REFORM THE CONTRAS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403770005-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: March 31, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403770005-9
REFORM THE CONTRAS
By ROBERT LEIKEN
C ONGRESS FACES AN excruciating dilemma in its
vote on aid to the Nicaraguan rebels. Should it ap-
prove President Reagan's proposal for military aid and
underwrite a mainly reactionary leadership unable to gain
the full support of the Nicaraguan or the American people?
Or should it vote down military aid and face the inevitable
consequences-both for Nicaragua and eventually for
Central America, Mexico, and the United States-of a con-
solidated, Soviet-backed expansionist Sandinista regime?
In recent weeks the Sandinistas have launched a major
diplomatic and public relations campaign aimed at con-
vincing the world that they are David fighting the U.S.
Goliath, and that they will be responsive and fair to their
people just as soon as the gringo guns are lowered. But few
are still naive enough to believe Sandinista promises.
On October 15 President Daniel Ortega announced
"emergency measures" that virtually suspended all civil
liberties, including the rights of speech, assembly, personal
security, freedom of the press, movement, to form labor
organizations, and to strike. Ortega blamed "U.S. im-
perialism" and rebel "sabotage and political destabiliza-
tion" for the new crackdown. The real target of this latest
crackdown is Nicaragua's political opposition, indepen-
dent press, labor unions, and above all, its religious
organizations.
From February 8 to 15, 1 participated as an observer on a
mission to Nicaragua of the International League for Hu-
man Rights. There was overwhelming evidence of an in-
tensifying campaign of intimidation, harassment, and co-
ercion. According to Monsignor Bosco Vivas, auxiliary
bishop of Managua, more than 100 Catholic lay and reli-
gious workers and 50 priests have been detained and inter-
rogated since October. Evangelical ministers and lay work-
ers have been subjected to the same treatment. The
Sandinistas have prohibited open-air Masses, shut down
the Catholic radio station, suppressed its newspaper, con-
fiscated its printing press, seized its social welfare office,
prevented the establishment of a human rights office, ille-
gally drafted seminarians into military service, and impris-
oned and deported priests.
Opposition political parties and labor unions have also
been singled out. Two Social Christian Party activists were
brutally murdered in November. The International League
for Human Rights has a list of 57 members of PLI (Inde-
pendent Liberal Party) from Condega in Esteli province
Robert Leiken is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endow-
ment for International Peace.
who are under detention. The Sandinista attacks and in-
timidation have focused on less visible opposition activists
in outlying provinces. But the campaign has been sweep-
ing-virtually all political parties have felt its effect, in-
cluding not only the right wing and the center, but also the
Communists, Socialists, Social Christians, and Social Dem-
ocratic parties. In response, a broad civil anti-Sandinista
front is slowly emerging. The once-enormous popular sup-
port for the Sandinistas has virtually vanished, and their
power now depends on a military and security apparatus
built by Moscow and Havana.
After talking to many professionals, and to union, party,
and religious leaders and activists, it was clear that there is
a major Sandinista effort to infiltrate opposition groups
and to coerce members into collaborating with Sandinista-
created "internal fronts" of the FDN (Nicaraguan Demo-
cratic Force). Later these activists are pressured to de-
nounce fellow members as FDN agents to justify
repression against their organizations.
We also talked to scores of political prisoners and their
families. The International League for Human Rights esti-
mates that there are now between 3,500 and 7,000 political
prisoners in Nicaragua, not including the 2,500 National
Guardsmen. It is impossible to be more precise because of
the secrecy of Nicaragua's prisons and its state security
system, which controls the clandestine state security pris-
ons. Political prisoners are subject to solitary confinement
in subterranean cells without sanitation facilities. They are
denied food and water for as long as four days at a time.
We heard of cases of simulated executions, threats to fam-
ily members of prisoners, including their pregnant wives,
and a gamut of psychological torments known in Nicara-
gua as "white torture. W%e also spoke to individuals who
had suffered physical torture.
In the remote Indian communities of the Atlantic coast,
Sandinista repression is less discreet. The Sandinistas are
waging an air war involving bombing and strafing of vil-
lages and noncombatants. On February 8, 1986, Vew }or'
Tames correspondent Steven Kinzer described "craters
made by rockets and 500-pound bombs" dropped by gov-
ernment planes on Indian villages while pursuing Miskito
leader Brooklyn Rivera. Rivera succeeded in escaping
through the remarkable cooperative efforts of Miskito vil-
lagers. Rivera's Misurasata group receives no support of
any kind from the U.S. government. In fact, the U.S.-
backed FDN (with U.S. government and Honduran gov-
ernment compliance) has prevented Rivera from entering
Honduras to meet with Indian refugees and leaders there.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403770005-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403770005-9
sus
Misurasata had met several times with the Sandinista gov-
ernment in an effort to reach a peaceful settlement recog-
nizing Indian rights. Despite their promises of peace and
reconciliation, Sandinista troops carried out this recent
search-and-destroy operation with the full knowledge of
the government in Managua.
