We shipped weapons, Sandinistas say
By GLENN GARVIN
Herald Staff Writer
MANAGUA -- When Ronald Reagan and Sandinista leaders slugged it
out during
the 1980s over what was going on in Nicaragua, Reagan was right
more often
than they liked to admit, the Sandinistas have admitted.
In a series of interviews with The Herald as the 20th anniversary
of their July 19,
1979, rise to power approaches, several past and present Sandinista
officials
confirmed for the first time that they shipped weapons to Marxist
guerrillas in
neighboring El Salvador.
The Sandinistas also said that the Soviet Union agreed to supply
them with MiG
jet fighters and even arranged for Nicaraguan pilots to be trained
on the planes in
Bulgaria. But the Soviets reneged on the deal, sending the Sandinistas
scurrying
to make peace with the contras, the officials said.
``The Sandinista leadership thought they could be Che Guevaras
of all Latin
America, from Mexico to Antarctica,'' former Sandinista leader
Moises Hassan
told The Herald. ``The domino theory wasn't so crazy.''
During their explosive battles with Congress over U.S. aid to
anti-Sandinista
rebels in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials frequently
justified helping the
rebels on the grounds that the Sandinistas were shipping arms
to the Salvadoran
guerrillas.
Reagan's deputies also accused the Sandinistas of planning to
acquire the MiGs,
a move that they warned that the U.S. ``would view with the utmost
concern.'' In
1984, when American officials spotted large crates being unloaded
from Soviet
ships in Nicaraguan ports, there was a widespread fear that the
two countries
would go to war. But the crates turned out to contain helicopters,
and tensions
eased.
Sandinista leaders always denied that they supplying the Salvadoran
guerrillas.
``We are not responsible for what is happening in El Salvador,''
said Sandinista
party cofounder Tomas Borge in 1980 in a typical speech. ``We
are only guilty of
our example and we cannot help it if our example reaches other
places....There
will never be any aggression from our country against any other
country.''
But earlier this month, Borge and former president Daniel Ortega
both admitted
the denials were false. They said the Sandinistas had shipped
arms to Salvadoran
guerrillas because the Salvadorans helped them in their successful
insurrection
against Anastasio Somoza, and also because they thought it would
be more
difficult for the United States to attack two revolutionary regimes
instead of just
one.
``We wanted to broaden the territory of the revolution, to make
it wider, so it would
be harder for the Americans to come after us,'' Borge said. Ortega
added that it
was ``amatter of ethics'' to arm the Salvadorans.
Neither man offered details on how many weapons were supplied
to the
Salvadorans. But a former Sandinista official -- Moises Hassan,
who was a
member of the revolutionary junta that governed Nicaragua in
the early 1980s --
said he believed about 50,000 weapons and a corresponding amount
of
ammunition were sent to El Salvador just in the first 16 months
of the Sandinista
government.
``Ortega and Borge didn't tell me about it, because they thought
I was unreliable,
but other people who just assumed I knew would casually bring
it up,'' Hassan
said.
Hassan, who resigned from the Sandinista party in June 1985 but
continued to
work closely with his old colleagues as mayor of Managua until
late 1988, also
confirmed that the Sandinistas had a commitment for MiGs from
the Soviet Union.
He said he learned of the plan for the MiGs during 1982, when
he was minister of
construction and the Sandinistas began building a base for the
jet fighters at
Punta Huete, a remote site on the east side of Lake Managua.
The site included a 10,000-foot concrete runway -- the longest
in Central America
-- capable of handling any military aircraft in the Soviet fleet,
and protective
bunkers for 16 aircraft.
``It was top secret -- we even had a code name, Panchito, so we
could talk about
it without the CIA hearing,'' Hassan said. ``But somehow the
Americans found out
anyway.''
Alejandro Bendaña, who was secretary general of foreign affairs
during the
Sandinista government, said Nicaraguan pilots trained to fly
the MiGs in
Bulgaria. But in 1987, soon after the Punta Huete site was finished,
the Soviets
backed out, he said.
The news that they weren't getting a weapon they had always considered
a
security blanket, coupled with Soviet advice that it was ``time
to achieve a
regional settlement of security problems,'' made the Sandinistas
realize that they
could no longer depend on the USSR for help, Bendaña said.
Quickly the Sandinistas signed onto a regional peace plan sponsored
by Costa
Rican President Oscar Arias, which required peace talks with
the U.S.-backed
contra army, Bendaña said. Those talks in turn led, eventually,
to an agreement
for internationally supervised elections that resulted in a Sandinista
defeat in 1990.
``It wasn't the intellectual brilliance of Oscar Arias that did
it,'' Bendaña said. ``It
was us grabbing frantically onto any framework that was there, trying
to cut our losses.''