United States military aid is at last beginning to flow to the Nicaraguan resistance. The question of whether the U.S. should help at all—a question which provoked the most passionate foreign-policy debate since the Vietnam war—has for the moment yielded to another: how are we going to go about it?
This question is just as difficult and just as deep. No resistance movement—as the Soviets are obsessively aware—has ever overcome an established totalitarian system. Unlike other anti-Communist guerrilla movements, the Nicaraguan resistance is fighting on the soil of the West; the Nicaraguan people, the United States, and the resistance leadership itself will insist that this struggle must be fought by the values of our common culture. And opponents of Nicaraguan aid were right at least on one point: if the resistance now fails, the United States will pay a very heavy price. In comparison with Communist perseverance in Vietnam and Afghanistan—especially when Nicaragua’s proximity to the United States is taken into account—such a failure will breed a scathing contempt for this country in many quarters.
During the past few months we have engaged leaders of the resistance, U.S. government officials, and independent observers in many discussions about strategy for the movement. Out of our discussions three distinct perspectives have emerged. The first arises in conversations with friends of the resistance, and draws upon their experience in the rebellion against the Somoza dictatorship. Some supporters of the resistance are now looking forward to a triumphant role-reversal, in which the Sandinistas collapse like Somoza, Ferdinand Marcos, or Cuba’s Batista when confronted by popular insurrection.
The second view is shaped by the hemisphere’s earlier memories—memories that are most vivid on the extremes of the political spectrum. Both Central America’s conservative elites and its homegrown, nationalistic Left share the expectation of eventual U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua. This is an expectation that also—if perhaps only unconsciously—seems at times to affect the strategic thinking of some in the resistance itself. Perhaps most surprising is the extent to which anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans still within the country are gripped by the idea—or fantasy—that the U.S. will come to free them.
The third prospect we encountered might be called “the long march.” It foresees a longer-term and perhaps militarily indecisive guerrilla struggle within Nicaragua, linked to a much more intense political and diplomatic campaign in the world beyond. The hope of success lies in wearing down and disrupting the Sandinistas’ control over the population, while building up support for the insurgency and opposition to the Sandinistas in the democratic world. At some point—and very possibly not until Ronald Reagan has left the Presidency—the Sandinistas will be forced by a combination of military and other pressures to give way to the democratic demands of their people.
These discussions of strategy for the resistance are not futuristic speculations. The long-term course the movement takes will be influenced decisively by the manner in which U.S. support is used during the months immediately ahead. If decisions about how to use the aid are made unthinkingly, and if the United States follows the path of least resistance as it has so often done in the past, there will be no turning back from the consequences of error.
The first and second of the strategic approaches discussed here—insurrection and intervention—both have this powerful attraction: they allow for a solution to the Nicaraguan problem before President Reagan leaves office. Many Nicaraguan democrats (who shudder to recall U.S. policy during the Carter years) and many U.S. supporters of the resistance assume that the insurgency must win a decisive military victory before the end of President Reagan’s term, or it is lost.
There can be no doubt that the President has been the major force in securing U.S. aid for the resistance: his support helped generate the morale and private funds that kept the movement going during the two years it had no congressional support. Only his personal commitment overcame the skepticism of many within his own administration, the waywardness of many congressional Republicans, and the reluctance of swing-vote Democrats to help him win last June’s vote. Only a President with Reagan’s personal popularity could plant himself so firmly on a policy that as yet has no stable base in U.S. public opinion, and is opposed so vehemently on the Democratic party’s Left. It is therefore not surprising that many Nicaraguan democrats and their U.S. supporters are drawn to strategies that will force an outcome to the Nicaraguan conflict—one way or another—before the President’s term ends in 1988. This is the main factor that fuels the hopes of insurrection and of intervention, and it should be no wonder that it does.
But one has to remember that the worst mistakes the U.S. has made in Nicaragua in the years since the Sandinistas took charge all have their basis in a pessimism about America’s staying power, a pessimism which in itself defeats all efforts at strategic thinking. It is worth reviewing some of this history for the lessons it provides to the strategic discussion now before us.
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No political weakness so haunts the resistance as the question of whether it is an authentically Nicaraguan movement for democracy, or a collection of Somocistas and marauders. Even though today the resistance is an army of thousands of peasant soldiers which has among its leaders men with unambiguous credentials in the democratic cause, its reputation is clouded by its origins in Somoza’s National Guard, by memories of the trainers borrowed in the early days from Argentina’s “dirty war,” and by tales of violence and corruption in the camps and cantinas where the first contra leaders gathered after Somoza’s fall.
Much of this early history might have been avoided if the United States had entered with a firm hand in the early 1980’s. But the shortsightedness of some in the Republican administration conspired with the illusions of the Democratic party’s Left to prevent any such thing. In its first year the Reagan administration was gloomy about the prospects for a resistance movement in Nicaragua. Its concern focused on El Salvador, which was reeling from internal discord and the muchtouted final offensive of the Farabundo Marti’ National Liberation Front (FMLN). Nicaragua seemed to be lost—a misfortune that could be blamed on the Carter administration. The Nicaraguan rebels and their Argentine advisers were coin of little value, except for what they might bring in bargaining with the Sandinistas over their intervention in El Salvador. (A more respectable group of resistance leaders might paradoxically have been worth even less, being harder to trade.) Assistant Secretary of State Thomas O. Enders traveled to Managua in August 1981 for discussions of just such a deal. But he was dismissed by the Sandinistas, who were confident that El Salvador’s imminent collapse would assure victory for their revolution throughout the region.
