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President Reagan tried to address these problems last month, in a thoughtful and moderate speech that outlined his Caribbean Basin Initiative. That program sought to stress the economic and social needs of the region and promote a multinational approach to its problems. Last week, however, the Administration's focus shifted back to the military and strategic aspects of the Central American turmoil.
The new offensive began with a slide show for the press, in the State Department's Dean Acheson Auditorium. John Hughes, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, accompanied by CIA Deputy Director Bobby Inman, displayed 36 declassified aerial photographs, documenting a massive military buildup by the Sandinista government since the 1979 revolution that ousted right-wing Dictator Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza. Not only was this buildup far in excess of Nicaragua's legitimate defensive needs, said Hughes, but "the fingerprints we find in every case are the Cubans'."
Hughes identified 36 new military bases that have sprung up in the past two years. The Sandinista forces have grown from a 5,000-man guerrilla band, when they first took power, into a combined army, militia and reserve force of 70,000. "Most of these garrison areas are built along Cuban design," Hughes said. "We see the Soviet-style obstacle course and physical-training area. This is the pattern we saw time and time again in Nicaragua. It's the pattern we've already seen time and again in Cuba." To prove it, he juxtaposed a photograph of a Cuban compound next to the Nicaraguan one. They matched. Hughes also pointed out a mock-up of an airfield. Said he: "This is the kind of field where you train commandos how to attack and destroy aircraft with explosive charges. This is reminiscent, of course, of the Ilopango raid in El Salvador in January. These are not for the defense of Nicaragua. They are primarily for the projection of power in an unconventional way." The construction, he said, is supervised by 2,000 Cuban military advisers in Nicaragua.
The photographs also disclosed a growing cache of Soviet materiel, including 25 aging but still potent T-55 battle tanks, twelve heavy howitzers, twelve armored personnel carriers and two attack helicopters. Runways at four airfields had been enlarged, Hughes said, to accommodate MiG-21 fighters. Fifty Nicaraguan pilots, he charged, are training in Bulgaria and Cuba. Inman summed up the implications of the slides. Said he: "The military structure being built up is clearly here to support the move on into a bastion [for exporting revolution], as we saw in Cuba. But this time there aren't the ocean barriers. It's not an island. You can move more rapidly into the other Central American countries."