As disillusionment spreads, the Sandinistas face a new threat
For the celebration of the third anniversary of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution, the dusty provincial town of Masaya, 18 miles southeast of the capital city of Managua, last week was colorfully decorated with flags and posters. A band played revolutionary songs, and the crowds sang along. But there was little cheer in the speech delivered by Daniel Ortega Saavedra, a member of the all-powerful nine-man Sandinista Directorate. "Nicaragua is undergoing a silent, yet bloody invasion," he declared. Ortega charged that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the Honduran armed forces were supporting more than 2,000 rebels who have been operating along the border with Honduras. Since July 4, he told his audience of 30,000, the guerrillas had staged more than 18 attacks on Nicaraguan territory and killed more than 50 government troops. Ortega punctuated his statistics with repeated shouts that "this is not a figment of our imagination."
Indeed it was not. The Sandinistas have every reason to be preoccupied with counterrevolutionaries, or contras. For the first time since the end of the civil war that toppled right-wing Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, the Sandinistas are being seriously challenged by armed groups of Nicaraguans who originally supported the revolution but who have become disillusioned with the regime's strident Marxism, its disregard for individual rights and its increasing dependence on Cuba and the Soviet Union. The contras say they are fighting to fulfill the revolution's original goals: political pluralism, individual liberties and a mixed economy.
The group responsible for much of the military action is the Nicaraguan Democratic Front (F.D.N.), which claims to have 2,000 armed men who make regular incursions into Nicaragua from their sanctuaries in Honduras. Led by José Francisco Cardenal Telleria, a civil engineer, the F.D.N. has been especially active since March. Linked to the F.D.N. are many Miskito Indians who resent the Sandinistas for having forced thousands of them out of their homes along the Honduran border and into internment camps. The Miskitos are now in open revolt, and running battles with the Nacaraguan armed forces have been going on for the past three weeks. The Honduran government has mostly turned a blind eye to the activities of the contras.
But the biggest threat to the Sandinistas comes from Edén Pastora Gómez, 46, a flamboyant and popular former guerrilla leader known as Commander Zero. A hero of the Sandinista revolution, Pastora fled Nicaragua a year ago and eventually surfaced in Costa Rica last April. He passionately denounces his former comrades-in-arms as "traitors and murderers" and has called on the Nicaraguan people to "expel [them] from power." For the present, Pastora's strategy is to hope that his re-emergence will lead to the defection of other unhappy Sandinista supporters, and eventually divide the army so that he can come to power in what would amount to a coup.