Having allowed itself and the resistance to be stained with Somocismo and the Argentines, the United States then sought to regain respectability for the project. The people of El Salvador, who in March 1982 braved guerrilla violence to turn out in vast numbers to exercise their newly-acquired democratic rights, taught the administration the power of the democratic idea. It was time to turn away from the old guard in Central America—and to find a more effective way to pressure the Sandinistas. The administration—and specifically the CIA—believed it had been given just the personality to open this new gambit: a charismatic, charming, and immensely popular hero of the Nicaraguan revolution, Commander Edén Pastora, known as “Comandante Zero,” who had broken with his former Sandinista comrades.
The mercurial Pastora was not chosen for his ability to sustain a political position or manage an army. Pastora is an indisputably intelligent and brave man. But he represents a mentality that will not survive the forces of modernity which are now dissolving the traditional culture of the region: he is a warrior chieftain, or caudillo. During the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship, Pastora directed the Sandinistas’ most stunning military and propaganda triumph—the seizure of the National Palace in 1978. He stood as the figurehead of the Sandinistas’ southern front during the final months of the insurrection: the front which bore the brunt of the National Guard’s resistance. Young Sandinista soldiers and militiamen—officers and troops—idolized him. During the triumphant rallies of 1979, Pastora’s name—and often his alone—was shouted by the crowds that massed in the plaza in front of Managua’s ruined cathedral. With his leadership, the Reagan administration hoped, whole units of the Sandinista Popular Army could be persuaded to defect. What red-blooded young Nicaraguan would stick with the drab Ortega brothers and the hard-eyed Tomas Borge when Comandante Zero summoned them? The Americans—ever fearful of their own country’s capacity to stay the course—grasped at Pastora as at a magical key to success.
But Pastora disappointed them. Rumors abounded that his circle of close advisers was deeply infiltrated by the Sandinistas. And, more important, the organizational grip that the Sandinistas—and the droves of advisers who poured in from the Communist world—exercised over their new army proved more tenacious than expected. This was the first intimation that a struggle against the new system being imported into Nicaragua would be far more difficult than the struggle against Somoza had been.
But the CIA continued to grope desperately for some dramatic way to break the Sandinistas’ grip. In the winter of 1983 and spring of 1984 a group of commandos under the direction of the CIA planted mines in the harbors of El Bluff on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast and at Corinto, the major Pacific port. The blasts that followed did little actual damage: the mines were percussion mines, intended to frighten ship-owners and insurance underwriters, not to sink ships. But they echoed loudly in Washington and in the capitals of Western Europe. Paramilitary activity organized by the U.S. in Nicaragua had overreached its political support at home. Leaks sprang up all over Washington about CIA misadventures in Nicaragua. Congress, declaring that its oversight prerogatives had been abused, voted a prohibition on the use of U.S. funds for military activities directed against the government of Nicaragua. The mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, intended to provoke defections and economic stress in Managua, embarrassed the U.S. and cost the resistance forces their U.S. government financing. Thus had another foreign-policy stratagem designed to circumvent a difficult and unpredictable democratic decision-making process splattered the reputations of those who had contrived it.
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So in less than two years the United States had moved from pessimistic realpolitik to insurrectionary romanticism. (There is a tantalizing comparison between the CIA’s mining of Nicaragua’s harbors and those acts of “propaganda of the deed” carried out by 19th-century Russian anarchists.) What was it that linked the cold-blooded political bargaining of Enders to the romantic gestures of the CIA? One factor was that, in the aftermath of Vietnam, détente, and various Third World misadventures of the late 1970’s, our national-security establishment despaired of the possibility that this country could conduct a sustained policy abroad which in some way involved the use of force.
Such despair can breed both resignation and fantasy. As popular discontent with the Sandinistas began to mount in Nicaragua in the early 1980’s—the rebellion of Miskito Indians on the Atlantic coast, the strikes in the ports, the surge of opposition to the regime apparent in the enthusiasm shown for the Catholic Church—some Americans and Nicaraguans seized the hope that the Sandinistas would be swept away on a wave of popular rebellion. It was understandable: hostility to the Sandinistas, especially among Nicaraguans who live in the countryside, was growing to proportions that equaled or exceeded the hostility shown a few years before to the Somoza dictatorship. The economy was desperate, especially when foreign aid began to dry up and the economic policies of the revolutionary government began to demonstrate their disastrous effects. Rebel bands along the borders of Honduras, at first a dubious mixture of ex-Guardsmen and cattle rustlers, began to be transformed by infusions of tough, angry peasant recruits.
But insurrection against a Somoza-style dictatorship and insurrection against a government which is developing along Marxist-Leninist lines are two very different matters. Even among militant anti-Communists, this distinction is often missed. Such misunderstanding explains why Edén Pastora failed in his effort to promote mass defections from the Sandinista army, why derring-do assaults by CIA-sponsored forces on Nicaragua’s ports and airfields did not destabilize the country, and why the resistance armies—as their critics in the U.S. Congress are wont to put it—“have never seized and held an inch of Nicaraguan territory.” It also explains why it is foolish to rest the future of Nicaragua and Central America on the likelihood that a mass popular insurrection will sweep away the Sandinistas before the Reagan term is out.
Whatever else Cuban, Soviet, and East European advisers have brought to Nicaragua, they have also brought an unprecedented capacity for organization. Somoza was cruel, corrupt, and casually incompetent. But the new Nicaragua is systematically cruel, corrupt, and incompetent. While Somoza was interested merely in stealing, the new order has been engineered principally to repress the people. Under the new system, even incompetence is built in: i.e., the shortages of food, raw materials, and medicines. Under the Sandinistas, mere money is not enough for a bribe; one has to pay with allegiance to the state.
