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But what followed was worse. On Friday, the State Department proudly trotted out 19-year-old Orlando Tardencilla Espinoza, a Nicaraguan who had been captured in El Salvador by government forces. While in their custody, Tardencilla had confessed that he had been sent to fight in the civil war by the Sandinistas after having received military training in Ethiopia and Cuba. After interviewing him in El Salvador last week, and attempting to verify his story, the State Department flew Tardencilla to Washington to meet the press.
Once TV cameras were turned on him at a press conference in the office of State Department Spokesman Dean Fischer, Tardencilla sang a different tune. While officials from State watched in embarrassment and dismay, he repudiated his previous confession, which he said had been obtained through torture. Speaking through an interpreter, he said, "They have tried through certain psychological coercion to force me to say things about what is happening in El Salvador. In fact, an official in the U.S. embassy told me that they needed to demonstrate the presence of Cubans in El Salvador. They gave me an option: I could come here, or face certain death."
Tardencilla admitted that he had served in the Sandinista army, but insisted that he had gone to El Salvador—where he became a guerrilla commander—out of personal conviction and not because he had been sent by Nicaragua. He went on to say that "I am the only foreigner I know of [who was] fighting in El Salvador." His outpouring was too slick, too full of revolutionary rhetoric, to be very convincing, but it certainly did not help the Administration's case. This weekend he was released and allowed to return to Nicaragua. Said a State Department official: "It's the first smart thing we've done with this young man.''
—By Walter Isaacson.
Reported by Johanna McGeary and Strobe Talbott/Washington