[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 107 (Tuesday, July 27, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9373-S9376]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         NICARAGUA'S SANDINISTAS ADMIT TO SUBVERTING NEIGHBORS

  Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, I have at hand several news reports 
indicating that Nicaragua's Sandinistas have finally confessed that 
they supplied weapons in the 1980s to communist guerrillas in El 
Salvador and, in fact, were themselves dependent on a flood of weapons 
from the Soviet Union during that period.
  An excellent series of articles, written by Glenn Garvin and 
published in the Miami Herald earlier this month, at long last makes 
the record clear on that score. I ask unanimous consent that Glenn 
Carvin's articles be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my 
remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. HELMS. Mr. President, Mr. Garvin conducted a series of interviews 
with current and former Sandinista officials who are now celebrating 
the 20th anniversary of their rise to power on July 19, 1979. What they 
celebrate is a revolution that brought nothing but poverty and 
heartache to millions of people.
  But in the midst of reciting war stories, they let the truth slip 
out: these Sandinista officials confirmed that they provided weapons to 
the Marxist Salvadoran guerrillas. They also acknowledged that the 
Soviet Union agreed to supply Nicaragua with high-performance MiG 
fighters, along with other military assistance.
  This is not news, but what is, indeed, news is that, for once, two 
Sandinistas told the truth. back in the 1980s, when President Ronald 
Reagan and good many Senators accused the Sandinistas of fomenting 
revolution in neighboring countries, they and their left-wing media 
apologists in the United States questioned our facts. When the Reagan 
Administration warned the Soviets not to provide MiGs to Nicaragua, the 
other side falsely accused President Reagan of hysteria.
  Now come Sandinista leaders--co-founder Tomas Borge and former 
president Daniel Ortega--admitting their role in a plot to escalate the 
crisis in Central America. Mr. President, neither of the two is famous 
for telling the truth, but in this case, I think they stumbled upon it, 
letting the cat out of the bag.

                               Exhibit 1

                        [From the Miami Herald]

                  We Shipped Weapons, Sandinistas Say

                           (By Glenn Garvin)

       Managua.--When Ronald Reagan and Sandinista leaders slugged 
     it out during the 1980s over events in Nicaragua, Reagan was 
     right more often than they liked to admit, the Sandinistas 
     now say.
       In a series of interviews with The Herald, several past and 
     present Sandinista officials confirmed that they shipped 
     weapons to Marxist guerrillas in neighboring El Salvador, a 
     statement they once hotly denied.
       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.


                             domino theory

       ``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

[[Page S9374]]

     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 United 
     States ``would view with the utmost concern.'' In 1984, when 
     American officials spotted large crates being unloaded from 
     Soviet ships in Nicaraguan ports, there was widespread fear 
     that the two countries would go to war. But the crates turned 
     out to contain helicopters, and tensions eased.
       Sandinista leaders had denied supplying the Salvadoran 
     guerrillas. ``We are not responsible for what is happening El 
     Salvador,'' said Sandinista party cofounder Tomas Borge said 
     in 1980.
       Earlier this month, Borge and former president Daniel 
     Ortega both said 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 one.


                          a matter of ethics'

       ``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 ``a 
     matter of ethics'' to arm the Salvadorans.
       Neither man offered details on how many weapons were 
     supplied. But Hassan a former Sandinista official 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 resigned from the Sandinista party in June 1985 but 
     continued to work closely with his old colleagues as mayor of 
     Managua until late 1988.
       He 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 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.


                          Code name: Panchito

       ``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.''
       Alejandro Bendena, 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 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 not 
     longer depend on the USSR for help, Bendana 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, 
     Bendana said. Those talks 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,'' Bendana said. ``It was us grabbing frantically onto 
     any framework that was there, trying to cut our losses.''
                                  ____


                 Hostility to the U.S. a Costly Mistake


20 years after the revolution, Nicaraguans wonder how it all could have 
                             gone so wrong

                           (by Glenn Garvin)