During the early years of Sandinista rule, efforts were made to prepare the country for the economic dislocations that seemed certain to follow its confrontation with the United States. It was clear by early 1982—before any organized resistance was under way—that agricultural production and real output in the manufacturing sector had drastically declined. The country imagined it was flying, when in truth it was in a free fall. There was no investment: capital had been flowing in through foreign aid, but it all was being used to support consumption. Once the foreign aid ended, a firestorm of inflation would inevitably sweep through the economy.
One of the authors of this article, then an adviser in the Department of International Relations of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, repeatedly presented the alarming economic data to his superiors. They reacted with Bourbon disdain. To every warning of impending economic catastrophe they responded with recitations of their political conquests: the strength of state security and the army; their mastery of the media; the creation of neighborhood-control cells like those that had proved so effective in Cuba.
The Sandinistas realized early on that economic scarcity had its uses in the political micromanagement of the population. The system of rationing that governs daily economic life in Nicaragua could hardly be effective were there not chronic shortages. In turn, this system of rationing, administered by neighborhood police agents in the Sandinista Defense Committees (CDS), is the regime’s basic mechanism of political control. As popular support for the revolution has waned, these committees have ceased to be centers of political activity. But because of their critical economic functions, they sustain an atmosphere of fear and caution in the population that is a powerful deterrent to popular insurrection.
With these neighborhood-control committees as the foundation, Cuban and Eastern-bloc advisers are supervising the construction of a pervasive structure of repression in Nicaragua. Nicaraguans are a gregarious, family-centered people, with a notorious inability to keep secrets. This makes them easy marks for spies, wiretappers, and the bullying interrogators of a police system that far exceeds the capabilities of the Somoza dynasty.
Even the remnants of the openly organized political opposition in Managua may often serve the interests of the security police. Not only can the legally tolerated opposition deceive credulous foreign observers—who fail to see that its activities are firmly restricted—it can also unwittingly become a web for ensnaring domestic dissidents. When they join these opposition organizations, brave but naive opponents of the regime may simply be turning in their names to the file clerks at state security.
There is little prospect, then, that the embattled legal opposition in Managua can become an effective internal front for the resistance. Both the United States government and Nicaraguan resistance leaders might be well-advised to forswear any intention of using the political parties, the trade unions, or the religious institutions in such a fashion. (As for the Catholic Church, despite what some may wish, it is not likely to jeopardize its existence in Nicaragua for any political purpose. Nor, for that matter, is it appropriate to ask the Church to do such a thing.) The remnants of Nicaragua’s free trade unions, business organizations, and political parties still can fill some symbolic and humanitarian purposes. But no one should imagine that they can serve as important instruments of rebellion against a Communist regime.
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There are other obstacles to the prospect of insurrection in the new Nicaragua. Among the most formidable is the fact that today Nicaragua is in truth an occupied country. In his last days, Anastasio Somoza had the help of about a dozen U.S. mercenaries, while today there are as many as 8,000 Communist-bloc “internationalists” in the country. The recently adopted U.S. aid package for the resistance prohibits U.S. military personnel from coming within twenty miles of Nicaragua’s borders. Meanwhile Cuban pilots fly the Sandinistas’ Soviet helicopters, and Cuban officers fight in their counterinsurgency forces. East Germans operate sophisticated telephone-intercept systems, and Bulgarians formulate economic directives at the vastly powerful Ministry of Economic Cooperation. Even West European volunteers who come to do construction work or pick coffee have been issued automatic weapons, and can double as militiamen.
In his final days Anastasio Somoza was cut off from virtually all outside sources of military assistance. But today the Communist world provides the Sandinistas with a vast arsenal of military supplies. In the years since 1979, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, Soviet-bloc military assistance to Managua has risen to well over a billion dollars—about half of it in hardware and half in military construction. During 1986 alone it is estimated that over $200 million in Soviet-bloc military equipment was delivered to the Sandinistas. Five airfields with runways long enough for high-performance jet aircraft are being built with Soviet aid; just one of them, at Punta Huete, will cost $100 million, the entire amount appropriated for all forms of U.S. aid to the resistance this year. The ports of Corinto and El Bluff will both, as a result of Soviet improvements, soon be capable of handling large-scale cargo shipments.
The Sandinistas now possess at least a dozen armored MI-24 and MI-25 attack helicopters, 35 troop-carrying helicopters, 350 T-55 tanks, 700 SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles, 100 rocket launchers and heavy artillery pieces, and steady supplies of ammunition and fuel. At least one AN-30 reconnaissance aircraft is already helping the Sandinistas to remap the countryside for pinpoint artillery fire. This arsenal supplies a Sandinista army of about 70,000 active-duty military personnel, and a militia of another 65,000 or so local and parttime troops. The Somoza government, it may be recalled, was able to field a National Guard of no more than 12,000 men in 1979, and almost half of these were recruited during the panic that followed the outbreak of serious fighting at the end of 1977.
The Sandinistas not only benefit from direct military aid from the Communist world, along with the millions of dollars they still receive in economic and technical assistance from Western governments, churches, and private organizations. They can also exploit the humanitarian sentiments of the democratic world, not least of all those of the U.S. This places the struggle against Somoza and the struggle of the resistance against the Sandinistas in two very different moral and political contexts.
The Somoza dynasty was capable of great viciousness, but its ties to the West nevertheless caused it to observe some constraints. In December of 1978, well after Edén Pastora’s epic capture of the National Palace, Somoza himself declared an amnesty that freed many Sandinista prisoners—including some captured urban commandos. It is hard to believe that the Sandinista Directorate would permit such a thing in the Nicaragua that it now rules.
