Tough Tug of War

By Evan Thomas

To Ronald Reagan, Nicaragua is a "cancer" in the Western Hemisphere, a potential Soviet "beachhead" in North America, a haven for dope smugglers and terrorists. The country is in the grip of "an outlaw regime" of Marxist-Leninists who torture pastors and burn down synagogues. Left to fester, Reagan warned the nation last week, the Nicaragua of Sandinista Leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra will become a "second Cuba"--worse, a "second Libya, right on the doorstep of the United States."

The specter conjured up by the President is a frightening one, and though exaggerated, it contains elements of truth. But last week it failed to move a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives. In a vote that had been billed as a vital test of the Administration's interventionist foreign policy, the Democratic-controlled House rejected, at least for the moment, the President's request to give $100 million in aid to the Nicaraguan contras, who seek to overthrow the Sandinista regime. "The Administration deserved to have its nose bloodied on this," said Democratic Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin. "They handled this really badly." To a disappointed Reagan, the vote was "a dark day for freedom."

The outcome and the close vote (222 to 210) reflected the public's own confusion and wariness over the Administration's policy in Central America. For Reagan, accustomed to winning the big ones that he cares about and works for, it was a significant political setback. Nonetheless, the debate over Nicaragua is in fact just heating up. Under intense lobbying from the White House, the Republican-controlled Senate is expected to pass the contra aid package this week. Within three weeks the matter will be right back on the House floor.

Last week's rebuff was merely a "lost battle in a war we're going to win," declared White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan. "We will never give up," vowed the President as he posed for photographers with three contra leaders who had flown to Washington to plead with legislators on Capitol Hill. He held up a button that read IF YOU LIKE CUBA, YOU'LL LOVE NICARAGUA.

The House vote was something of a personal triumph for that old sparring partner of Reagan's, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who is retiring this year. Just before last week's vote, O'Neill promised that compromise proposals for contra aid would be brought up within a month, a tactic that was designed to win some undecided members into the nay column this go-around.

Democratic leaders concede that the White House will be able next time to salvage at least some aid for the contras. The critical questions: How much? What kind? With what strings attached? Reagan originally chose to demand all or nothing, but many Congressmen are searching for a middle ground. Unwilling to cut off the contras altogether, yet eager to explore diplomatic avenues as well, they want to approach the Sandinistas with a mixture of carrot and stick.

The deep uncertainty in Congress and the nation makes the debate over what should be done about the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua all the more important. The argument so far has been waged with rhetoric that is more emotional than enlightening. Before the vote, Administration spokesmen warned that anyone opposing aid to the contras would be regarded as "soft on Communism." Wagging a finger toward the Democratic side of the aisle, G.O.P. Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois charged that "history is going to assign to you folks the role of pallbearers to democracy in Central America." Such attacks predictably backfired among members of Congress who saw their patriotism impugned. Accusing the Reaganauts of Red baiting, the Democrats used some scare tactics of their own, darkly warning that Nicaragua could become "another Viet Nam." In a passionate speech that climaxed the House debate, Speaker O'Neill revived old nightmares with his declaration, "I see us becoming engaged, step by step, in a military situation that brings our boys directly into the fighting."

The overheated charges and countercharges threaten to obscure the real stakes, which are unquestionably high. Supporting the overthrow of a foreign government, even a detestable one, is a radical act that has brought the U.S. to grief before. In the case of Nicaragua, it risks prolonging civil war, justifying further internal repression by the regime and heightening tensions all through the region. Yet Western countries have felt compelled in the past to protect their national interests by interfering with foreign governments. Communist regimes do it almost by definition. Unquestionably, the Sandinistas in pursuit of Soviet-style Marxism pose a genuine threat to the somewhat fragile democracies of neighboring countries. Potentially more threatening is the danger to U.S. security if Nicaragua becomes a base from which Soviet submarines and bombers can prowl vital sea-lanes and America's coasts.

The President is not guilty of posturing about the Nicaraguan threat. He truly believes. To him, Nicaragua's Ortega, in his Castro-style fatigues, is not merely a Third World revolutionary who delights in tweaking Uncle Sam, but an agent of the Kremlin, bent on spreading Communism through the hemisphere. When the question of what to do about the Sandinistas comes up at National Security Council meetings, Reagan assumes what one aide calls his "Churchillian mode." The normally amiable and relaxed President sits up straight in his chair; his eyes flash, his lips tighten, and his hands ball up into fists. Throughout Reagan's political career, stopping Communism--along with reducing the size of Government and cutting taxes--has been an idee fixe. Nicaragua, in Reagan's view, is the place and now is the time to take a stand. So committed is he to changing the Sandinista regime, say some Administration officials, that if Congress ultimately fails to provide aid to the contras, Reagan may feel compelled to take direct military action.

