Funding for Frontline is provided by this station and other public television stations
nationwide and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Tonight on Frontline, Nicaragua, where the U.S. is acting against a government it doesn't
like and fighting a war by proxy.
At the beginning, people came in full of them and beggar and thought, you know, here we
are, the dragon slayer.
The political war in Washington and the real war in Nicaragua.
This is the diabolical nature of the thing, using people to wage a war with little political
cost for the adventurer.
Tonight, War on Nicaragua.
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York,
WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston.
This is Frontline with Judy Woodruff.
Good evening.
Once more, a political drama is unfolding in Washington.
In the months to come, as Congress investigates the Iran arms scandal, we will follow, in
numbing detail, a trail of arms and money from the White House to Tehran, from Switzerland
to Miami.
And finally, it seems, to Central America and the Nicaraguan contras.
When the scandal first broke, Frontline correspondent William Greider was in Nicaragua examining
a different story, but one that he believes really lies at the heart of the crisis in
the White House.
A story that the congressional committees will not examine in full, the story of the
policy that led up to the present scandal.
His report is called War on Nicaragua.
It is produced by Sherry Jones.
The war is fought in places like this, Miraflores, a mountaintop cooperative in northern Nicaragua.
Here, when they are planting beans or working the cornfields, one peasant must always stand
guard.
From the cover of mountain mists, the contras often attack.
When the contras came, the women were confused and afraid and thought that they were our
own people.
One of the contras looked into a window in the house where the women were hiding.
He probably thought that the guards were inside, so he threw a grenade through the window.
He killed five people altogether, including two children and a teacher.
The child who died was my son and the teacher my sister.
No Americans are fighting or dying here, yet it is very much America's war.
Six years into the conflict, some basic questions still need to be asked.
Why is the United States engaged in this struggle?
What is different about this war?
Why these people?
Why here?
There are only three million people in Nicaragua.
Per capita income is $720 a year.
This is what is known in Washington as third world poverty.
Yet these people live close enough to the United States to see how we live and to mimic
the symbols of our prosperity.
Since July 1979, Nicaragua has been ruled by the revolutionary Santa Nista Front, a
government that has committed the nation to radical change, for better or worse.
You're asking how life has changed since the revolution?
Twice as good, 40,000 times.
We have land, we have money, we have technical knowledge.
Compared to what we had yesterday when we had nothing, we are the owners of the land
today.
We have, as I was telling my friends, a little bit of everything.
Many feel threatened by the changes, including some in Nicaragua's middle class, like this
woman who owns her own bakery.
Now you pay for everything.
Everything is taxes.
Everything is limited.
Everything is rationed.
You go to buy something for your family, and they give you a little loaf of bread to last
for a week.
Lies.
They say things that make them sound good, so people will say they're good.
But they're lies.
They are monsters of evil.
The Santa Nista revolutionary goals are planted in barren soil.
It is a nation of peasants who work with oxen instead of tractors, machetes instead of machines.
Like the other small nations of Central America, it is a country that is devoutly Catholic,
underdeveloped, desperately poor.
These are the people who must learn a new national anthem, proclaiming their own independence
and their attitude toward the U.S. as well.
The Yankee, they sing, the enemy of mankind.
Nicaragua is a country with only five elevators, yet it became a central preoccupation of American
foreign policy.
The questions that usually dominate Washington debate about the nature of the Santa Nistas
and their political opposition in Nicaragua are not the focus of this program.
Instead, we will examine a more provocative question about ourselves, about how the United
States claimed the right to intervene against a sovereign government it didn't like, and
about the methods it decided to use this time, both at home and on the battlefield.
It all started six years ago, in the first days of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
January 20th, 1981, the new president's promise to restore America's strength is designed
to erase lingering memories of Vietnam and to demonstrate to the Soviet Union that America
is no longer paralyzed.
At the beginning, people came in full of vim and vigor and thought, you know, here we are,
the dragon slayers, we're going to go out and slay all the dragons, and Ronald Reagan
is going to go down as the greatest president around, and, I mean, Ronald Reagan didn't
lose that election, he won it with a fairly nice mandate, and his whole campaign was anti-Soviet.
John Carbo was a foreign policy advisor to the new administration.
We're saying stay out of our hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine still applies.
Go off and fight your war somewhere else, leave us alone.
The new administration views the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as the world's central struggle.
