Not since President Nixon struggled to extricate his administration from the Vietnam War before the November, 1972, elections have U.S. voters been faced with so stark a choice between war and peace in a presidential election year. One thing Americans casting their ballots for president this fall will be judging is what, if anything, the nation owes the contras. Next January, the new president will have to decide.
President Reagan frequently confided to senior aides his determination that come Jan. 21, 1989, the day after he leaves the presidency, the Marxist Sandinista government of Nicaragua would also be gone from power. Now Reagan is likely to finish his eight years as President with one of his most cherished goals unattained.
In Reagan`s plan to roll back the first communist beachhead on the American mainland, the Nicaraguan rebels have been his foot soldiers. Known as contras, these U.S.-armed guerrillas were the cornerstone in this hemisphere of what has unofficially become known as the ”Reagan Doctrine,”
the policy of supporting anticommunist guerrilla movements around the globe. Before the end of his first year in office, Reagan had set in motion a program to train the first 500 anti-Sandinista rebels he one day would call ”freedom fighters” and ”the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.” But as the President`s last year in office winds down, thousands of now-demoralized contras are holed up in jungle camps along the green, mountainous border between Nicaragua and Honduras, well short of their goal to topple the Sandinista regime.
A ragtag peasant army wearing U.S. military camouflage uniforms and driven by a U.S.-nurtured vision of a democratic Nicaragua, the contras are now divided by infighting, denied adequate funding by the U.S. Congress and threatened by Soviet-supplied Sandinista soldiers. Their future, perhaps more uncertain now than at any time since 1981, will ultimately be determined by U.S. voters when they pick a new president on Nov. 8.
The apparent failure of U.S. contra policy comes after the U.S. has spent more than $200 million to fund the fight and after up to 50,000 Nicaraguans have been killed or wounded in the war to overthrow the Sandinista regime. It comes after Nicaragua`s economy has been virtually destroyed by U.S. trade sanctions and a bloody seven-year civil war that has caused $3 billion in damages. It comes after the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has helped wage a proxy, not-so-secret, low-intensity guerrilla conflict in which the American public would never have permitted its own sons to die.
When Reagan steps down, he will leave behind a bitter legacy in Nicaragua and a deep mistrust of U.S. intentions in Central America that could take years of sorting out by the next administration.
Vice President George Bush is ready to support the contra struggle, even if it means more war against the Cuban-backed, Soviet-funded Sandinistas. ”We can`t just leave the contras twisting in the wind,” he says. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, on the other hand, is opposed to any more military aid for the contras and advocates the same path of negotiation chosen by the five Central American presidents when they signed a regional peace plan a year ago. ”If all goes well,” he proclaims, ”the endless debate over contra aid that has obsessed Washington for the past seven years will be over.”
Dozens of interviews with U.S. and Central American officials, foreign-policy experts and contra civilian and military leaders reveal general agreement that the United States helped create the contras and has a clear responsibility to help them now. But a heated debate continues in the final months of the Reagan administration over just what America`s obligations are or should be to the rebel cause.
”The American people should not forget that the problem in Nicaragua is not just the problem of the Reagan administration or a political party. They should realize it`s a problem for all Americans,” says Aristides Sanchez, a member of the contra directorate and a founder of the original rebel army. Sounding the now-familiar alarm about countries falling like dominoes under communist aggression, he adds, ”One day they will confront a war in Central America, and it will not be the children of the Democrats or the Republicans, it will be the sons of Americans who will fight.”
As with Vietnam, the choice in Nicaragua means either continuing to support an unpopular war for democracy or trying to negotiate a peace at the risk of consolidating a communist government right in our back yard. Unlike Vietnam, where 58,000 U.S. troops died before America pulled out 15 years ago, the contra war in Nicaragua has been waged, not by U.S. servicemen but by Nicaraguans backed by U.S. dollars. Since 1981 this war has waxed and waned as a vacillating Congress, swayed by prevailing political winds, opened and closed the contra-aid spigot, while the Soviet Union has continued to supply arms to the Sandinistas at a steady rate of $40 million a month, according to contra estimates.
