janw@inmet.UUCP (09/24/86)
The following is an excerpt from the article WHY THE CONTRAS, *The Economist*, Sep 6, 1986, pp. 12-13 ================================================================= Not many people doubt that the Sandinists are running a nasty re- gime that is impoverishing their country. [...] Economic miseries have been piled on political ones. Nicaragua's foreign debt of $6 billion is far larger than the country's shrinking GDP, manufac- turing industries have collapsed, even rice and beans are now ra- tioned in peasant diets. The wisest policy towards such a regime is usually to let it self-destruct. The Sandinists seem well on their way to that. The guess of some observers is that perhaps only a fifth of city-dwellers, and a slightly greater proportion of peasants, now back the government. But the worry about the Sandinists is that they may be putting themselves in a position where no amount of unpopularity or in- competence will ever make any difference to their grip on power. Their 75,000-man army (Central America's largest by far) and 44,000-man reserve are there, very likely, not just to fight the contras but also to impose a full-blooded communist government on the country. COMMUNISTS ARE DIFFERENT For democrats, the prospect of another communist government matters not so much because such regimes are unpleasant, as be- cause they seem irreversible. Francoists give way in Spain, Mar- coses depart from the Philippines, Duvaliers leave Haiti, Somozas eventually get thrown out of Nicaragua; but after too many de- cades of experience the world has yet to see a single communist regime dislodged. These regimes stay in place, even when their people would overwhelmingly wish them to go [...]. That leaves the democrats little room for manoeuvre. If a country is sliding into Leninism, more modest instruments of pressure, like economic sanctions, are often useless. Military force is frequently the only thing that can stop it, and the decision has to be made at an early stage: once a country has crossed the line, it is lost.
janw@inmet.UUCP (09/24/86)
The following is another excerpt from the article WHY THE CONTRAS, *The Economist*, Sep 6, 1986, pp. 12-13 ================================================================= Many people object that the Sandinists are being driven against their will into Russian arms by the American threat against them; but the record belies that. In 1979-80 the United States gave $118 in aid to the Sandinists, while they were opening the door to Cuban arms and advisers. The Sandinists took advantage of the long pauses that the American Congress forced in Mr Reagan's pro-contra campaign to show their attachment to Moscow and to tighten their internal repression. They have so far refused to agree to a regional peace treaty drawn up by the Contadora group (see page 32). The more plausible conclusion is that the only thing sparing the Nicaraguan people Cuba's fate is the contra guerillas' military harassment of the Sandinist regime. Some of Mr Reagan's critics accept this, but argue that the con- tra cure is worse than the Sandinist disease. The contras are still widely seen in the West as a murderous rabble consisting mainly of left-over thugs from Somoza's despised National Guard. This view no longer has much to support it. The contras have done atrocious things, but no more than most groups of men, of left or right, who fight this shapeless sort of war (and certainly no more than the guerillas in Afghanistan). They include 2,000-3,000 ex-Somoza men. But they have almost as many disillusioned ex-Sandinists in their ranks, and their civi- lian leaders - like Adolfo Calero, Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo - have good democratic credentials. The most telling thing about the contra army is its size. The 2,000 former National Guardsmen of five years ago have grown into an army of 16,000, three times as big as the Sandinist army was when it marched into Managua. The new recruits are not press-ganged; they are fleeing from the Sandinists. THE WIDER WAR For all that, Nicaragua is a tiny country. If America's policy is to make sense, it must serve broader interests. One of those involves America's contest with Russia. [...] A People's Demo- cratic Republic of Nicaragua would be an example for revolu- tionaries elsewhere in Latin America, and another willing forward base of Leninism in the Western hemisphere. No democrat in the West - even those who think Mr Reagan is wrong about Nicaragua - could welcome that. [...] The civil wars which that wretched region has been enduring for the past decade have killed perhaps 150,000 people out of a total population of 20m. [...] In the past five years, however, the Americans have helped to nudge hard-right regimes in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras towards the centre. [...] The danger of an unchecked Nicaragua is that it could drag other Central Ameri- can countries back into the anti-democratic turmoil from which they are just beginning to escape. Until they became preoccupied with the contras a couple of years ago, the Sandinists were giving a good deal of help to El Salvador's guerillas, and smaller amounts of help to the smaller insurgent groups in Guatemala and Honduras. The Sandinists said then that "the revoulution goes beyond our borders". It is possi- ble that, even unrestrained by the contras, Nicaragua's leaders would not resume the revolution-exporting business; but it is not probable. Their inclination to keep to themselves is probably about equal to their inclination not to create a Leninist state.