Where the Somoza regime depended on the presence and effectiveness of one man, the Sandinistas have created a bureaucratic apparatus. One of the worst shocks to the old regime—more destabilizing than the early guerrilla forays of the Sandinistas—was Anastasio Somoza’s heart attack in 1977. All Nicaragua sensed that without “Tacho” Somoza the very structure of the country would unravel. But no one today imagines that the death of a single person—Daniel Ortega or Tomás Borge—would bring a similar crisis upon the Marxist-Leninist machinery that now rules Nicaragua.
Finally, those who imagine that a blaze of insurrection will engulf the Sandinistas overlook one other much neglected reality about the Nicaraguan revolution: it was largely a revolution from above. Only in the final phase, when momentum had shifted decisively to the anti-Somoza forces, did Nicaraguans, principally urban youth, participate in any numbers. The most effective cadres of the revolution were the children of privilege: the sons and daughters of the wealthy Nicaraguan family dynasties that nursed resentments toward one of their number—Somoza—who had become overbearingly greedy. During the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm that swept the generation of the 60’s—especially the elite youth of the Third World—many children of prominent Nicaraguan families discarded the quaint politics of their parents and became admirers of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh. These young people became the essential element in the Sandinistas’ internal front. Who would suspect that a Mercedes driving through the well-to-do Managua neighborhoods of Las Colinas or Los Robles might have a sack of weapons in its trunk? How many soldiers of the National Guard, sons of poor rural families, would force the poised young driver of that car off the road for a search?
So in many respects the Nicaraguan revolution was not a “circulation of elites.” Instead, many young people accustomed to privilege simply adopted a new ideological perspective. This is not just a nice irony: the point is that in Nicaragua today there is no possibility of finding shelter for democratic revolutionaries in the safe houses of a decadent ruling class. Those who imagine a revolution against the Sandinista comandantes that is patterned after the revolution against Somoza overlook this difference.
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But if there is little likelihood of a quick and massive insurrection against the Sandinistas, what hope is there for unseating them?
The possibility of direct military intervention by the United States is a virtually taboo subject in most discussion here in the U.S. Those who treat it so would probably be astonished to learn that many Nicaraguans not only wish for an invasion, but cling to the expectation that eventually the U.S. will recognize the necessity for such action. They cannot believe that the superpower which for so long held sway over their region of the world will let their country fall to the Communists—once it becomes apparent that this is actually what is taking place. This expectation, which sometimes verges on the messianic, is yet another impediment to the possibility of insurrection.
It should be remembered that Nicaragua is not, despite the incessant claims of the American Left, an anti-American country. The United States never seized Nicaraguan land or plundered its raw materials. The bitterness that such a history left in Mexico or the plantation districts of Central America was never present in Nicaragua. While there are some ugly memories—especially the support the U.S. gave to Somoza during his final orgy of corruption—there are also memories that are warm. The United States contributed a great deal to Nicaragua’s prosperity, and also to what peace it has enjoyed. The occasional intervention of the U.S. Marines—something House Speaker Tip O’Neill argues has forever poisoned Nicaragua against the U.S.—was always viewed with mixed feelings in the country. Shirley Christian of the New York Times actually puts it tactfully in her book, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family:
Nicaraguan politicians and warlords regularly sought outside help from the United States or European countries to support their own cause. Those who complained about such interventions usually did so because the intervention of the moment happened to be working against them.
Even the legendary Augusto Caesar Sandino himself, Miss Christian reminds us, promised on at least two occasions to lay down his arms if only the U.S. military would take over Nicaragua’s government and conduct elections.
Both this history and their present misery make it unlikely that the Nicaraguan population in general would support the Sandinistas if the U.S. were to intervene. Least of all would the Sandinistas be able to retreat to the mountains to resist, as Daniel Ortega so often boasts. The peasants of Nicaragua’s mountain regions have been the bitterest opponents of Sandinista rule, and have provided the insurgency with most of its recruits. If the FSLN retreated to the mountains, an invading force from the U.S. could just sit and watch the fight. The same is true of Nicaragua’s long and swampy Atlantic coast, whose native Miskito Indians and black Creoles are strongly anti-Sandinista, and have many ties to the United States.
But the Sandinistas do retain some significant support among urban youth. While they may talk romantically about fighting from the mountains, they have actually begun to organize for a defense based in Nicaragua’s most populated urban centers. Such a strategy, assuring large numbers of civilian casualties, can be politically effective against civilized opponents, as the Israelis learned to their cost in Lebanon. Even if Nicaragua’s cities could be taken, the Sandinistas would have the capacity for urban-guerrilla and terrorist attacks against an occupation force. It is also uncertain just what military capability the large numbers of internationalist military personnel in the country have. If the U.S. were to invade, their backs would be against the wall.
So a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua could be a gruesome business. But if young Nicaraguans’ lives are given equal weight with those of young Americans, it could be less bloody, especially for civilians, than a prolonged civil war. The Sandinista army could not hold out for long against U.S. air, sea, and armored forces in a conventional conflict, even if its foreign bosses did manage to hold it together. Once the back of the Sandinista military were broken, the forces of the resistance could take over the grim and gritty work of securing the country. In fact, as they are presently trained and organized, that may be what they are best suited for.
But the military difficulties of a U.S. invasion are not really the principal obstacle to this possibility. The strongest arguments against U.S. intervention are political, and involve considerations that lie outside Nicaragua. Yet even here, the most common argument is also a questionable one: that military intervention would unite Latin America against the United States. A similar point was made about U.S. support for Britain during its war with Argentina, yet the threatened reaction never came. It was also said that the U.S. bombing raid against Qaddafi would provoke fury throughout the Arab world, yet that, too, did not materialize. It is likely that many Latin American political leaders would make pro-forma declarations of opposition to any such U.S. action. But certainly much of the Central American public would accept or applaud it, while leftist and anti-Yankee clamor elsewhere, if noisy, would be superficial.