”Whoever is president next year, they`re going to have to face that question,” says Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. ”If they want to end aid to the contras completely, they will have to come up with some other way to deflect the Sandinista presence and the Soviet threat,” he argues, noting that the Soviet bloc has supplied $500 million in economic assistance to the Sandinista regime in the year since the Central American peace plan was signed. Abrams insists the Nicaraguan problem is ”a matter of our own national security.” He defends the Reagan doctrine and says it would have succeeded in bringing democracy to Nicaragua by now if the Congress had supported it consistently.
”How many more Nicaraguan lives will it take before Mr. Reagan abandons this anti-Soviet crusade he insists on waging in Central America?” asks Alejandro Bendana, general secretary of the Nicaraguan foreign ministry. ”Can Reagan be persuaded to change his obsessive desire to unseat the Sandinistas and `win one` in Central America? He acts as if all Judeo-Christian tradition rests on the fate of Nicaragua and as if (without the contras) Sandinista hordes would be crossing the Rio Grande. If its security depends on destroying a dirt-poor country of 3 million people, then the United States is, indeed, insecure, and the state of the union is in a pretty sorry way.”
For years presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson spearheaded an all-out war effort in Indochina. Backed by a bipartisan consensus in Congress, that effort provided American manpower, money and munitions, sending more than 400,000 U.S. troops to South Vietnam by the end of 1967. There has been no bipartisan consensus for Reagan`s contra policy, and his administration has had to beg, borrow and even deceive to fund its cherished 14,000-member rebel army on the cheap. The Iran-contra scandal, the darkest blemish on the Reagan presidency, showed the lengths to which his administration would go to support the contras, despite a congressional ban on U.S. aid.
”The Vietnam syndrome still hangs strongly,” says longtime contra director Adolfo Calero, referring to a peculiar legacy of the Southeast Asian war-the deep American fear of getting U.S. soldiers mired in another conflict on foreign soil. ”The U.S. is basically isolationist,” he says. Moreover, he points out, there`s a recent study by the nonpartisan Americans Talk Security Project that indicates a confusion and a lack of knowledge among U.S. citizens about which countries in Central America are allies or foes.
That study, a survey of 1,000 registered American voters, found that 61 percent of the respondents believed the Soviet Union was supporting a communist revolution against the government of Nicaragua. Actually, Moscow is backing the Marxist Sandinista government against the U.S.-supported contra rebels. The survey also showed that 43 percent of the respondents believed El Salvador was unfriendly to or an enemy of the U.S., while 25 percent thought it was ruled by a communist government. In fact, the Salvadoran government is a staunch U.S. ally fighting a war against communist insurgents with the help of more than $1 million a day in U.S. aid.
”What I would tell voters is that there is a necessity to find out, to educate themselves on the importance of Central America, on the importance of the United States keeping its leadership of the free world, and to mind what is happening in its own neighborhood,” Calero says. The inconsistent record of U.S. public support for the contras, he claims, is due to ”an embarrassing lack of education rather than a lack of concern.” Calero insists that Americans who are well-informed about Nicaragua ”are overwhelmingly in favor” of the contras.
Like the South Vietnamese before them, the contras are the latest allies in danger of being abandoned by the United States in an election-year push for a negotiated settlement. Instructed by Nixon to negotiate a peace, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger labored for nearly four years before he was able to make his famous announcement, ”Peace is at hand.” And it came only days before Nov. 7, 1972, when Nixon was re-elected by an unprecedented margin. But what was seared even more deeply into the American memory was the bitter result of that peace: scenes of failure, like the frenzied evacuation of Saigon in April, 1975, as the capital fell to the North Vietnamese.
Now it is the Central American peace plan, signed Aug. 7, 1987, by the region`s five presidents, that has pre-empted the U.S.-directed struggle to wrest Nicaragua from communist hands. The plan`s architect, Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts, a clear signal from Europe that others in the world disapproved of the administration`s little war. Years of U.S. funding to the contras had not brought peace any closer. Now a regional approach offered participants the chance to try their own hand at solving a generation of civil strife in Central America.
The Arias plan undermined Reagan`s contra policy by giving the Democratic-controlled Congress an election-year alternative to continued funding of an unpopular war. On Feb. 3 the U.S. House of Representatives voted 219 to 211 to reject Reagan`s request for $36.25 million in new contra aid, including military assistance. On Feb. 29 the CIA-operated supply airdrops officially ended, and since then Congress has granted only humanitarian assistance.