Leaders of Nicaragua's internal civilian opposition be-
lieve that the Sandinistas are out to destroy them, and that
the rebels are at the very least a necessary evil. One left-of-
center leader told me that if there is any chance for negotia-
tions now with the Sandinistas, the U.S. would be "fool-
ish" to remove the one instrument of pressure that has a
real effect on the Sandinistas: the armed resistance.
THE PROBLEM confronting Congress and the Ameri-
can people is with the "instrument of pressure" de-
signed to moderate or to remove the Sandinistas. The Nica-
raguan armed opposition has been divided into as many as
six different groups, with varying ideological orienta-
tions, political bases, and military potential. The United
States has by and large supported the FDN, formally under
the umbrella organization UNO, United Nicaraguan
Opposition.
The FDN was created by Argentine military and security
agents and by the CIA. Strong ties of loyalty, or fealty,
have developed between CIA officials, acting as imperial
patrons, and their colonial adjutants in the FDN. Most of
the FDN High Command was drawn from the National
Guard. These officers are intensely loyal to Commander in
Chief Enrique Bermudez, and have the allegiance of some
of the field commanders. However, Bermudez-along with
Aldolfo Calero, who was installed as the political leader of
the FDN by the CIA, and Aristides Sanchez, a former
landowner-forms part of a cabal closely linked to a shad-
owy network of expropriated landowners, businessmen,
former associates of Somoza, and _UT T right-wing donors.
These exiles influence the FDN leadership through family
ties or as former or current employers.
These leaders have been reluctant to unite with the other
resistance organizations and are in turn distrusted by them.
They have resisted efforts to democratize the FDN and
UNO apparatus, and thus have often stood in the way of
the effort to create a unified, democratic national resis-
tance to the Sandinistas. Above all, the struggle in Nicara-
gua is a national struggle, yet to date it has been led by a
small ideological sector of pre-revolutionary Nicaragua.
This is true even though the popular base of the resis-
tance has grown enormously. There are some 20,000 armed
insurgents in a Nicaraguan population of three million,
of which the FDN makes up some 12,000. The FDN claims
that 40 percent of its troops are former Sandinista
soldiers and fewer than two percent are former National
Guardsmen Among the rebel groups there is much unhap-
piness with the current CIA-imposed leadership
dance, in the field often share their troops' resentment
of the FDN's leadership A t, associate of rebel
leader Eden Pastora has described t`,ese tield commanders
.u a mixed bag of Zapatas ani 1'ancho Villas i e
troops' peasant revolutionaries and rebel brigands.
Recently the FDN has suffered serious military reverses.
These have been due to the intensive Soviet-Cuban train-
ing of the Sandinista forces, to their acquisition of Soviet
helicopters, and to the introduction of Soviet heavy artil-
lery. The FDN troops are poorly trained and suffer from a
lack not only of equipment but of combat officers. The
ratio of officers to troops is about one to 200. This means
that the FDN cannot break down into small units in the
face of Sandinista bombardments and artillery, and it has
lacked the trained organizers necessary to create a political
and military infrastructure.
Nonetheless, the FDN receives information and aid from
local residents and is enjoying substantial and growing
support among Nicaragua's small farmers and campesinos.
FDN fighters are peasants with deep economic, political,
and ideological grievances against the regime. They have
maintained high morale despite a lack of military equip-
ment and training-and sometimes boots and food. The
FDN, in short, is a movement with a peasant base, populist
middle-echelon officers, and a mostly reactionary leader-
ship imposed and maintained by the United States.
The most important groups outside of UNO are BOS
(Southern Opposition Bloc), led by Alfredo Cesar and
Eden Pastora, and Misurasata. The political tendencies
of these groups is social democratic. They have also en-
joyed strong local support and fight on without U.S. fund-
ing. Only the unity of all anti-Sandinista forces and the
establishment of strong southern and Atlantic coast fronts
will turn the armed resistance into a militarily viable
enterprise.
The disunity of Nicaraguan resistance forces and their
failure to develop a democratic leadership have helped to
isolate internationally our Central American policy. The
administration's own policy and rhetoric have contributed
to this isolation. The national and democratic character of
the Nicaraguan civilian and armed struggle has often been
drowned in a torrent of administration invective that has
conveyed both impotent rage and hegemonic presumption.
This rhetoric buttresses those among the Nicaraguan
civilian and armed resistance who prefer to wait pas-
sively for an imagined U.S. invasion. And it has of-
fended the dignity of Latin American governments, which
are sensitive to U.S. bullying and mired in debt to U S
banks.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403770005-9
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