       Managua.--It was hard to say which was shining more 
     brightly, Moises Hassan thought, as his makeshift military 
     caravan rolled down the highway: the sun in the sky, or the 
     faces of the people crowded along the road, shrieking 
     ``Viva!'' to his troops.
       It was the morning of July 19th, 1979, and Nicaragua had 
     just awakened to find itself abruptly, stunningly free of a 
     dictatorship that, for more than 40 years, had passed the 
     country around from generation to generation like a family 
     cow.
       Hassan, as a senior official in the Sandinista National 
     Liberation Front, the guerrilla movement that had spearheaded 
     the rebellion against the dictatorship, had played a key role 
     in ousting it. But now, as he waived to the crowds lining the 
     highway, he realized that it was what came next that would 
     really count.
       ``You could see the happiness in the people's faces,'' he 
     recalled. ``And you could see the hope, too. And I told 
     myself, damn, we've taken a lot of responsibility on 
     ourselves . . . . We cannot let these people down.' ''
       Twenty years later, neither Hassasn nor any other 
     Sandinista leader denies that the revolution they did let 
     Nicaraguans down. It would reel headlong into a decade of 
     confrontation with the United States, a catastrophic economy 
     where peasants literally preferred toilet paper to the 
     national currency, and a civil war that would take 25,000 
     lives and send perilously close to a million others into 
     exile.
       It would end 11 years later in an ignominious electoral 
     defeat from which the Sandististas still haven't recovered, 
     and some say, never will. And it is still a source of wonder 
     to them how everything could have gone so disastrously wrong.
       ``We believed--it was one of our many errors--that we were 
     going to hold power until the end of the centuries,'' mused 
     Tomas Borge, who helped found the Sandinista Front in 1961. 
     ``It didn't work out that way.''
       Just as the Sandinista victory in 1979 echoed around the 
     world, ushering in a new chapter of the Cold War, its 
     collapse sent a tidal wave washing through the international 
     left.
       Leftist theoreticians who could no longer defend the 
     bueaucracy in the Soviet Union or Fidel Castro's erratic 
     military adventures abroad pinned their hopes on the Baby 
     Boomer regime in Nicaragua. They were devastated when it 
     fared no better than the graying revolutions in Cuba and the 
     USSR.
       ``It's like saying we had a project to make the world over 
     the greater justice and greater fairness, and we failed,'' 
     said Margaret Randall, an American academic who lived in 
     Nicaragua during the first four years the Sandinistas 
     governed and wrote four adultatory books about them.
       ``It's been very, very hard for those of us who gave our 
     best years to Nicaragua, our greatest energies to Nicaragua, 
     who had friends who died there . . . It's one thing to say 
     the people are gone, but the project is still there. But now 
     there's nothing. We're still picking up the pieces.''


  all was confusion--chaos left sandinistas a blank slate for country

       On that day 20 years ago, it was a little hard to imagine 
     that any government would emerge from the debris left behind 
     when Anastasio Somoza--the last of three family members to 
     rule Nicaragua--slipped away in the middle of the night.
       Within hours of Somoza's departure, the entire senior 
     officer corps of the National Guard, the army on which the 
     dictatorship was built, bolted for the border. On the morning 
     of July 19, Managua's streets were littered with cast-off 
     uniforms of panicky junior officers and enlisted men who were 
     making their own getaways in civilian clothes.
       Chaos was everywhere. Children lurched about the parking 
     lot of the Inter-Continental Hotel, spraying the air with 
     bullets from automatic rifles left behind by the soldiers. 
     Inside the hotel, the last of the foreign mercenaries Somoza 
     employed as bodyguards was going room to room, robbing 
     reporters (including one from The Miami Herald) at gunpoint.
       At the airport, clogged with government officials and 
     Somoza cronies trying to catch the last plane out, an armed 
     band of teenage Sandinista sympathizers climbed into the 
     tower to try to arrest the air traffic controllers, who were 
     still wearing their National Guard uniforms. Only the 
     intervention of a Red Cross official prevented a complete 
     disaster.
       Elsewhere in the city, those who couldn't or wouldn't leave 
     were nervously preparing peace offerings to the revolutionary 
     army that was headed for Managua. One elderly couple spray-
     painted FSLN--the Spanish initials by which the Sandinistas 
     were known--across the sides of their new Mercedes Benz.
       But as Sandinista forces poured into the city over the next 
     few days, the situation quickly stabilized. And as FSLN 
     leaders admit, the anarchy they found actually offered them a 
     marvelous opportunity to start a country from scratch.
       ``The state dissolved completely,'' said novelist Giaconda 
     Belli, who delivered the first newscast over Sandinista 
     television. ``No army, no judges, no congress, no nothing. . 
     . . It was like a clean slate for us.''
       What the Sandinistas had promised--to the Organization of 
     American States and the U.S. Government, as they tried to 
     mediate the war against Somoza--was a pluralist, non-aligned 
     democracy with a mixed economy. Many Sandinistas still say 
     that was what they tried to build.
       ``We were not trying to put a communist government in 
     Managua,'' Belli insisted. ``We were very critical of the 
     Soviet model and the Cuban model. We never closed our 
     borders, we never prohibited organized religion.''
       But though there were many members of the FSLN who rejected 
     communist dogma, the nine men who composed the Sandinista 
     directorate--the central committee--were committed Marxist-
     Leninists.
       ``All the top leadership was Marxist-Leninist,'' agreed 
     Hassan, who wasn't. ``And I knew that if they had their way, 
     Nicaragua would be a Marxist state. But I wasn't too worried 
     about it. I didn't think they would be able to brush aside 
     the rest of us.''
       Hassan was part of the five-member junta--which included 
     two non-Sandinista members--that was theoretically governing 
     Nicaragua until free elections could be held. But, he soon 
     realized, all the important decisions were being made by the 
     party leadership. The junta was little more than a rubber 
     stamp.
       ``I remember when the Russians invaded Afghanistan late in 
     1979, the junta had to

