Contradictions in Nicaragua

The Reagan administration is on the warpath in Nicaragua. U.S. troops may not yet be in the frontlines, but Washington is financing and directing a paramilitary campaign that is taking lives, ravaging communities, and deliberately inflicting suffering on innocent Nicaraguans.

Although the war is called "covert," the American public has known about this campaign for more than two years. Not since the press caught Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sending CIA operatives en masse to Angola a decade ago has an ongoing clandestine operation been so exposed in the media.

The administration has spent more than $50 million—and is currently seeking $21 million more from Congress—to create, train, and equip an army 15,000 strong, known as the contras, dedicated to overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Dozens of U.S. intelligence officials have concentrated their activities in Honduras and Costa Rica, which now serve as sanctuaries and training grounds for the counterrevolutionaries; contras have also trained on American soil at boot camps located 20 miles from Miami International Airport and in southern California. And the semipermanent U.S. military "maneuvers" in Honduras have provided a cover for launching contra attacks against the Nicaraguan government.

During a recent visit to Nicaragua, we found that the not-so-covert war being carried out in the name of the American people is an ongoing tragedy affecting an entire nation. Almost daily the newspapers—pro- as well as anti-Sandinista—carry stories describing raids by the counterrevolutionary forces on small villages, the death of soldiers and civilians, the mining of harbors, or the destruction of oil depots and other economic facilities. Both supporters and detractors of the Sandinista revolution to whom we talked acknowledged that the contras are exacting a severe economic and human toll.

The human toll, according to Nicaraguan government figures, has risen dramatically over the last two years. In 1982 the government blamed 273 military and 53 civilian deaths on attacks from contra forces based in Honduras. In 1983 the Sandinistas reported 300 soldiers killed in combat. Of the 346 non-combatants who were also slain, 104 were professionals and technicians—teachers, health care workers, agronomists, and church officials—working to bring social services into the rural areas. The Sandinistas believe that the contras deliberately target civilians working with the government's rural programs, because, as one Nicaraguan Interior Ministry official explained, "they represent the essence of the revolution."

While the Sandinista regime has been criticized for its political direction, it has been commended for its bold initiatives to improve living conditions among the peasantry. According to the World Bank, the government "has given top priority to education." Even the U.S. State Department, in its 1983 human rights report, praises the Sandinistas' "efforts to improve health service," citing decreases in common diseases such as malaria and polio, and the construction of new health-care centers and hospitals.

But while Nicaragua is actively pursuing the very objectives recommended by the Kissinger Commission to accelerate "human development" in Central America, the contras are attempting to disrupt these programs. To block gains in health care, for example, they have attempted to dissuade peasants from participating in vaccination drives, calling the medicine "brainwashing serums from Russia and Cuba." The contras have destroyed 22 rural health clinics; 19 medical workers have been killed.

A former contra official we interviewed in a prison barracks in Managua admitted "eliminating" a middle-aged, lay religious couple with a "shot to the head" because they were "militants," active in educational programs and community organizing in the northern city of Esteli.

The economic toll on this small country, whose entire national budget, Interior Minister Tomas Borge points out, is less than one-sixth the cost of the U.S. B-1 bomber program, is equally brutal. The Nicaraguan government estimates economic damage caused by the counterrevolution at $100 million.

Sabotage has taken a variety of forms. Nicaragua's largest petroleum storage tanks at the port of Corinto were destroyed during a machine gun attack from high-speed boats in October 1983, prompting the Sandinistas to ration gasoline. Electrical and communications centers and the international airport in Managua have been damaged in aerial bombing raids. Main bridges have been dynamited and dozens of warehouses, construction sites, factory buildings, and other facilities have been burned. In an effort to block shipping and impede foreign trade, the CIA and the contras have begun to mine Nicaraguan ports.

Agriculture is also a target. Government authorities claim that a significant percentage of the cotton and coffee crops—Nicaragua's primary cash exports—went unharvested because of contra attacks. In one small northern village we visited, two men had been hacked to death in December when they went into the fields to pick their crops. Such attacks have forced an estimated 55,000 peasants to flee their lands, leaving their property and possessions behind and creating additional resettlement costs for the Sandinista regime.

Coupled with the Reagan administration's economic blockade, which has limited Nicaragua's trade with the United States and restricted its access to bilateral and multilateral aid, these attacks have had a major impact on the country's vulnerable economy. The loss of export earnings from coffee and cotton has contributed to shortages of basic commodities Nicaragua cannot afford to import. Productivity has been hurt as workers break from their jobs for militia training. "Increasingly active anti-Sandinista guerrilla movements" are "among [Nicaragua's] chronic economic problems for which there is no early solution in view," acknowledges the 1983 foreign economic trends report issued by the U.S. embassy in Managua.