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Nevertheless, there are serious political arguments against sending U.S. military forces into Nicaragua. It will be far better if Nicaraguans themselves free Nicaragua. Nicaragua needs to rebuild confidence in itself after the successive embarrassments of Somoza and the Sandinistas. It needs to develop the body of democratic political leaders and organizers that will be essential to make the country work after the Cubans and their cohorts are sent home. Moreover, if the Nicaraguan population can be mobilized for the central role in ridding the country of totalitarianism, there will be much less likelihood that Communist terrorism and guerrilla activity will persist to bleed a new democratic government after it has been established.
In addition, if the people of Nicaragua them selves took the lead in breaking the grip of totalitarianism on their country, they would deal a powerful blow to the political ambitions and ideological pretensions of the Soviet empire. Their achievement would defy the spirit of the Brezhnev Doctrine—the Soviet Union’s commitment to protect every “socialist” advance. A rebellion against Communism from below would also rebuke what remains of the more fundamental Marxist-Leninist claim to represent an expression of popular will.
But the most convincing basis for opposing a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua is that as a practical matter it simply will not happen. The debate over a mere $100 million in U.S. military aid was so bitter, and the twelve-vote margin of victory so close, that it is foolish to treat U.S. military intervention as an imminent possibility. There are those (among them many Nicaraguans) who hold a fervent hope that President Reagan, personally so committed to ousting the Sandinistas, will overrule other political considerations and sweep them away during his final days in office. That faith is difficult to sustain.
Over and over the President and his chief aides have promised not to send U.S. troops to fight in Central America. The military situation in Nicaragua is such that if the President changed his mind he might indeed be able to get U.S. troops in and out of Nicaragua within the ninety days permitted before congressional disapproval under the War Powers Act. But the suspicion, ill-will, and backlash that this change of course would create would inflame U.S. domestic politics and provoke clamor abroad. It is hard to imagine such an undertaking now, when the administration is adopting a more accommodating stance toward the Soviet Union, and the Republican party is struggling with its own succession crisis. Those who recall how strongly the White House political staff resisted even a nationally televised presidential speech on the eve of the June vote on Nicaraguan aid will appreciate this point.
There are some provocations that could change the calculations about U.S. intervention: a Sandinista attack on a neighboring country, the deployment of offensive aircraft, or an increase in Soviet-bloc combat forces. But barring such developments, friends of Nicaragua’s democrats should warn them not to expect the Marines. If the Nicaraguan resistance believes that the United States may intervene, some will surely try to maneuver the U.S. into doing just that. Others will stand aside waiting for their liberators to arrive. In either case, the future of Nicaragua’s people will rest entirely in the hands of the United States. As the past has shown, that is not an entirely safe place to be.
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If neither U.S. military intervention nor a quick and overwhelming popular insurrection against the Sandinistas is likely, what hope is there for Nicaragua? The Sandinistas are consolidating their political machinery and increasing their military capability. To many, it seems that time is on their side. How can the U.S. and the resistance use the limited resources now available to good effect?
It may be helpful here to recall a maxim of the Left that is somehow passed over when it comes to Nicaragua: the Communists are really not ten feet tall. The Nicaraguan resistance does have strengths, and the Sandinistas also have their weaknesses. In some respects, both of these are really quite considerable.
Most important are the size and proven battlefield capability of the insurgent forces. Critics may sneer at this guerrilla force as a “ragtag army” which is reluctant to fight. But the Sandinistas have no such illusions, and are arming themselves for a serious campaign.
The guerrilla forces of the resistance now total about 18,000 full-time combatants—the largest peasant army in Latin America since that of the Mexican revolution. These can be broken down roughly into three groups. There are some 16,000 under the main guerrilla command, UNOFDN, whose headquarters is located in the rugged mountains along Nicaragua’s northern border. Another 1,500 or so operate in the humid lowlands to the south. This loose-knit collection of guerrilla bands, once allied to Edén Pastora, now is coordinating more closely with the UNO forces. There are also some 500 Indian and Creole guerrillas along Nicaragua’s strategic Atlantic coast. Many of these peoples are English-speaking and Protestant, and historically have resisted domination by the Latino culture of Nicaragua’s Pacific coast. The Miskitos were the first group in Nicaragua to take up arms against the Sandinistas, and remain hostile to them—although they are divided in their own attitudes toward the main resistance leadership. Nevertheless, they have a strategic potential that far exceeds what they are today.
The resistance movement, it should also be remembered, is all of four years old. The Sandinistas, by comparison, grew out of the wave of revolutionary movements that washed up on Central American shores after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Their first military effort (an attack on a settlement along the Coco River) was not mounted until 1962, and ended in a defeat so devastating that it was five full years before they attempted another. It took them seventeen years in all to piece together the band of some 3,000 guerrillas that launched the final offensive against Somoza in 1979.
Such a long-drawnout history is hardly unique among guerrilla movements. The Salvadoran rebels, now the FMLN, have never in their history mustered much more than 10,000 combatants—and that peak came when many imagined them to be on the verge of power. Their roots go back some fourteen years. The Chinese revolution was made by a movement that had been in being for some twenty years, a movement which suffered the now legendary rout to the caves of Yenan. The Nicaraguan resistance also compares respectably with the other anti-Communist guerrilla force against which it is often glibly and unfavorably measured: the UNITA movement in Angola. Jonas Savimbi began to organize the UNITA movement in Angola in 1966, against Portuguese colonial rule. He and his followers have been in the bush on and off for some twenty years, and recently have once again demonstrated by their military strength that they are an indisputable factor in the political future of their country.