To the Reagan team, the cluster of tiny nations in Central America seems the right battleground.
The president has put it very well when he said that the future of a hundred million
people from Panama to the open border on our south is at stake, and I think one thing we
Americans need to do is to take Marxist-Leninists seriously.
They view all of Central America as needing to be liberated, and all the Sandinistas leaders
have said that.
So if...
Constantine Mengus was the National Security Council's chief Latin America strategist.
Because they would now be smuggling thousands of young Nicaraguan soldiers disguised as
communist guerrillas from El Salvador into El Salvador and Guatemala, then they would
say, well, we've got to have a big shield to deter Guatemala and El Salvador from hitting
us directly, and then when they had those countries under communist control, with Mexico
having 80 million people, they would need an even bigger army from all of the Central
American countries as they start to work with the Mexican internal far left to destabilize
Mexico.
And then, of course, when they're at our border, they'd need an even bigger army because then
they'd be undertaking operations against the United States directly.
And so you see, in the logic of Marxist-Leninist movements that see the entire planet as needing
to come under communist control, they will always need to have a huge army.
When the Sandinistas triumphed, they did not disguise their contempt for the United States.
For 35 years, America had supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship here.
For decades, it had attacked Latin revolutions.
They expect the same.
Before Reagan came to power, we'd heard his political positions, and we knew the new government
will be a threat to Nicaragua.
It made hope more distant.
It didn't kill it because you can't kill hope, but it made it more distant.
And we were sure that when the Reagan administration took office, we will be faced with aggressive
policies bent on destroying the Nicaraguan revolution.
The Sandinistas declare solidarity with a Latin revolution that has survived Cuba and
Fidel Castro.
To Washington policymakers, this is a portent of Soviet influence.
To Nicaragua, it is a declaration of independence.
Nicaragua demands, doesn't beg, but demands a new type of relationship.
On the 19th of July, Miguel Descoto is the foreign minister of Nicaragua.
Enough is enough.
From now on, we want friendship.
That means we want to relate on the basis of sovereign equality and legal equality.
We may be very small, we are very small and impoverished, but we believe that we're entitled
to the full exercise of our sovereignty.
We do not accept this status that the U.S. government would like, has imposed, and would
like to maintain over us, the status of a backyard nation.
The question is how the two countries will work out their differences, by force or by
diplomacy.
And when the Sandinistas are caught supplying weapons to the guerrillas in neighboring El
Salvador, the United States is alarmed.
We were worried about the effect of their engaging in countries on their borders and
causing disruption.
Lawrence Pizzullo was our ambassador to Nicaragua.
Their concern was that they were surrounded by countries who were enemy states, especially
to the north, who were going to be hostile to them.
Plus, they had romantic ties, and more than that, real ties with some of those guerrilla
groups who they knew and had befriended them during their period in the mountains.
Now what you had to do was get these two different positions and through a patient discussion
and understanding have them reach a point where there was an accord.
While the U.S. ambassador negotiates, unknown to him, officials in Washington are pursuing
a different strategy.
Six weeks after his inaugural, on March 9, 1981, President Reagan signs a secret directive.
Nicaragua is declared a threat to El Salvador, and ultimately to the United States.
On authority of the president's signature, the CIA sends its operatives into the field.
In the countries on Nicaragua's borders, small rebel armies have formed, financed by
wealthy exiles, and composed largely of veterans of Somoza's dreaded National Guard.
The CIA will secretly organize among the scattered groups, attempting to unify them into one
opposition force to confront the Sandinistas.
At the same time in Managua, Pazulo warns Ortega that if Nicaragua wishes to avoid conflict
with the United States and the loss of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, they must stop shipping
arms to El Salvador.
Ortega gets the message.
We spoke to Pazulo about the issue, and we asked that information be shared, because
we knew there was concern that Nicaraguan territory was being used to supply arms to
the Salvadoran guerrillas.
We kept in touch and dismantled the place being used for the transport.
This administration has made strong representations to the Nicaraguans to cease...
In Washington, the State Department confirms that Nicaragua has stopped shipping arms.
Their response has been positive.
We have no hard evidence of arms movements through Nicaragua during the past...
But despite Nicaragua's compliance, the administration announces that it is cutting off economic
aid anyway.
I think it was a landmark decision, because it set a tone, it set a psychological benchmark
in the relationship, which was very difficult to ever recapture.
And that was my argument, don't do it.