Although Ronald Reagan calls them "freedom fighters," and they call themselves "commandos of liberty," the leaders of the counterrevolutionary forces have few democratic credentials. Several prominent members, most notably Eden Pastora and Alfonso Robelo, are disenchanted ex-officials of the Sandinista government. But their organization, the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, is small and up until recently has not been the major recipient of the Reagan administration's largess.

The largest and most active contra group—and the one most closely allied with the United States—is the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN). Forged with the help of the CIA in 1981 from several smaller contra organizations, the FDN's seven-member directorate includes the former vice president under the Somoza dictatorship and a brigadier general from Somoza's praetorian army, the Nicaraguan National Guard. The FDN's military staff and many of its field commanders are former sergeants and colonels of the guard, a fact that has lent credence to the Sandinista charge that the contras are somocistas attempting to regain power.

The FDN rank and file, variously estimated from 5,000 to 7,000 in number, is made up of guardsmen who fled Nicaragua after the revolution, Miskito Indians whom the Sandinistas alienated by trying to force their integration into the revolution, and small landowners and peasants who have been disaffected for religious or ideological reasons.

In their recruitment drive, the contras have appealed to the "traditional values" of rural Nicaraguans. Their propaganda, dropped from airplanes over northern Nicaraguan villages along with plastic bags filled with candy, balloons, and soaps, depicts the hand of the FDN offering a basket filled with gifts, a cross, and the Nicaraguan flag. Religious freedom and the fight against "Soviet imperialism" are central themes of the counterrevolution. "All Christian Nicaraguans are obliged to fight against the atheist Sandinista government," the contra literature asserts. "Our triumph is assured because the Nicaraguan people and the free nations of the world have condemned the Sandinista regime to disappear from the political future."

But their tactics of destroying hospitals and killing civilians belie the image of the Christian liberator. Consider the cases of two FDN members we interviewed (in the presence of Sandinista soldiers) who were being held in a Managua military prison for allegedly attempting to "create insurrectionist cells," and to assassinate three high officials, including the two priests in the government, Father Miguel D'Escoto, foreign minister, and Father Ernesto Cardenal, minister of culture. The FDN members gave different reasons for joining the contras. One, a former National Guardsman who used the nom de guerre "B-1," was ideologically motivated. He wanted to "restore democracy" to Nicaragua, he said, as it had been during the rule of Somoza.

The other, a flaccid young man who used the name "El Muerto"—the Dead One—had taken asylum with relatives who were members of the National Guard in the Guatemalan embassy on July 18, 1979, and had gone to Guatemala. At the age of 18, he recounted, he joined the contras, not because of any political motivation, but because "I realized that there was no future for me in exile, and it was the only way I could see to get back to my homeland."

According to his story, El Muerto's road home led him to a contra camp in Honduras called "Pine 1," where he became "chief of intelligence." His duties included interrogation, torture, and "elimination" of prisoners.

Revenge against the Sandinistas and their supporters appears to be as much a motive of the contras as any commitment to religious or democratic principles. Some contra leaders have been so bold as to threaten a bloodbath if they are successful. "Come the counterrevolution there will be a massacre in Nicaragua," one promised a Newsweek reporter in Honduras. "We have a lot of scores to settle. There will be bodies from the [Honduran] border to Managua."

But the contras appear to have no chance of overthrowing the Sandinista government. After more than two years of CIA planning and training, and massive injections of U.S. dollars, they have proven an ineffective guerrilla army, unable to accomplish even their professed short-term goal of seizing territory and declaring a "liberated zone."

Last September, CIA advisers in Honduras reportedly directed the contras to shift from a "war of position" to a "war of attrition" and concentrate on commando-style sabotage operations rather than risk heavy casualties in confrontations with the Sandinista army. Even though the contras have since launched a series of successful air and sea attacks on port cities and economic facilities, CIA analysts believe that the contras have neither the military capacity nor the political sophistication to do more than wreak havoc and terror throughout Nicaragua.

Not only has the Reagan administration openly admitted its support for the Nicaraguan contras, but U.S. officials have also endorsed their activities. According to UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, the United States has a "moral right" to back the counterrevolution. On May 4, 1983, the president himself admitted that "we've been [giving] money, providing subsistence and so forth to these people." Reagan then declared that it is "all right with me" if Congress wants to make such assistance overt instead of covert, as long as there are no "restrictions on the freedom fighters as to what tactics they could use."