The Nicaraguan insurgents also now have considerable battlefield experience. The troops and their commanders know and are loyal to one another. They are familiar with the terrain and the people in the regions where they operate. Unlike the bulk of the Sandinista forces, they are volunteers. One U.S. military expert who has worked with the armed forces of a number of Central American countries says that veterans of the Nicaraguan insurgency are man-for-man as good as any fighting forces in the region.
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Large numbers of Nicaraguan insurgents have been fighting deep inside the country for three or four years. Guerrilla units regularly make twenty to thirty-day marches through Nicaragua, and many remain there today, despite shortages of medical supplies and the communications equipment and munitions they need to stand off the Sandinistas’ heavy weapons and helicopter gunships. Today, for example, 1,500 men of the Jorge Salazar Regional Command are operating in the Department of Chontales, some 60 miles southeast of Managua, and over 150 miles south of the Honduran border.
Nicaragua is a spacious and agriculturally well-endowed country, and there are few highways. It has long coastlines; the Atlantic coast has many rivers, islands, and lagoons. Mountain ranges cross it from east to west in the north, and one spur also cuts down through the center of the country. This provides a variety of good terrain for guerrilla operations. The most important geographical fact of all is that Nicaragua is so close to the United States: a fact that makes it so attractive to the Soviets and, because of our ability to provide supplies and to obtain intelligence, at the same time so vulnerable.
In sum: the size, the record, and the strategic circumstances of the Nicaraguan resistance make it a force that the Soviet Union would undoubtedly be glad to accept in trade for any pro-Soviet guerrilla movement in the world today.
These assets could, of course, be squandered in mindless demonstrations of the movement’s military capabilities. The aid legislation adopted by Congress requires periodic reports from the President on the “military progress” of the insurgency—presumably with the intention of cutting off the aid if little is accomplished. Senator Richard Lugar has said that the resistance needs to “demonstrate control of territory” if it hopes to sustain congressional support. Such remarks are heard widely.
Obviously it is fair to ask the resistance for evidence of progress, but should such progress be measured by the standards of conventional warfare? The Sandinistas, after all, engaged in guerrilla operations of one kind or another for more than seventeen years before they ever “held an inch of territory.” There are some parts of Nicaraguan territory that would not be difficult for the resistance to capture today—but would be worthless to hold. There are some targets that could be quickly and dramatically attacked—but to no strategic purpose, and with a meaningless loss of life. (One recalls that Edén Pastora did in fact hold a large region of swampland in southeastern Nicaragua for several years. Far from winning him admiration, it became an international joke.)
There are more appropriate standards by which Congress can evaluate the progress of the resistance. Has it established an effective military presence inside Nicaragua? Have its military actions contributed to weakening the totalitarian controls of the Sandinista government, to building support among the Nicaraguan people, and to proving to the wider world that this movement deserves support? Specific measures of success will not be body counts or reports of vehicles destroyed—measures stressed by some critics who in other ways are attentive students of the errors of Vietnam. Better measures are whether the resistance can challenge the internal-security network, can destroy communications facilities and significant military installations, can coordinate a variety of military operations at once, and can rally defectors from the Sandinista army.
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Yet even if the resistance undertakes appropriate and effective military action, it must convey accurate information to the outside world about what really is happening on the battlefield. It must also coordinate its military action with political and diplomatic developments in Nicaragua and in the world beyond. This is, in essence, a problem of politics. And the paradox of the Nicaraguan resistance is that political leadership is at once one of its greatest weaknesses and one of the areas which offer hope of the greatest gain in the months ahead.
Outside sympathizers who are unfamiliar with Nicaraguan history are often dismayed by evidence of political weakness and division in the resistance. But this should come as no surprise. The Somoza dynasty ruled Nicaragua for almost forty-five years, and drove away, repressed, or corrupted almost two generations of political leadership. Most of those who maintained their independence of Somoza were drawn into the revolution against him. Today they in turn are fragmented among the Sandinista government, the resistance, and the vestiges of political parties, trade unions, and business organizations that linger inside the country. Very few Nicaraguans, needless to say, have yet acquired the skills and conceptual understanding needed to build a broad-based and effective political organization—let alone one that can hold its own against the international network of the pro-Sandinista Left. Many have been crippled by the cycles of failure and betrayal that make up Nicaragua’s political history.
But alongside this liability one must enter an impressive asset: the instinctive uprising of tens of thousands of freedom-hungry Nicaraguans against those who have again betrayed them.
It could be expected that those who are gathered in the mountains are often steeped in a contempt for politics and politicians—an anti-political politics that is not wholly unfamiliar in the United States. Nor is it a coincidence that a number of them were young, low-ranking officers of Somoza’s National Guard: the Guard, like the Church, was one of the few institutions of Nicaraguan life where loyalty and organizational skills were cultivated and respected. The imposition of a Communist regime in Managua brought chaos and despair to the politics of Nicaragua and the region. These people stepped into the political vacuum, took up arms, and began to resist. Nothing in Nicaraguan history could have prepared them for the complexities of regional and superpower conflict into which they were thrust by those simple acts of bravery.
But now the movement they created must develop the capacity to meet such political challenges. Most of the guerrilla uprisings with which we are familiar actually began in political circles: with leftist intellectuals or party organizers who reached out to the masses for soldiers who could do the dying. The heroism and pathos of the Nicaraguan resistance lie in its attempt to turn this experience around. First came the fighters. Only now is this movement contending with the need for spokesmen and organizers who can help broaden it, interpret it, and represent it in the tricky political arena into which its numbers and its endurance have raised it.
The difficulty of this work is compounded by the need to do it all in public, where much of the audience is hostile and even supporters are often less helpful than complaining. Yet in the past year, amid great airing of their conflicts and shortcomings, Nicaraguan democrats have begun creating structures that can conduct political work in behalf of the forces in the field and their hostage countrymen. The hard task that remains is to work out relations between this newly formed diplomatic and political leadership and the rebel army.