In fact, if the peril posed by the Sandinistas were as great as the President's political rhetoric suggests, he would be irresponsible not to send in American troops. Yet Reagan's long-standing reluctance to let the facts interfere with good anecdotes once again got the better of him last week. His nationally televised address was sprinkled with overstatements that contradicted the evidence presented by officials in his own Administration. To illustrate the "revolutionary reach" of the Sandinistas, for instance, the telecast of Reagan's speech displayed a map of Latin America that was bathed in red. The President declared that Nicaragua provides military training, safe haven, communications, false documents, safe transit and "sometimes weapons" to "radicals" in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic. This came as news to the Brazilian government, which protested that there are no guerrillas in Brazil. Indeed, Brazil had objected a month ago when Secretary of State George Shultz made the same charge; at the time, the State Department apologized. Reagan's speech was further illustrated by a photograph that he said showed an aide to one of the Sandinista commandants "loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States." Top Nicaraguan officials, he stated, are "deeply involved in drug trafficking." Two days later, officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a statement that they had no evidence to support his charge.

In Congress, Reagan's diatribe provoked more disbelief than fear. Unlike earlier campaigns by the White House, the President's speech failed to flood congressional offices with letters and phone calls backing his position. "People just aren't getting cranked up about this," shrugged House G.O.P. Leader Robert Michel of Illinois. "Most people don't know where Nicaragua is." By the eve of the House vote, it was apparent that the Administration had to offer some kind of compromise. In return for the votes of wavering lawmakers, Reagan promised to delay the bulk of the $70 million in military aid for 90 days while he sought a diplomatic settlement. Some $25 million for humanitarian aid (such as medical supplies and food) as well as funds for "defensive purposes"--communications equipment, training and the like --would be sent without delay. The Administration officials who shaped the compromise were particularly eager to equip the contras with surface-to-air missiles that they could use to fend off Soviet-made gunship helicopters. Said G.O.P. Congressmen Rod Chandler of Washington: "We didn't want them to be butchered while this 90-day period is going on."

Though the Administration's offer won over a few fence sitters, others remained suspicious. The rub: the President, and not Congress, would have the right to determine whether diplomatic efforts had proved fruitless and the rest of the military aid should be sent. They charged that last year Reagan failed to live up to his promise to seek a peaceful settlement in return for congressional votes for $27 million in humanitarian aid to the contras.

Consequently, mere assurances by the White House that it will actively pursue negotiations will probably not suffice to wring an aid package out of Congress this time around. Though it appears likely that Congress will eventually vote to send some more assistance, it is almost certain that there will be tight strings on the money. The proposals that seem to attract the most congressional support call for withholding all or some aid--at least the money used for buying weapons--for several months while the Administration seeks a negotiated peace between the Sandinistas and the contras, as well as a treaty securing peace in the region. At the end of that period, Congress will vote again on whether to release the funds to arm the contras. To win that round, the Administration will have to convince a majority in both houses that the U.S. at least made a good-faith diplomatic effort.

Congress has other options, of course. It can pass well-intentioned resolutions blandly calling for diplomacy and peace. Or it can simply do nothing. But a realistic assessment of the threat posed by the Sandinistas to the region, as well as to the U.S. itself, clearly exposes the risks of a policy of benign neglect.

Though Reagan may overstate the Sandinistas' malevolence, Nicaragua is not a paper tiger. In their effort to create a Soviet-style state, the Sandinistas have had a great deal of help from the Kremlin and its surrogates. Nicaragua's 62,000-man regular army, by far the largest in the region, has been trained by some 3,500 Cuban advisers. East Germans and Cubans are at every level of the Sandinistas' internal-security apparatus. The Soviets have funneled an estimated $500 million in weapons to Nicaragua, including as many as twelve Mi-24 gunship helicopters.

Straddling Central America with harbors on both the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, Nicaragua is strategically situated to threaten sea-lanes that carry more than half the crude oil imports of the U.S. It is but a half-hour jet flight away from perhaps the most critical "choke point" of all, the Panama Canal. There have been some ominous signs that Nicaragua is preparing to serve as a Soviet base. Warsaw Pact engineers are building a deep-water port on the Caribbean side, "similar," Reagan said in his speech, "to the naval base in Cuba for Soviet-built submarines." Under construction outside Managua is "the largest military airfield in Central America," said Reagan, "similar to those in Cuba from which Russian Bear bombers patrol the U.S. East Coast from Maine to Florida."