You can always cut off that aid program.
We don't have to give them the money, we can keep that money for as long as we want.
Once you've done it, it's one of those acts you can't redo, you can't undo.
November 16th, 1981, the day the choice is made to deal with Nicaragua by force.
Reagan's National Security Council gathers for a secret session.
Some advisors will argue that the U.S. should send its own troops and swiftly eliminate
the Sanadistas.
But the president chooses a less dangerous approach, war by proxy.
He signs a secret directive with the stated purpose of stopping the flow of arms from
Nicaragua to El Salvador.
But it also authorizes the CIA to develop a paramilitary force and promises more money
and men later, as needed.
The goal was to get the Sanadistas out.
From the beginning?
From the beginning.
That was not what was said.
Well I can't say that, I mean I can't speak for the president, but I can tell you that
in the minds of all those people around him, wherever they are, the so-called true Reaganites,
the goal was to move them out.
These are the forces to do it, an army organized and equipped by the American government.
After Vietnam, the American public has no stomach for direct U.S. intervention, where
American boys will do the donning.
So this army will be manned with foreign youth.
They're known as the counter-revolutionaries, or Contras.
The Contras are coming, they're at the crossroads, and they killed a young guy.
We couldn't spend the night at home last night, we couldn't even take sheets or blankets
with us, we had to sleep out last night, and we're just now heading back to our village.
By early 1982, a war has begun in Nicaragua.
The action then is described by a former Contra leader.
They were making small incursions, hit and run things, and it was just to attack isolated
places or kill border guards or harass people in a farm, things like that.
Those attacks have anything to do with interdicting arms between Nicaragua and El Salvador?
No.
In all the time I was involved with the Contras as a director, and before I was made director,
I was in very close contact with the Argentinians and the CIA.
They never talk about, we are going to stop the flow of weapons to El Salvador, to Honduras.
The border between Nicaragua and its neighbor, Honduras, where the Contras are based, becomes
a war zone.
The Sandinistas declare a state of emergency and begin to remove peasants from villages
in the area.
That includes the brutal relocation of the Mosquito Indians, providing the Contras with
a growing supply of recruits.
Many of the people at that time were mostly peasants, some of them have also their own
grievances against the Sandinistas.
The Sandinistas made many mistakes, they mishandled the minority groups in the East Coast.
So those people became very anti-government and ready to fight.
And then others were also brought by force, intimidated, or they are putting a position
they have no choice.
How does that work?
Well, for instance, a commander goes to a town in Nicaragua, or close to the border,
and he says, who are here Sandinista supporters?
Then they identify two or three.
He shuts them in public, then he asks the rest, do you want to follow me?
Well, most people follow them.
Within six months, by the summer of 1982, the nature of this war is clear.
The proxy army does not confront the Sandinista army in open battles.
Its targets are mostly peasant villages.
They took them away, they took our men away, all of them, they took them by force.
They took them with their hands tied behind them and a rifle right here.
Oh, you're crying, the Contra said, we'll give you something to cry about.
My baby was in the nursery, and the one who was taking care of her was wounded.
And when they tried to kill her, they killed the baby.
That's the worst part of what they're doing, killing us and children who don't know anything.
How can anyone believe they're committing these horrible crimes here, burning our farmlands,
killing our children, killing our friends?
In Washington, this is called low-intensity warfare.
It is quite different from the way the U.S. fought in Vietnam.
The targets of the attacks include rural health clinics, schools, and farm cooperatives.
Nicaragua now recognizes it is at war with the United States, although there are no American
soldiers in the field and no declaration of war by the U.S. Congress.
December 1982.
And you may think they will overlook the Contra's terrorist tactics, but you are wrong.
The American people are outraged.
A year after the Contra Army is organized, some members of Congress are upset by news
stories of attacks on villages in Nicaragua.
The fires of communism are burning in Nicaragua, but the administration has learned another lesson from Vietnam.
A war can be lost in Washington, as well as on the battlefield, so a move in the Congress
to cut off Contra funds means the proxy war has a public relations problem.
In Miami, the Central Intelligence Agency sets out to improve the image of its proxy army
by recruiting a moderate civilian leadership among Nicaraguan exiles.
In this hotel, the head of the agency's Central America team talks to Edgar Chamorro, an exiled
businessman.
There's a lot of selling of the Contra, you know, when I talk to these people, you know,
they were interested in seeing this as a product that has to be sold to the American consumer
or to Congress.