Congress has stipulated that the military forces must be “subordinate to civilian leadership” if the resistance is to continue receiving U.S. aid. The impulse of Congress is a constructive one, but the politics of an insurrection are not the same as the politics of a constitutional democracy. As a practical matter, the relationships between the political elements and the military elements of a movement of this kind must be an organic one: neither can be the tail that wags the dog. “Contra reform,” as it has come to be called, seems unlikely to succeed if a diplomatic and political leadership is simply imposed on the guerrilla army from without. Diplomatic, political, and military strategy must be shaped, understood, and accepted by all if it is actually to guide the forces in the field. Working these things out will generate endless controversy. But not all controversies are wasteful or destructive. Nicaragua’s new democratic leadership will not be produced by immaculate conception and painless birth.
In this conflict, as often seems to be the case in war, the clock is the most deadly weapon in the field. The capacity the resistance has shown for sheer endurance—the capacity to withstand the siege of the clock—is now its most potent asset. It may be unlikely that the resistance will win conventional military victories in the months ahead. But if it can sustain itself as an effective military presence inside the country, it can buy the time it needs to strengthen its political base in Nicaragua and beyond. Perhaps the most intimidating claim the Marxist-Leninists make is that they control the clock: their assertion that history is always on their side. Those who can defy that claim should not underestimate the potential they thereby create to rally people to their side, or to demoralize their enemies.1
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Despite their ideological claims, the clock is also ticking for the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas accepted economic scarcity as a means of manipulating the population for political ends, but what was scarcity has now become desperate poverty. When there is a shortage of plantains, a government can achieve control by rationing plantains. But when there are no plantains, it is difficult to sustain that control. In Nicaragua today shortages of food and other necessities have created a political tinderbox. The government that seized control of daily economic life also, perhaps unwittingly, grasped the responsibility for providing rice, meat, and medicines. This is now generating a political backlash with explosive potential, as the Sandinistas acknowledge in their frenzied campaign to blame all economic troubles on the resistance.
Popular discontent over the economy will present an early test of the ability of the resistance to coordinate its political and military strategies. The military forces of the resistance could attack economic targets in ways which would allow the Sandinistas to turn popular resentment against them. But if the resistance can direct its attacks on the economic and political pillars of Sandinista rule, while also pressing the case in the political arena that Nicaragua’s new poverty must be seen as a byproduct of Marxist-Leninist repression, it can gain in strength.
This kind of focus and coordination will be difficult. The Sandinistas will use a variety of means to make everything the resistance does seem inhumanly destructive. Civilians and foreign volunteers will be located around likely military targets. Agricultural cooperatives will double as garrisons for counterinsurgency troops. The international media and human-rights groups will be fed a steady diet of atrocity tales. Great effort will be required of the resistance to see to it that as few of these charges as possible are genuine. But if concern for human rights and democratic values can be understood throughout the movement as a necessity for building the political strength of the resistance—not simply as a restriction imposed by the U.S. Congress—it is possible that this challenge can be met.
Although the Sandinistas may have made gains in strengthening their political and police cadres inside Nicaragua, they have unquestionably lost ground in terms of the breadth of their popular support. Sandinista youth who are fresh from indoctrination in Cuba and some of the veterans of the current fighting who have been demobilized may provide a measure of intensity to Sandinista political operations on the domestic front. But the Sandinistas have lost much of the support they once enjoyed among the Roman Catholic clergy and the large body of religious workers who manage many of the country’s schools, hospitals, and social services. Pro-Sandinista labor unions, which once enjoyed a measure of grassroots support, have become the classical Communist labor fronts—mere government agencies that strive to improve discipline and meet production norms.
The bombastic campaign the Sandinistas launched to promote a new constitution has collapsed—a propaganda defeat that reflects the collapse of any pretense that political democracy survives within the country. The Sandinistas have worked hard to keep some independent political representation alive in the National Assembly, and permitted the Managua leadership of a number of the old political parties to conduct the minimal functions necessary for survival. But these groups have grown increasingly unwilling to play the parts assigned them in the Sandinistas’ Potemkin Village democracy. Harassment against them has increased, and many of their leaders have gone or seem likely to go into exile. Even if the Social Christian party decides to field candidates in municipal elections—as is rumored—this can only demonstrate again the fraudulence of Sandinista claims to honor political pluralism. As they proved in the abortive elections of 1984, the Sandinistas comprehend so little of the spirit of democracy that they cannot even organize a sham election.
The closing of the newspaper La Prensa and the expulsion of leading Nicaraguan churchmen can only be explained as attempts to scare the Nicaraguan population out of any anti-government actions that might have been inspired by last June’s U.S. congressional vote. Future gains by the resistance and difficulties for the Sandinistas are likely to provoke similar reactions: it is hard to see what options this government has left but to tighten its hold with the only resource it possesses—military and police power. Foreign economic aid from non-Communist countries has been drying up fast and will surely continue to decline as the Sandinistas tighten their repression. Western European governments have begun to discourage private citizens (the “Sandalistas”) from doing volunteer work in Nicaragua.
As the costs increase and as international and their own domestic pressures mount, Havana and Moscow will have to ask how great a commitment they are willing to make to sustain this highly vulnerable outpost in Central America. Colonel Harry G. Summers, the U.S. military historian and one of the most insightful strategic analysts of the Vietnam conflict, argues that the Nicaraguan conflict is not at all a replay of the Vietnam war. It is, in many respects, actually Vietnam in reverse. The Communists are supporting a new and unpopular regime. The neighboring countries are all hostile to the Communists. The Communists must rely on conscription for their military manpower (and the draft has proved more troublesome for the Sandinistas than it was for the U.S. in the late 1960’s). The Communists have the strain of overextended supply lines. Finally, the Sandinistas are fighting the rich man’s war: all those helicopters, trucks, weapons, troops, and advisers exact an enormous cost from Managua and its patrons.