But no administration spokesperson has fully explained what "national interest" is served by directing and financing the activities of men who call themselves "B-1" and "El Muerto." The administration has obfuscated its policy goals and intentions and has offered three different explanations to justify U.S. support for the contra war.

The first was put forth in a December 1, 1981 presidential "finding," required by Congress for all covert operations, which authorized the CIA to strike against Cubans and Cuban supply lines in Nicaragua. CIA Director William Casey later explained to Congress that the covert operations were intended to destroy the "Cuban infrastructure" in Nicaragua. The contras did kill a number of Cuban teachers who were working with the literacy campaign. But since no other Cuban targets were to be found, the administration refined its justification for CIA covert operations.

The official rationale for the contra war became to "interdict" weapons that the administration claimed were being transported from Nicaragua to rebels in El Salvador. This justification has also collapsed for lack of supporting evidence. To date the contras have not "interdicted" a single pistol, and U.S. diplomats in the region have stated that no evidence exists of significant arms flows from Nicaragua to El Salvador.

In July 1983 the administration drafted a new "finding" to justify a request to Congress for increased U.S. aid to the contras. No longer was the emphasis placed on interdicting arms; instead the administration stressed the need to disrupt and pressure the Sandinista government. In recent public statements, the president has said that U.S. support for the counterrevolution will stop when the Sandinistas modify their domestic policies and comply with their earlier promise to hold democratic elections in Nicaragua.

But the official reaction to the Sandinistas' February 21,1984 announcement that elections will be held later this year dispelled lingering doubts over whether the Reagan administration is any more genuinely interested in democratization in Nicaragua than it has been in Chile or Guatemala, for example. Administration officials have made it clear that they view the elections as being a result of U.S. pressure and intend to keep the pressure up. Secretary of State George Schultz has publicly refused to say that the United States would halt support for the contra war, even if the Sandinistas won fair and square, as some Western observers predict they can. "The elections are one thing," he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 22, but other aspects of Nicaragua's behavior are "simply not compatible with the kind of world we would like to see down there."

Neither Cuban infrastructure, interdiction of arms, nor a concern for democracy account for the administration's conduct in Nicaragua. Rather, like so many of his predecessors, President Reagan is motivated by a "control mentality" which has dominated the history of U.S. relations with Latin American revolutions. "We set the limits of diversity," Henry Kissinger once told a group of officials during a strategy meeting on how to destabilize the Allende government in Chile; that is what the Reagan administration is now intent on doing in Nicaragua.

Since the contras' tactics are unlikely to produce democracy, one must conclude that the administration is using them to punish the Sandinista revolution. This punishment serves two purposes. First, the pain and damage the contras inflict on the Nicaraguan people and economy send a message to other revolutionary movements in the region that a challenge to U.S. influence will be met with prolonged and unyielding hostility. Second, U.S. policy makers harbor the illusion that the combination of an unending war of attrition and increasing economic pressures will change the political climate and erode public support for the Nicaraguan government, thereby forcing the Sandinistas to concede the basic principles of the revolution.

This approach, like the administration's militarist solutions to the crises in Lebanon and El Salvador, is doomed to failure. As ardent nationalists who survived years of Somoza's vicious repression before finally achieving power, the Sandinistas are not about to capitulate.

Promoting counterrevolutionary violence is a dangerous policy. Not only has the Reagan administration legitimized terrorism and subversion—sending a message of endorsement to right-wing death squads throughout the region—but it is also undermining the real U.S. national interests of peace and stability in the region.

Yet the Reagan administration clearly plans to "stay the course" in Nicaragua. The contras are currently mounting a new offensive, and tensions are escalating along the Nicaragua-Honduras border. But the future of this war depends on continued U.S. support, because the contras cannot survive without it.

As the administration seeks to spend $21 million more of the taxpayers' money to fund its surrogates, the public and its Congress ought to ask whether the contras are the type of allies we can afford. Do protracted terror and violence serve U.S. interests in Central America? Has the Reagan administration made a serious effort for a negotiated peace in the region? And, more fundamentally, why are we in Nicaragua, and what right do we have to be there?

At the time this article appeared, Richard J. Barnet was a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the author, most recently, of The Alliance; Peter Kornbluh was a research associate at the Institute for Policy Studies. Both had recently returned from a trip to Nicaragua.