[[Page S9375]]

     meet to decide what position we were going to take at the 
     United Nations,'' Hassen said. ``We decided we would condemn 
     it. But when [Foreign Minister Miguel] D'Escoto went up to 
     New York, he abstained when it was time to vote. The 
     Sandinista directorate told him what to do, and he obeyed 
     them, not us.''
       In fact, there was an increasing confusion between the 
     identity of the country and the party. The police became the 
     Sandinista National Police, the army the Sandinista People's 
     Army. Schoolchildren pledged allegiance not only to Nicaragua 
     but to the Sandinista party, and promised it their ``love, 
     loyalty and sacrifice.''
       Meanwhile, the failure to condemn the Soviet invasion was 
     symptomatic of the revolution's leftward march. The 
     government quickly moved to seize anything that was 
     ``mismanaged'' or ``underexploited.'' Farmers were ordered to 
     sell grain only to a state purchasing agency and cattle only 
     to state slaughterhouses.
       Newsmen who criticized government policies lost their 
     papers or radio programs, and sometimes were jailed. Kids 
     learned math from schoolbooks that taught two grenades plus 
     two grenades plus two grenades equals six grenades, and their 
     alphabet from sentences like this one that illustrated the 
     use of the letter Q: ``Sandino fought the yanquis. The 
     yanquis will always be defeated in our fatherland.''
       It was the profound Sandinista hostility to the United 
     States--the party anthem even referred to the U.S. as ``the 
     enemy of humanity''--that led to what some party leaders now 
     consider its most ruinous mistake: supporting Marxist 
     guerrillas in nearby El Salvador against the American-backed 
     government.
       First Jimmy Carter and then Ronald Reagan warned the 
     Sandinistas to stay out of the Salvadoran conflict. When they 
     didn't, the United States first suspended aid to Nicaragua, 
     and later began supporting the counterrevolutionary forces 
     that came to be known as the contras in a civil war that 
     ultimately cost the Sandinistas power.
       ``It was just political machismo,'' Belli said. ``Everybody 
     was young, wearing uniforms, and they thought they were cut. 
     They wanted to be heroic, and going up against the United 
     States was heroic. . . . But it was the wrong thing to do, 
     and the Nicaraguan people paid a high price.''
       Several Sandinista leaders say the party missed a golden 
     opportunity when Thomas Enders, an assistant U.S. secretary 
     of state, came to Managua in 1981 with a final carrot-and-
     stick offer from the Reagan administration: Quit fooling 
     around in El Salvador, and we'll leave you alone, no matter 
     what you do inside Nicaragua. Keep it up, and we'll swat you 
     like a fly.
       ``It was a great opportunity for a deal,'' said Arturo Cruz 
     Jr., who was a key official in Nicaragua's foreign ministry 
     at the time. ``I think it was a sincere offer. Ronald Reagan 
     considered Nicaragaua a lost cause. Their concern was El 
     Salvador.'' Sergio Ramirez, a member of the junta and later 
     vice president, agreed: ``I thought it was an opportunity, 
     and I said so, but no one agreed with me.''
       Even with the benefit of hindsight, some Sandinistas say it 
     was unthinkable to back away from the Salvadoran guerrillas.
       ``That was a matter of ethics on our part,'' said former 
     President Daniel Ortega. ``The Salvadorans had helped us 
     [against Somoza]. And thanks to the armed struggle, El 
     Salvador has changed. It's a much different place than it was 
     then. . . . The war in El Salvador has led to a political 
     advance, and we are part of that achievement.''
       The United States wouldn't have kept its promise anyway, 
     said Borge. ``Look, I don't think Cuba was ever a threat to 
     the United States, but let's say it was at one time,'' he 
     explained. ``Well, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it 
     obviously isn't a threat anymore. But the U.S. agitation 