All this must make the Sandinistas painfully aware that the Soviet Union has never accorded them formal standing as a fraternal socialist state: the degree of comradeship that supposedly entitles a government to the full protection of Soviet military power. Joseph Stalin abandoned the Spanish Republicans; strategic differences broke up the Marxist government of Grenada; dissension has at one time or another unraveled the Communist parties of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Who knows what can happen in Nicaragua? Big Brother is half-a-world away.
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The best hope the Sandinistas now have is that weakness and division in the United States will lead to another cutoff in U.S. aid to the resistance, either because Congress shifts to the Left or because Ronald Reagan will soon depart the Presidency. If the Sandinistas and their sponsors see that the resistance is committing itself to a do-or-die effort before President Reagan leaves office, they will be encouraged to dig in for short-term survival. Both the Nicaraguan people and other Central Americans will hesitate to commit themselves, knowing that if a one-shot effort fails, they will be left behind to face the consequences. Paradoxically, if its adversaries know that the resistance is planning for the long march, the chances are much better that some success can be won in the short term.
There are those—including some now in the national-security establishment of the U.S.—who are persuaded that this country is incapable of sustaining a long-term foreign commitment in a conflict such as the one in Nicaragua. Tocqueville’s maxim is cited with a ritual pessimism: “Foreign politics demand scarcely any of those qualities which are peculiar to a democracy.” But there have been times and situations where the U.S. has stood its ground abroad. This country has sustained the defenses of Europe and East Asia since the beginnings of the cold war, even in times when those it is protecting seem ungrateful, and unwilling to bear their fair share of the burdens. The armed forces of the United States have suffered over 400,000 casualties in the “long twilight struggle” since 1948, well over ten times those of the Soviet Union. The United States has also stood by Israel, even when that has entailed great costs and risks.
But there are several aspects of the Nicaraguan issue which at this moment make it uncertain that the American public will understand and accept the need to see it through. One is the official fiction that the Sandinistas can somehow be persuaded to set aside Marxism Leninism and embrace some kind of pluralism or democracy. Given their government’s continued public adherence to this fiction, it is no wonder that many Americans continue to imagine that diplomacy alone may still offer a real alternative to the war.
Another problem is the reluctance of political leaders to confront the public with the likelihood that this will be a long, harsh, and possibly dangerous conflict. There is, of course, the risk that such candor may prove frightening. But unless these things are said, many in the U.S. and in Central America are bound to remain ambivalent. The future of Nicaragua is going to be one of “blood, toil, sweat, and tears.” Leaders who explain this frankly, and who candidly describe what part in it the United States and others have to take, may find, as Churchill did, that their people will respond honorably and even gratefully.
The U.S. presidential campaign of 1988 is the greatest vulnerability in the timetable of the resistance. Those who oppose U.S. aid have worked hard to portray this policy as Ronald Reagan’s obsession, and some supporters of the effort have embraced that characterization for the short-term advantages the President’s popularity provides. But if the U.S. commitment is to survive the 1988 campaign, Nicaraguan aid must be seen as more than the enthusiasm of a narrow circle of Reaganites, and more even than a Republican-party cause. It must be put before the country as an issue of the most basic national interest. Memories of last June’s grating partisan struggle in the House of Representatives will make this a difficult thing to accomplish.
The intense partisanship that has colored this debate may in fact be one of the main reasons it has failed to stir broader popular support. In the eyes of the general public it may seem more a quarrel within the U.S. political system than a conflict which pits U.S. interests against those of serious foreign adversaries. Some Democrats in the House of Representatives saw the Nicaraguanaid vote as their opportunity to vent long-building frustrations against a conservative administration. Some Republican political strategists saw the vote more as an opportunity to embarrass Democrats than as a serious matter of national security. (One Democratic supporter of the aid bill commented that the Carter White House did more to generate public and bipartisan support to give away the Panama Canal than Republicans did to rescue Nicaragua.) If the prospect of success in Nicaragua does require the resistance to undertake a campaign that can outlast the Reagan administration, supporters of Nicaragua’s democrats in this country face a prodigious political challenge of their own.
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But the clock is also ticking for the Sandinistas. Here is just one vignette, barely reported in the world press. September 15 is Independence Day throughout Central America. To mark this anniversary in 1984, Sandinista leaders came to the border to watch as a team selected from among the cream of their political youth, the finest products of the new revolutionary education, ran up to pass the traditional torch of independence to a team representing “bourgeois, decadent” Costa Rica. The Sandinista youths jogged down the Pan American highway toward the border, where a Costa Rican team stood gingerly waiting to receive the torch. Television cameras on both sides of the border followed them intently, while dignitaries and onlookers watched in a holiday mood. The Sandinista youths reached the border. Then they just kept on going. Past the cameras, past the border guards, past their revolutionary mentors, and on down the highway into Costa Rica.
This was an event that many in the resistance remind you of when they are told of the awesome size and the ideological indoctrination of the forces they face.
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1 The fact that the resistance survived for two years without the direct support of the United States government is especially galling to its opponents, and a source of enormous political strength. It is this transgression against the laws of history—rather than any violation of the laws of the United States—that accounts for the frenzied campaign to prove that such a thing in fact could not have happened. To resist on the basis of one's beliefs—to be, according to the name the Sandinistas have given them, a contra—is to commit what for some on the Left is an unnatural act. Those who engage in such deviant practices are reviled with an intensity that must stir the envy of any Bible Belt preacher.
