Washington's Dilemma in Nicaragua

...Meanwhile Omar Torrijos, the two-faced Panamanian strongman who wanted to block the Communists yet was a great buddy of Castro, sent his friend Commandante Eden Pastora, still pari oftheNicaraguan united front against Somoza, to Cuba and Venezuela...

...Pastora, who was pinning down the largest part of the National Guard south of Managua, sent Carter a message urging him to force Somoza to withdraw a bit and thus enable the non-Marxist guerrilla chief to reach thecapital ahead of rival revolutionists...

...Back when I met him Nicaragua was peaceful and relatively prosperous under the Somoza family's "benign" dictatorship—benign, at any rate, compared with its successor—so the testy Salazar and I conversed mostly about the late great poet Reuben Dario, with whom he had gone to school...

...Why did the United States government, after forcing out Somoza, fail to prevent the imposition of a dictatorship by the tiny Sandinista minority...

...Shirley Christian, the first writer to chronicle this disheartening tale of 50 yearsof lost opportunities, pinpoints our dilemma on the last page of her book: "The United States should not allow itself to fall into the trap of having to accept, in an area as closely tied to it as Cen-ral America, either a repressive Right-wing dictatorship because it is not t hreat-ening to U.S...

...My account of the country was based largely on talks with Leopoldo Salazar, in those days the proprietor of a small inn on the coffee estate of Santa Maria de Ostuma, near Mata-galpa...

...By 1981, after Ronald Reagan had become President of theUnited States, all of the non-Marxists who had allied with the Sandinistas to get rid of Somoza were "declared the enemy," as Christian puts it...

...Carter asked Bowdler at one point, "Is Somoza a moral man...

...But instead of landing there, a&scheduled, the guerrilla leader's plane flew to Managua, where he was killed by members of General Anastasio Somoza Garcia's National Guard, which had recently replaced the U.S...

...I lived here and saw my personal property stolen and destroyed by [Augusto Cesar] Sandino's bandits in the early '30s...

...TheU.S...

...attempts to "preserve a bourgeois democracy," and providing guidelines for moving beyond the "alliance of convenience" with the non-Marxists...

...Shocked at the U.S.' apparent impotence, Ihe moderates fell themselves forced lo choose between Somoza and ihe Marxist-Leninists, whose secret police chief was appropriately named L(hiin Ccrna...

...President," Bowdler replied...

...It didn't matter, though, because the Sandinistas already controlled not only the Armed Forces and the police but also the press and the educational system, where the Cubans were very active...

...Late in 1979, too, the Cubans sent their first major contingents of military and security officers into Nicaragua...

...The result of thesecontacts," observes Christian, "was lhat the trickle of weapons...

...They were welcomed by a Sandinista commander as "revolutionary friends and brothers" in the struggle "of oppressed peoples against Yankee imperialism...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "The Road to Panama," "Haiti: The Black Republic" I visited Nicaragua 20 years ago in the course of preparing a travel book on Central America...

...It was at this point, in 1979, that the United Stales made its biggest mistake...

...The most important step in that process—the replacement of Defense Minister Bernardino Larios, a former National Guard officer, by Army Commander Humberto Ortega, a Sandinista—came in December...

...The Carter Administration had been divided...

...Somoza himself was not in on theplot, andthe American Ambassador tried to stop it...

...I did, however, ask him what he thought of the So-mozas' current puppet, President Rene Schick...

...Somoza had already flown with his entourage to Miami, an interim junta had been installed to replace him, and Tomas Borge, the veteran Sandinista, had been named the Interior Minister in charge of the police...

...At the victory celebration in July 1979, Pastora's speech was the shortest: No doubt anticipating the future, he promised to resist any attempt to betray the revolution...

...As so often in I lie past, Nic-araguans laced (he bitter realization that their own needs—and dreams— were subjugated to matters beyond their borders...

...Under the Communists it would be the same...

...Salazar answered, grinning: "Well, maybe we're a little tired of the Somo-zas after 30 years, but...

...look at our prosperity...

...Oddly enough, Shirley Christian sets the stage for Revolution in the Family, her exhaustive, amazingly objective report ontheSandinista uprising and its consequences, by interviewing the same Salazar, now an 82-year-old exile in Costa Rica...

...Carter hesitated...

...Toward the end of September Sandinista militants issued a secret report claiming that the movement had thwarted U.S...

...Marines as the effective power in the land...

...Forty-six years later the Sandinistas, who had by then overthrown the Somoza dynasty, assassinated Salazar's son Jorge, the charismatic leader of the democratic opposition, as he was about to press them for elections...

...And now that the Leftist dictatorship is entrenched, Nicaragua's economy is a shambles, and armed rebels are harassing theSandinistason at least two fronts, why is the result a stalemate with most of the world unsympathetic to the contrast Here the responsibility is Ronald Reagan's...

...Ambassador William Bowdler and Viron Vaky, the Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs, wanted to jettison Somoza in 1978 by cutting off his supplies and denying him a visa to the United States...

...We have learned that the only way to handle them is to shoot them...

...The responsibility belongs to Jimmy Carter...

...Carter understood Bowdler and Vakys logic, but as Christian notes, "he also understood that it meant the United States would be telling another country what kind of government it ought to have, or that he would be telling another sitting president that he had to leave...

...In no way, Mr...

...Instead, Carter again sat on his hands, and Pastora was the last to reach Managua...

...The establishment of a totalitarian regime, tragically, was seen as secondary...

...Consider also that our good relations with you, because of our implacable anti-Communism, we owe to the Somozas...

...Their margin was slight, but even so, it left Reagan with just one option: to support the contras...

...More specifically, the same fear of violating the nonintervention principle that prevented Carter from acting to ensure a moderate succession to Somoza now prevented Reagan from blockading the coast and mining the harbors to stop the entry of Soviet-supplied arms, food, oil, and other goods—on which Nicaragua had become quite as dependent as Cuba...

...anything less drastic would have put the democratic opposition out on a limb, and the Sandinistas were prepared to pick up the pieces...

...The official story that he had been caught in a crossfire intended for someone else was palpably untrue...

...Machine-gun toting soldiers ambushed him on November 12, 1980, some 12 miles south of Managua, and mowed him down...

...President, though, had begun to resemble Carter in facing (or rather, not facing) up to the Shiite terrorists holding Americans hostage in Lebanon...

...national security or a repressive Left-wing dictatorship in exchange for commitments not to over-I hrow a neighboring government or acquire migs...

...A few months further on the two leading non-Marxist figures on the junta were forced to resign, and LaPrensa, the leading independent newspaper, closed...

...Infact,onFebruary21,1934, Salazar andanumber of his friends had gathered at Jinotega to shoot Sandino, the Sandinistas' eponymous hero...

...Fidel was supplying Ihe commandantes with tanks and other weapons as well...

...The Sandinistas won the election of 1984 against the now-leaderless pluralist majority because they controlled the balloting machinery, had lowered the voting age to include the young people educated by the Cubans, and were keeping all reports of their strong-arm tactics out of the press...

...Five days later, the first educational advisers from Havana arrived...

...coming inlo Costa Rica for Ihe Sandinistas grew quickly inlo a heavy flow...