     against Cuba and attempts to isolate it continue. The U.S. 
     doesn't like revolutionaries, and we were 
     revolutionaries.''
       But is some Sandinistas had doubts about the carrot in 
     Enders' offer, they know he was serious about the stick. 
     Three months after the Sandinistas rejected the deal, the 
     Regan administration was funneling money to the contras. Four 
     months after that, in March 1982, the contras blew up two 
     major bridges in northern Nicaragua, and the war was on in 
     earnest.
       The war led directly to some of the Sandinistas' most 
     unpopular policies, like the military draft, and broadened 
     others, like moving peasants off their land into 
     cooperatives. Censorship expanded until the daily paper La 
     Presena, the last voice of the opposition, was shut down 
     completely.
       What had been skirmishes between the Sandinistas and the 
     Roman Catholic Church erupted into full-fledged firefights, 
     climaxing when FSLN militants shouted down Pope John Paul II 
     as he tried to say Mass.
       It accelerated the decline already begun by their economic 
     policies. By 1988, inflation was 33,000 percent annually, and 
     it took a shopping bag full of cordobas just to buy lunch--
     that is if you could find lunch.
       Practically everything was in short supply: No hay, there 
     isn't any, because about the only Spanish phrase a visitor of 
     Nicaragua needed. The vast shelves of the supermarkets built 
     in the days of Somoza were empty except for Bulgarian-made 
     dishwasher soap, useless in a country with no dishwashers.
       When the Sandinistas managed to obtain food from their 
     socialist trading partners, people were suspicious. A bumper 
     crop of Russian potatoes in 1987 led to the widespread 
     certainty that they were contaminated with radiation from the 
     breakdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl.
       Some of the problems, Sandinista leaders insist even now, 
     weren't their fault.
       ``The conflict with the church was strong, and it cost us, 
     but I don't think it was our fault.'' Ortega said. ``There 
     was so many people being wounded every day, so many people 
     dying, and it was hard for us to understand the position of 
     the church hierarchy'' in refusing to condemn the contras.
       Others, they acknowledge, were in large part their 
     responsibility. ``When we arrived, we had almost total 
     power,'' Borge said. ``And we didn't know how to handle total 
     power. What came hand in hand with total power was the 
     mistaken belief that we were never mistaken. This made us 
     behave in an arbitrary way. And the most grave and arbitrary 
     abuses were made in the countryside, where the peasants began 
     to join the contras.''
       Sandinista leaders agree that the contras would never have 
     grown into such a huge and destructive force--some 22,000 by 
     the war's end--if the U.S. hadn't been arming and supplying 
     them. But most of them also admit that the revolution made 
     the war possible by alienating hundreds of thousands of 
     peasants.
       ``During the 1984 election, we had a rally down in the 
     southern part of the country, and they had this peasant--a 
     contra who had surrendered--make a symbolic presentation of a 
     riffle to me,'' Ramirez recalled. ``We always talked about 
     the contras as American mercenaries, but this guy standing 
     across from me was not some big gringo Ranger. He was a 
     simple peasant.
       ``Before that, my understanding of the counterrevolution 
     had been intellectual. But here, right before me, was the 
     face of the country. This poor man. . . . He thought we were 
     going to take away his children, interfere in his family, 
     butt into his religion, make him work in a collective.
       ``And this was the man that the revolution was supposed to 
     be for! You know, the revolution was headed by intellectuals. 
     We did it in the name of the workers and peasants, but were 
     all intellectuals. And in the end , most of the peasants were 
     against us.