Nonetheless it appears doubtful that the Soviets would risk the inevitable U.S. reaction to placing offensive weapons in Nicaragua. More than a year ago, after receiving erroneous reports that the Soviets had sent MiG-21 fighter planes to the Sandinistas, the U.S. firmly warned the Kremlin that any offensive weapons in Nicaragua would be "unacceptable." Though an ardent suppliant for Soviet aid, Nicaragua does not appear to be quite the Soviet client state that Cuba is. The Kremlin regards Nicaragua as a "target of opportunity, and therefore useful, but also expendable," says a State Department official. Moscow "provides only enough military aid to make United States military intervention costly and save the Soviet 'revolutionary' reputation, not enough to guarantee survival or risk confrontation," writes Robert Leiken, a Central American expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank.

Still, Nicaragua is an important testing ground in the rivalry of East and West. The Soviets have long made it their business to probe the Third World, seeking to add satellites to their orbit. Under the so-called Reagan Doctrine, the Administration has decreed that the U.S. can no longer afford to watch passively as the Soviets consolidate their power. Through the use of surrogates and guerrilla movements, long a Soviet tactic, the Reagan Administration seeks to roll back Communism, or at least make Soviet expansionism more costly.

The Administration fears a horrifying, though hardly realistic, potential scenario: the Sandinista army storming up though Honduras, linking forces with its revolutionary allies in El Salvador, and driving on through Guatemala and into Mexico. The prospect of an armed Communist bulwark on America's southern flank is what Reagan dreads most. But the governments of Nicaragua's neighbors do not seem as concerned, in part because they believe the U.S. would immediately jump to the rescue. "We're not really afraid of a Sandinista invasion," says one Honduran military officer. "They wouldn't make it to Tegucigalpa before the 82nd Airborne got here."

A greater and far more plausible threat is that of Sandinista-sponsored subversion. The democratic governments of the region are understandably nervous that the Sandinistas will seek to export their own revolution. "The Central American countries don't dislike the Sandinistas because of their Soviet connections, but because of their connections with homegrown radicals," says a senior U.S. diplomat.

The Sandinistas openly profess solidarity with other revolutionary movements. On the outer walls of the Arab-Libyan cultural center in Managua are snapshots of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi reviewing troops. When Colombian terrorists raided the Palace of Justice in Bogota last year and had to be blasted out by government troops, the guerrillas were portrayed in the state- controlled Managuan press as victims of a governmentinstigated massacre.

There is solid evidence that Nicaragua is actively supporting insurgencies in neighboring countries. The country maintains warehouses of arms that are available to every Communist insurgency in the region except Peru's Maoist Sendero Luminoso, according to Alvaro Baldizon, a former key official in the Sandinista regime who fled to Honduras last year. To minimize their involvement, says Baldizon, the Sandinistas require neighboring guerrillas to ferry their own arms shipments. Visiting guerrillas are trained at bases in Nicaragua, he further claims, and are even provided with free plane flights on Cubana Airlines to Havana for more specialized instruction.

Though the supply of Nicaraguan arms to the rebels in El Salvador has allegedly tapered off somewhat in the past four years, Salvador President Jose Napoleon Duarte insisted in an interview with TIME last week that the Sandinistas are still providing the rebels with support as well as sanctuary. Said he: "There is no doubt that there is a whole centralization of the guerrillas' efforts in Nicaragua." In Guatemala, the Sandinistas have helped leftist guerrillas make a modest comeback after their insurgency was nearly exterminated by a massive campaign launched by the Guatemalan military in 1981.

Honduras is the one anomaly in Central America: though it is somewhat wary of its southern neighbor Nicaragua, in fact it is more fearful of its historic rival, El Salvador. Indeed, some Hondurans fear that if Duarte ever mops up the Salvadoran rebels he will turn his American-trained army on Honduras in order to settle some long-standing border disputes.

The governments of the nearby Latin American democracies--Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama--have tried not to get caught in the cross fire between Managua and Washington. So far their policy has been to maintain passable relations with the Sandinistas and to keep the U.S. at arm's length. In Guatemala, for instance, newly elected President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo describes his policy as "active neutrality." Some Central American leaders are worried that the U.S. will send in the Marines to overthrow the Sandinistas and thereby plunge the whole region into a conflagration. The Sandinistas do not try to allay these fears. "If the U.S. intervenes," warned a militant Sandinista last week, "we will take the revolution wherever we can."

