CENTRAL AMERICA: The Shadow of Castro

Deep in the tangled bush on Costa Rica’s side of the Nicaraguan border, Costa Rica’s Civil Guard Commander Alfonso Monge, 45, walked up to a dilapidated shack, threw open the door, and fell dead in a hail of bullets—a casualty in an angry flare of violence that raced across Central America last week. Before the rattle of small arms and the whomp of mortars died down, three governments —in Costa Rica. Nicaragua, Guatemala—had felt the hot breath of revolt. 29 men were dead, and the U.S. Navy was patrolling offshore to guard against further trouble. Overall loomed the darkening shadow of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

One by one, as the fighting erupted in their nations, Presidents Mario Echandi of Costa Rica, Luis Somoza of Nicaragua and Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes of Guatemala stepped up to accuse Castro of everything from supplying rebel arms to outright intervention. Guatemala protested to the Organization of American States and talked of invoking the 1947 Rio Pact against aggression. Its President Ydígoras demanded a Korean-style police action against Cuba. Both Guatemala and Nicaragua sent pleas to Washington requesting a U.S. Navy patrol in the Caribbean to thwart any Cuban invasion. The U.S. swiftly dispatched the necessary task force.

How deeply was Castro involved? In this case, probably not so deeply as the worried Central Americans claim. As the palace coup in El Salvador a fortnight ago demonstrated, there is already grave unrest in that poverty-stricken subcontinent, and there is no doubt that Castro agents are fanning it for all they are worth. Yet no new Czech weapons have turned up, and the best intelligence indicates that Castro has mounted no major effort—as yet. What does worry the U.S. is his growing capacity for warfare and his announced intention of stirring rebellion. Last week the U.S. State Department released statistics showing that in the past 21 months Castro has received 28,000 tons of Communist arms, including artillery and MIG jet fighters. The naval squadron that the U.S. dispatched to patrol Central America’s coast was less a measure against what Castro had actually done than a precaution against what he would like to do.

Strangers on the Border. The actual fighting last week was local, and quickly controlled. The men who riddled Costa Rica’s civil guard commander were Nicaraguans, longtime enemies of the Somoza regime, who were hiding on the border waiting for a chance to invade their homeland and overthrow the government. Acting on a tip, the Costa Rican civil guard went out to investigate the strangers, was ambushed, and the skirmish touched off a chain reaction. Enraged by the news of Monge’s death, the government of Costa Rican President Echandi shot off a state ment that the rebels included several Cubans, and were led by a mystery man called “El Cubano.” Then Echandi himself went to the border area to oversee the military action that scattered the would-be invaders. Captured: six, but no Cubans.

Inside Nicaragua, in an uprising apparently timed to coincide with the invasion from Costa Rica, rebels led by 14 old Somoza enemies—all members of the opposition Conservative Party—seized the town of Jinotepe and Diriamba, 25 miles south of Managua. West Point-trained General Somoza dispatched 300 tightly disciplined guardsmen to retake the towns behind a spearhead of tanks. At Jinotepe the rank and file rebels vanished into the underbrush. But at Diriamba their 14 leaders marched into the Christian Brothers boys’ boarding school, held 250 stu dents and their teachers as hostages for 66 hours before deciding to surrender.

In the aftermath the government announced there was no direct evidence linking Castro with the Jinotepe-Diriamba rebels. But the government charged that the would-be reinforcements in Costa Rica were “mercenaries, aided by the Communist government of Cuba.”

Barracks Break. The trouble in Guatemala was considerably more serious. Faced by a rebellion within his own armed forces, Guatemala’s President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes came closest to downfall. His plight grew out of long-simmering discontent among the younger officers, who claimed that Ydígoras’ Defense Minister Rubén González Siguí discriminated against them in favor of his own cronies. When two of the angry young men were placed under house arrest at the military-police barracks on the outskirts of Guatemala City, the dispute erupted with bloody fighting.

Recruiting followers inside the barracks, Major Rafael Sessam Pereira and Captain Arturo Chur del Cid staged an uprising in which the fort’s second-in-command and the captain of the guard were killed. The rebels loaded arms into ten army trucks and two weapons carriers and headed east out of town on the main road to Zacapa, Puerto Barrios and the Caribbean. Army men in Zacapa and Puerto Barrios rallied to their support.

Ready for War. Air force units loyal to Ydígoras blasted the Zacapa fort, killing four rebels and wounding five. The rebels withdrew from the fort to nearby hills. There, after several hours of machine-gun and mortar fire, they buckled. Some 250 deserted, and the 150 who were left headed for the Honduran border. They made a brief stand at Gualán, then broke and ran—some to surrender, others into the wilderness. When word of the defeat reached Puerto Barrios, rebels there surrendered without a fight.

Journalists at the front could find no sign of Cuban connivance, but Ydígoras insisted that “we know the rebels are receiving aid, including planes, from Cuba. We are ready to defend ourselves, and to attack anyone who attacks us.” He denounced the rebel army officers as being in league with Communist and left-wing elements, “who for some time have been conspiring to overthrow the legally constituted government.”

Communist Conservatives. Back in Havana, Fidel Castro’s house organ reacted to the week’s events with predictable howls of “Yankee military intervention.” charged that the U.S. naval patrol was the first step in a U.S. attack on Cuba and “a grave threat to world peace.” Yet there were hints that Castro might have to moderate his tone before long. Soviet Russia is increasingly—and obviously—worried about its newest satellite. In Havana, Soviet Ambassador Sergei M. Kudryavstev passed the word that Moscow is not entirely pleased with Castro’s systematic alienation of Latin America, and has urged him to ease off. Khrushchev has also made clear that his hopes for friendly relations with U.S. President-elect John Kennedy are more important to him than Castro’s feelings, and has warned Castro to confine his anti-U.S. attacks to the “Government” of President Eisenhower. When Raúl Castro was in Moscow last summer, Khrushchev himself remarked: “You know there are only two parties in Cuba, the radicals and the conservatives. The conservatives are the Communists—you are the radicals.”