       end of game--sandinistas stunned by scope of election loss

       The war eventually forced the Sandinistas to agree to 
     internationally supervised elections. They lost--to Violeta 
     Chamorro, publisher of La Prensa, one of their most important 
     allies during the war against Somoza--in a landslide that 
     stunned them.
       ``We had a naive syllogism: If it was a revolution for the 
     poor, then the poor couldn't be against us,'' Ramirez said. 
     ``But we should have known much earlier. We started out with 
     90 percent of the population behind us. By 1985, there were 
     400,000 Nicaraguans who had fled to Miami, several hundred 
     thousand more in Costa Rica and Honduras, and we still only 
     got 60 percent of the vote. The Nicaraguan family was 
     split.''
       Since the 1990 election, the Sandinistas have lost three 
     more elections (one presidential, two for local offices 
     across the country) by nearly identical margins. The party 
     newspaper is closed, the party television station under the 
     control of Mexican investors. Two major scandals--one over 
     the way Sandinista leaders looted the government on their way 
     out of office in 1990, another over allegations that Daniel 
     Ortega molested his stepdaughter for nine years, beginning 
     when she was 11--have been sandwiched around countless minor 
     ones.
       Those who govern now say the Sandinistas left nothing 
     behind but wreckage. Nicaraguan Vice President Enrique 
     Bolanos, a lifelong opponent of the FSLN whose farm was 
     confiscated during the revolution, says it will take decades 
     to undo the damage the Sandinistas did to the Nicaraguan 
     economy.
       ``Per capital income dropped to the levels of 1942 when 
     they were in charge,'' he said. ``The trade deficit, which 
     had always hovered around zero, went up to $400 million to 
     $600 million their first year, and its stayed there ever 
     since. Even if we get the foreign debt they left us under 
     control--it went from $1.3 billion to $12 billion under 
     them--that trade deficit will kill us.''
       Many of the party's most loyal militants--including 
     Ramirez, Belli, Hassan and Cruz--have deserted it. Some are 
     harshly critical of what the revolution left behind. Hassan, 
     who has left politics and now manages a garment factory, said 
     that what he saw during the revolution has soured him on the 
     political left.
       ``I think the left equal populism, which equals give-me-
     give-me-give-me,'' he said. ``What we bred here are people 
     who say, `I'll go to demonstrations and shout, but I won't 
     work. I want a salary, but I won't work. I want food, but I 
     won't work. I want a house, but I won't work.
       But others believe that the revolution left some things of 
     lasting value, including a sense that even poor people have 
     inalienable rights.
       ``Nicaraguan peasant will look you straight in the eye,'' 
     said Alejandro Bendana, once Daniel Ortega's top foreign 
     policy adviser, now estranged from the party. ``That wasn't 
     always true. When I was a kid, they walked up to you, bowing, 
     humble and deferential, saying boss this and boss that. That 
     is a legacy of the revolution.''
       Bendana, like many past and present Sandinistas, believes 
     that the revolution would have been worthwhile even if it 
     never accomplished anything but getting rid of the Somozas.

[[Page S9376]]

       ``Our parents had failed to get rid of the bastard, and we 
     were the ones who did it,'' he said. ``And to get rid of the 
     dictatorship, armed force was required. Banging pots and pans 
     in the streets, like in the Philippines, that wasn't going to 
     do it.''
       Ortega, somewhat paradoxically, believes that the election 
     that ousted him proves that the Sandinistas moved the country 
     forward.
       ``When we lost the election, we gave up the government,'' 
     Ortega said. ``That hadn't happened before. What we have here 
     is a typical bourgeois democracy--not a true people's 
     democracy--but I still think it represents an advance for 
     Nicaragua.''
       But being remembered as a transitional asterisk in 
     Nicaraguan history was not what the Sandinistas dreamed of in 
     1979, when they boasted that they would do nothing less than 
     construct a New Man, free of the chains of ego and 
     selfishness.
       ``I always thought the revolution would be a transcendental 
     story in human development,'' mused Ramirez earlier this 
     month. ``But it wasn't, was it?''

                          ____________________