NICARAGUA: Sandinistas vs. Somoza

A “final offensive ” throws country into chaos

It would be, the guerrillas vowed, their “final offensive,” an all-out push that would topple Nicaragua’s military strongman, President General Anastasio (“Tacho”) Somoza Debayle. Bands of well-armed insurgents of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) slipped across the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. The rebels first struck in half a dozen cities in the interior, bottling up government garrisons with torrents of bullets from Belgian-made automatic rifles. Then they moved into the capital of Managua, which had been paralyzed by a general strike. While Somoza’s air force wheeled overhead, raining down barrages of machine-gun fire, the Sandinistas* fought their way to within blocks of the President’s fortified command bunker, where the mustachioed dictator was directing a desperate counterattack.

As the offensive began, government forces reeled before the onslaughts of the Sandinistas and their allies, disaffected urban teen-agers known as los muchachos. Firing from barricades built of street paving stones (made by a company that Somoza controls), the guerrillas forced small government outposts in La Trinidad and San Isidro to surrender. A major battle shaped up in León, Nicaragua’s second largest city (pop. 44,000), where the Sandinistas surrounded a national guard installation, drew up a captured armored car and prepared to storm the garrison.

Somoza’s forces fought back with savage efficiency. His strategy was to let the Sandinistas take temporary control of the cities, “using up their ammunition first,” then to deliver a devastating counterpunch of firepower. Such tactics made a huge toll of innocent noncombatants inevitable. In the bloodiest fighting of a civil war that has simmered along for 18 months, many thousands died, most of them civilians. Carrying white flags, at least 200,000 refugees poured out of the barrios in Managua, León, Masaya and Matagaipa to escape the indiscriminate raids by government T-33 jets, rocket-equipped Cessnas and lumbering C-47 “Puff the Magic Dragon” gunships. “I really think Somoza is trying to kill every able-bodied Nicaraguan,” concluded a wealthy businessman in Managua.

The skirmishing in the countryside was less conclusive. National guardsmen intercepted 350 Sandinistas as they crossed the border from Costa Rica; the government claimed that 120 of the insurgents were killed and the remainder forced to flee back across the border. Despite that setback, a column of vehicles carrying 300 guerrillas approached the town of Rivas in southeastern Nicaragua at week’s end. Their objective, charged Foreign Minister Julio C. Quintana, was to declare Rivas the capital of a liberated zone and “seek international recognition” for an alternative government.

The violence touched off a mass exodus of foreign nationals. Somoza permitted a U.S. Air Force transport plane to land at the airstrip near his seaside villa at Montelimar, 40 miles from the capital, and provided an escort of national guardsmen, reinforced by armed U.S. Marines, to protect fleeing Americans. By week’s end about 290 American citizens had departed on four evacuation flights.

The chaos wrought by the fighting was aggravated by severe shortages of food and water and an electric-power blackout. Unable to purchase food at stores shuttered by the general strike, thousands of Managuans turned to looting. People were seen carrying away sides of beef, cases of rum, huge bags of coffee and flour. “We will exchange what we have for what we need later,” one woman looter ex plained. “We had nothing before.” Swigging bottles of stolen beer, Somoza’s guardsmen tried to direct the looters toward stores owned by opponents of the regime. Other shopkeepers simply threw their doors open to the pillagers, hoping that they could at least dissuade the mobs from destroying expensive equipment. Said a poultry dealer after the pillagers stole more than 42,000 chickens: “I no longer have feed. The poor people can have them.”

The mounting carnage served only to strengthen Somoza’s determination to hang onto the presidency. “I have no reason to abandon my constitutional post,” he declared from his bunker last week. The uprising, Somoza maintained, “was the work of Cuba and Panama,” which he claimed had armed and trained the guerrillas. To prove the point, Somoza brandished the identification papers of three Panamanians, including a former Deputy Minister of Health, who was said to have been slain last week by national guardsmen near the Costa Rican border.

There was in fact some truth in Somoza’s charges. Among those helping the Sandinistas were 80 members of an “international brigade” of Panamanians. But Somoza’s argument that the armed rebellion was nothing more than a Communist conspiracy was rejected by foreign diplomats. They attribute the anger of Somoza’s opposition to his ruthless suppression of all political dissent.

Opposition to Somoza has been hardening since the murder in early 1978 of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the stridently antigovernment Managua daily La Prensa, which was burned to the ground last week by Somoza’s troops. The resentment flared into a full-fledged civil war in which at least 2,000 died after a Sandinista force led by the now legendary Comandante Cero (zero) briefly seized the National Palace in Managua last fall. Since then political moderates have reluctantly rallied to the Sandinista cause. As one businessman told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich: “If the FSLN wins I don’t know what our fate will be, but frankly I would rather see Somoza leave now and worry about that later.”

But Somoza has no disposition for compromise. Earlier this year he curtly rejected a U.S. proposal for a plebiscite to decide his government’s future. Moderates argue that since the U.S. was instrumental in putting Somoza’s family in power, Washington should do more to force him to step aside. They charge that a cutoff of military and economic assistance ordered by Washington to back up its proposal was a futile gesture that could have little impact on a “feudal” leader like Somoza.

Events have seemingly justified the moderates’ pessimism. Somoza has beefed up his national guard from 8,100 to more than 12,000 men and armed them with Israeli assault rifles and machine pistols. The national guard has devoted so much attention to fighting the guerrillas that common criminals have had a field day.

The Sandinistas have also increased their numbers, to about 3,000, and improved their arsenal by purchasing large quantities of Belgian FAL assault rifles and rocket launchers on the international weapons market. In preparation for the latest offensive, students, factory workers and barrio activists in the clandestine United People’s Movement, the Sandinistas’ political arm, urged Nicaraguans to stockpile food, water and medicine. When the fighting erupted in Managua, many residents followed the Movement’s advice and left their doors unlocked so that harried guerrillas could find refuge inside their homes.

What worries Nicaragua’s neighbors is that the fighting might spill over the country’s borders if Somoza’s air force attacks Sandinista bases in Costa Rica or if he calls on his fellow military dictators in El Salvador and Guatemala for troops. Last month Mexico’s President, José López Portillo, severed relations with Somoza; a spokesman for the government said that “if Mexican volunteers wish to assist in the defense of Costa Rica, they are perfectly free to act as they wish.” Last week representatives from the Andean Group, an association of five Latin American nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela) flew to Managua to negotiate a truce. Their efforts at mediation were rebuffed by Somoza.

The U.S. has also been unable to halt the fighting. Washington fears that a Sandinista victory might usher in a Communist government. Nonetheless the Carter Administration, which is still concerned about human rights, has renewed pressure on Somoza to step down so that moderates can build a democratically elected government. Declared Secretary of State Cyrus Vance: “We’ve told President Somoza we believe that a political solution is necessary to resolve the problem in Nicaragua and that if the political problem is not resolved, the chances of a radical solution developing are greater.” There seems little chance that Somoza will heed Washington’s latest entreaty any more attentively than he has followed its advice in the past. Says an opposition leader: “He wants a victory, not a political solution.”

At week’s end Somoza appeared on national television, imploring his countrymen to lay down their arms. “We. have to confront the situation with calm,” he urged. “We never thought there would be so much pillaging and disorder. I never thought people would have to suffer the embarrassment of taking things to feed their children.” He added a poignant coda: “Please don’t force me to apply the law because above all I love my citizens.” That provoked an ironic comment from a Nicaraguan businessman. Said he: “Somoza must be mad.” The diagnosis, sadly, could be applied not only to the strongman, but to much of his country as well.

* The group takes its name from Augusto Cesar Sandino, a guerrilla leader assassinated in 1934 on the order of Somoza’s father, who founded the dynasty that has ruled Nicaragua for 46 years.