”I`ll always be in favor of a peaceful solution to the conflicts in the region,” Arias says. ”Most officials of the U.S. government, as well as members of Congress, tell me that the contras have no chance to overthrow the Sandinista government. I share that point of view. You didn`t succeed in Vietnam with the strongest army in the world. So it is not very plausible to succeed in Nicaragua with an army of 12,000 or 15,000 men, compared to an army of 100,000 Sandinista soldiers.”
Sitting in a wood-paneled office in his elegant home in San Jose earlier this year, Arias ponders Reagan`s objective to see the Sandinistas overthrown by next year. ”My impression is that before January of 1989, even with more aid to the contras approved, Mr. Reagan won`t be able to see the Sandinistas out of power,” he says. ”Every authoritarian regime needs an enemy,” he notes, arguing that as long as the contras exist, they will be an excuse for the Sandinistas not to move toward democracy.
Arias points out that no Marxist government in history had ever committed itself to democracy-until Aug. 7, 1987, when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega did just that by signing the Arias plan in Guatemala City, which was also signed by Arias and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. ”The only way to kill Dracula is with a cross-not a sword,” Arias insists. He says more lethal contra aid will only mean more war, thousands more deaths and deeper economic agony but no weakening of Sandinista power.
Ortega and the eight other comandantes who make up the Sandinista regime`s governing National Directorate have condemned the contras as
”mercenaries” serving the Reagan administration, U.S. imperialism and the memory of deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza. But political analysts believe that despite his defiant rhetoric about not yielding to the demands and pressures of the contras, Ortega did just that when he signed the Arias plan. The Sandinista regime needed peace, these analysts say. The war was consuming half the annual budget, bankrupting the economy, undermining the popularity of the Sandinistas and threatening the goals they had promised after taking over in the broad-based revolution that toppled Somoza in July, 1979. In any case, Ortega succeeded in throwing the Reagan administration on the defensive by portraying himself as a peacemaker at a time when Reagan was calling for more military aid for the contras.
Dismissing Ortega as a ”dictator in designer glasses,” Reagan has steadfastly maintained that the Sandinistas have no intention of restoring full democracy or giving up power. But the Great Communicator has found his policy tough to sell on Capitol Hill. Ortega gained an unlikely ally in House Speaker Jim Wright (D., Tex.), who, along with many congressional Democrats, has argued against more military assistance and in favor of giving the Central America peace plan a chance to work.
When their military aid was cut off in February, contra leaders once again faced the ever-recurring reality that they could not count on the U.S. Congress to guarantee a supply of arms. They felt their only alternative was to sign a preliminary accord with the Sandinistas establishing a tenuous truce and opening several months of on-again, off-again peace talks. For their fighters in the field, who had re-entered Nicaragua by the thousands in 1987 to score their biggest military successes of the war, the fragile peace could not have come at a worse time.
From under a crumpled camouflage hat, ”Orion” peers out with a malevolent glare through eyes grown cold in the battles he has fought during nearly half of his 31 years. ”I was a founder in the struggle for
liberation,” boasts the veteran contra regional commander as he leads a rebel patrol through the remote, rolling terrain in the heart of Nicaragua`s northern war zone. ”I won`t give up until I see the liberation of my homeland.”
Turning to a column of his men walking single-file through the countryside in the mountains of battle-torn Jinotega Department, Orion barks, though with a paternal note in his voice: ”Get on the ball! Keep your distance! One burst of fire and we could lose everyone.” The executive officer and second-in-command of the Jose Dolores Estrada Regional Command, this tough warrior has taken the name of a constellation-the sword-bearing hunter Orion-as his nom de guerre. With or without U.S. assistance, Orion still vows a fight to the death if that`s what it takes to bring democracy to Nicaragua.
”I am going to fight to the last consequences,” he says, pausing in the woods atop a mile-high mountain near San Sebastian de Yali in north-central Nicaragua. ”If God gives me the triumph, then I will work to do that. If not, I will die for my country.” It is still some time before the cease-fthat took effect last winter, and Orion is leading three U.S. newspaper reporters on a tour of his operations area, offering a glimpse of the grueling, Spartan lives the contras endure for their cause.
