They find themselves in a position similar to the one we occupied in the mid-sixties in Vietnam," wrote U.S...
...They give the Salvadorean comandantes safe haven, a place to meet...
...Americans will enthusiastically support an embattled peopleEngland during the Blitz, Israelis versus the Arabs -but the example the ally sets must be heroic, confident, competent, self-sacrificing...
...7 The pattern was to recur continually over the next three years, with each fresh spurt of guerrilla activity explained away with reports of yet another CubanNicaraguan arms infusion...
...Here soldiers are rounded up into the Army from buses and movie houses and concerts...
...Our labor of protection is so huge,' complained Army commander-in-chief Jaime Abdul Gutierrez, "more than anything we need more soldiers...
...In Nicaragua, you have commanders who fought in the revolution and who have a kind of mystique about them...
...7. The New York Times, March 6, 1981...
...That same month, it was later revealed, CIA Director William P. Casey gave the congressional intelligence committees a presidential finding "that secret operations in Central America were important to U.S...
...Using the debt crisis as leverage, the United States began to pressure Costa Rica into abandoning its historic political independence and disdain for militarism...
...9. Author's interview, Tegucigalpa, March 1984...
...These drew an immediate response from both Cuba and the Soviet Union...
...3 In a study for the American Enterprise Institute, Jorge I. Dominguez had been blunt: The objective interests of the United States in Central America outside of Panama are very modestso modest, indeed, that U.S...
...Policy in Central America and Cuba through F.Y...
...We need a permanent U.S...
...It aimed to sever or weaken the ties through a blend of covert action and diplomacy, in both its conventional and gunboat varieties...
...The construction was theoretically elegant and ideologically attractive-so much so that many Reaganites clung to it even in the face of powerfully contradictory trends...
...During the January 1981 "final offensive," Guatemala had sent troops to its narrow frontier with El Salvador, but their contribution was purely symbolic...
Vol. 18 • May 1984 • No. 3