Short of sending in the Marines, what is the best way for the U.S. to deal with the Sandinistas? It is an awkward fact that the U.S. can find no official support anywhere in Central or South America for sponsoring the contras. Indeed, eight Latin American countries--Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Peru--joined last month to urge the U.S. not to aid the contras, but rather to press for a regional peace treaty.

The contras, in fact, are a source of great uneasiness to the countries they use as a haven, Costa Rica and Honduras. Costa Rica has even agreed to join Nicaragua in creating a border patrol to stop contras from moving back and forth between the two countries. The fear that the contras might turn against their hosts in Honduras is "a nightmare for all of us," admits a CIA official.

Reagan's special envoy to the region, Philip Habib, has insisted that privately most of these governments, as well as those of Nicaragua's immediate neighbors, support the U.S. policy. They cannot say so publicly, he asserts, for fear of provoking the Sandinistas. In their hearts, says another Western diplomat in the region, most Central American leaders "wish the Sandinistas would disappear."

It does not seem at all likely that the contras are going to make them vanish, at least anytime soon. Cut off from U.S. military aid by Congress since 1984, the rebels have been losing ground to Nicaragua's well-equipped, well-trained counterinsurgency battalions. A year ago, some 15,000 contras roamed the Nicaraguan countryside, mostly across the northern third of the country. Today only about 4,000 contras remain in Nicaragua; the rest have been pushed back into their Honduran sanctuaries. Last week, in raids timed to show the flag to Congress, 3,000 contras infiltrated across the Honduran border to stage attacks on civilian and military targets. One U.S. intelligence official scoffed that the contras succeeded in making "a lot of noise while using vast quantities of ammunition with very little effect."

The contras are theoretically united under an umbrella organization called the United Nicaraguan Opposition, which was pulled together with U.S. help in 1985. In fact they are divided among themselves. Their political leaders tend to be former foes of the Somoza regime who fell out with the Sandinistas when the revolution was "betrayed"; many of the top military field commanders, on the other hand, served in Somoza's National Guard. Still, the contra forces are "too large and have too much support inside the country to be dismissed simply as a tool of the CIA," writes Leiken.

The contras, like the Sandinista troops, have been widely accused of committing atrocities against civilians. The facts are difficult to know; in a brutish guerrilla war, it is sometimes hard to distinguish between civilians and combatants. Although the U.S. military is currently barred from advising the contras, the Administration plans to send U.S. advisers to train them in their Honduran camps as soon as Congress passes an aid package. By instilling better discipline, U.S. advisers have been able to improve the behavior of Salvadoran troops; it is hoped that they would do the same for the contras.

Rather than increase the level of violence, Administration critics ask, why not try diplomacy? The Administration retorts that it has tried ten times in the past but that the Nicaraguans are not interested. Nor is there any reason to believe that the Sandinistas would honor any agreements any more than they honored their pledges just after the revolution to permit political pluralism and democracy.

At the heart of the diplomatic question is precisely what should and can be negotiated. The Reagan Administration insists that Nicaragua must move away from totalitarianism to pluralism. Yet, as U.S. Ambassador Harry Bergold concedes, "We have to assume that Marxist-Leninists will not allow themselves to be voted out of power." Says Nicaragua's Ambassador to the U.S., Carlos Tunnermann Bernheim: "We are ready to negotiate all national-security concerns the U.S. has with us. We will allow no Soviet or American bases. We have said this repeatedly. But we will never negotiate the revolution."

The governments of Latin America are by and large willing to let Nicaragua have its revolution. They are more interested in negotiating safeguards designed to keep Nicaragua from spreading insurrection to their countries, in short, a policy of containment. In 1984 the so-called Contadora group --Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama--got Nicaragua to agree to a proposal to reduce the size of its army and expel foreign advisers. The U.S. balked at the proposal, however, because it set no timetables for the departure of Nicaragua's Cuban advisers, offered no means of verification and did not address internal reforms in Nicaragua.

The Sandinistas, it can be reasonably argued, are far more likely to keep their promises under the pressure of armed force. Such a carrot-and-stick approach requires fine calibration, a careful assessment of when to deal and when to threaten. It cannot be carried off unless the Sandinistas know that the Administration is not just bluffing--and that Congress will back up the threats with the wherewithal to sustain them.

But what seems to be practical is not always politically feasible in Washington, especially during an election year. The rhetoric used by both sides so far has served only to polarize the debate and leave a confused public to believe that the choice is between reckless belligerency and naive isolationism. For Congress and the Administration alike, the challenge in the weeks ahead will be to shape a policy that balances diplomacy and force, and then, just as important, to stick to it.

With reporting by David Beckwith and Ricardo Chavira/Washington