Nicaragua launches a rhetorical counterattack against the U.S.
Easter Week is a major holiday throughout Latin America. But in revolutionary Nicaragua there were a few differences in the seasonal festivities. The Sandinista government announced that it would ban all radio broadcasts of Easter Masses unless the regime could censor pastoral sermons. Then, as half the country prepared to flock to the beach after their religious observances, the others girded for war.
While there were reports of fighting in the area near the border with Honduras, much of the struggle seemed to be a battle of words, chiefly directed against the U.S. Declared Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann: "The United States is waging war against Nicaragua." That kind of provocative rhetoric drew a sharp response from U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick. Said she: "The United States isn't invading anybody."
The Nicaraguans were trying as hard as they could to appear beset, but the reality was somewhat different. A campaign organized by opponents of the regime was indeed under way. And it was an open secret that the contras, as they are known, were receiving advice and logistical assistance from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Yet, by Western diplomatic estimates, only 2,000 to 3,000 rebels were involved in the insurgency, far too few to oust the increasingly unpopular Marxist-led Sandinista government, which is named after a Nicaraguan nationalist rebel of the 1930s, Augusto César Sandino, and took power in 1979 after the overthrow of Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
Although the overall results of the contra campaign are difficult to determine, it is having a dire effect in some areas. Rancho Grande, a hamlet of wooden and tin-roofed dwellings in the coffee-growing region of Matagalpa, 35 miles from the Honduran border, was struck by the rebels last week. Two members of the local militia force, numbering about 25, were killed, along with a French microbiologist, Pierre Grosjean, 32, who was visiting the area to study leishmaniasis, an ulcerating skin disease. After the Rancho Grande assault, Nicaraguan Defense Minister Humberto Ortega Saavedra, whose brother Daniel is coordinator of the Nicaraguan junta, declared confidently that "the counterrevolutionary forces are in serious difficulty."
From the contra side of the shifting battlefront, the opposite seemed to be true. TIME has learned that, for the first time last week, members of the rebel Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.), a grouping of conservative and moderate Nicaraguans combined with former members of the Somoza National Guard, began coordinating their northern actions with another group operating in the country's south. Meanwhile, more than 175 Miskito Indians from Nicaragua's Atlantic coast have completed a rebel training course that will help them to lead as many as 8,000 of their alienated fellow Indians into battle against the Sandinistas. The F.D.N. also plans to send some of its members to Argentina for instruction in the use of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles.