NICARAGUA: The Victors Organize

And their neighbors fear that the example may be contagious

“We call on you to organize, organize, organize. The more organized you are, the more difficult it will be for the counterrevolutionaries.” All over newly liberated Nicaragua last week, people responded to Guerrilla Leader Humberto Ortega’s appeal. From Chinandenga in the north to Rivas in the south, committees led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.) began distributing food and providing medical care for the thousands wounded in the savage civil war against exiled Dictator Anastasio (“Tacho”) Somoza Debayle. In Managua the junta that heads the Government of National Reconstruction ordered peasants who had occupied plantations owned by wealthy farmers to move on. The junta instructed them to join the peasant-owned agricultural collectives that will soon be established on the more than 1 million acres, roughly two-thirds of the country’s best farm land, that have been expropriated from Somoza.

The junta was also trying to mop up diehard remnants of Somoza’s national guard. Almost every night the sounds of gunfire shattered the stillness of Managua as Sandinista security men battled renegade guardsmen. Egged on by a Masaya mob that demanded the death of its prisoner, Sandinista troops summarily executed a 19-year-old informer who had admitted leading Somoza’s assassination squads to the hideouts of at least 20 guerrillas during the civil war. New York Democratic Congressman John Murphy, a longtime friend of Somoza’s, claimed that the Sandinistas were executing “thousands” of guardsmen and their families. In fact, the 3,000 guardsmen locked up in Modelo Prison at Tipitapa, 30 miles from Managua, insist that they have been well treated. Asserted the prison’s security chief, Marcio Maierna Ortiz: “We want our revolution to be an example to all of Latin America.”

That was precisely what troubled the military rulers of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Their leaders feared that a domino effect might engulf them in a wave of leftist insurgency inspired by the success of Nicaragua’s revolt. In all three countries, leftist terrorism has been on the rise, largely because more peaceable democratic opposition groups have been ruthlessly suppressed. Though the junta has denied any plans to “export our revolution,” Defense Department and intelligence officials are urging that the U.S. resume arms shipments to the three nations, which have been cut off since the Carter Administration began its human rights campaign.

The danger of more civil war seems greatest in El Salvador, the Western Hemisphere’s most densely populated country, where 5.3 million people are crowded into an area no larger than Massachusetts. The government of President Carlos Humberto Romero has been locked in combat with three well-organized bands of leftist terrorists. One such group, the Armed Forces of National Resistance, has raised $40 million in the past two years by kidnaping foreign executives and holding them for ransom. Even more threatening from the government’s standpoint is the widespread support won by the 70,000-member Popular Revolutionary Bloc, a broad-based movement that occupied the cathedral in San Salvador last May, triggering an attack by police that resulted in the deaths of 23 protesters.

Assistant Secretary of State Viron Vaky, who completed a fact-finding trip to Central America last week, found that Romero had retreated into a defiant “bunker mentality” not unlike the one that gripped Somoza during the final days of his dying regime.

The situation is nearly as tense in Guatemala, where many people have never forgiven the U.S. for a CIA-assisted coup that ousted the leftist government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954.

Since 1966 at least 40,000 people have been murdered in clashes between the government and its critics. Since the killing of Manuel Colom Argueta, one of the opposition’s most charismatic figures, many democratic opponents of the regime of President Romeo Lucas García have thrown in their lot with Marxist guerrillas.

In Honduras the three-man military junta headed by General Policardo Paz has made a few concessions that may isolate the leftist terrorists who are trying to bring it down. The government paid no more than lip service to Somoza’s plea that it crack down on Sandinista bases near the Nicaragua border. “They’ve made some of the right moves,” says a State Department official, “but the violent opposition, which is heavily Marxist, still remains powerful.”

Although they maintain friendly relations with their rebel counterparts in Central America, Nicaragua’s new rulers appear too preoccupied by their internal problems to lend much assistance to their cause. They have gone so far as to ask the U.S. to supply them with modern weapons to replace the outmoded arms they used to topple Somoza’s regime.

Washington has pledged to give “full and thorough consideration” to that request, even though Managua has lately become a mecca for Marxist mischief makers from around the world. The Sandinistas claim that they need the arms to ward off a possible counterattack by 7,000 national guardsmen that Somoza’s legendary combat leader, Commandante Bravo, claims to have standing by in Honduras.

If attack materializes, Somoza is not likely to lead it. At week’s end the exiled dictator was reportedly expelled from the Bahamian island of Grand Exuma, his latest port of call on a Caribbean cruise.