So there was a lot of salesmanship in the process.
They needed people.
But who was doing it?
The CIA.
Thirteen days before the crucial vote in Congress, the new Contra leadership, including Edgar
Chamorro, is presented to the press.
The CIA sat with us, we had yellow pad, you know, everybody, and we were, like, in a brainstorm
session, you know, saying, how do you talk to the press?
And then one of the CIA people, or whoever it was, will ask a question and says, what
do you say if they tell you, do you talk to your American officials?
I say, of course, we'll say, no, don't say that.
Say you never talk to them.
Or somebody else will drop a question, say, what if they ask you, where did your money
come from?
He says, well, from the United States, don't ever say that, you know, you have to say from
private sources.
Have you had any discussions with an employee of the U.S. government about your struggle?
And if so, when and about what?
No.
Yes.
Dr. Chamorro, with all due respect, you can't come here and expect us to believe that you
have no links with the military situation there.
This is not happening in a vacuum.
Well, we can tell what we really in the press, that I am being very honest to you.
I am not being...
What were they worried about in terms of the image of the FDN at that point?
Well, at that point, the concern was that they needed money.
The main concern I received from this man, we need money.
And the only people that have money here is Congress.
Congress buys the story, accepting the administration's claim that it is only stopping arms to El
Salvador, not making war against Nicaragua.
They authorized more money to the CIA, provided it is not used to overthrow the Sandinista
government.
The so-called Bolin Amendment has the effect of ratifying the secret war, not curbing it.
Congress was locked in a policy that it was faced with whether the question, whether or
not it wanted to pull the rug from under the executive.
And the executive knew that it had Congress.
And it was basically that simple a dilemma.
And from that point on, then, Congress has to look the other way on some other deceptions.
Well, from that point forward, Congress couldn't have indicated any grave surprise.
The administration's lack of candor, now fixed in law, will lead it into further evasions.
From the point of view of the Nicaraguans who fought there, they weren't hired to help
El Salvador or the United States.
They wanted to change the situation in their own country.
And they meant to change the government or to overthrow it, whatever was needed.
So we got into these contradictions.
And then we got into quibbling between the administration and Congress as to, well, are
you really abiding by not to overthrow?
And we said, yes, we are abiding, of course we are law abiding, and this is the law.
But then what are your purposes in Nicaragua if you don't want to overthrow?
We have no purpose.
We have no strategy.
Come on now.
The Bolin Amendment has no impact whatsoever on the war on the ground.
The Contra Army has grown to 7,000 men, mostly based in Honduras.
And from these camps, continued attacks on Nicaragua are launched.
The real war is now cloaked in legislative fiction.
Its true purpose is known, but is not officially acknowledged.
Mr. President, why don't we openly support those 7,000 guerrillas that are in rebellion
against it rather than giving aid through covert activity?
Because we want to keep on obeying the laws of our country, which we are obeying.
Everyone in Washington seems to be in on the joke, including the press.
Doesn't the United States want that government replaced?
No, because that would be violating the law.
But Mr. President, what is the American public to think?
In Honduras, the war strategy has another dimension.
In 1954, Honduras served as the staging area for U.S.-backed intervention against Guatemala
to its north.
Now Honduras makes itself available for the U.S. military venture aimed at Nicaragua to
the south.
Notice we've got everybody at attention before we run the Air Force through.
We've long depended on U.S. economic support.
This country has always been compliant to American wishes.
And this time, the Honduran military will receive what for them is a vast fortune, $80
million a year in U.S. funds for arms and training.
Honduras is the poorest country in Central America.
Per capita income is $560 a year.
Nearly half the people are unemployed.
Long ruled by the military, its democratically elected government is a new experiment.
We have democracy, a very fragile democracy.
As long as this conflict is here, I don't see how Honduras can really stabilize its
own democracy because you cannot destabilize Nicaragua without destabilizing Honduras and
the other countries in Central America.
You cannot have a conflict in Nicaragua without affecting the whole region.
But the warnings that the military money will strengthen Honduran generals at the expense
of democracy aren't welcome, especially to the U.S. ambassador.
They say that those in Honduras who are opposing U.S. policy as it is designed and is implemented,
we are going to regret it.
To be very frank with you, people at the U.S. embassy here only listen to those who support
them.
If you oppose them, you are anti-U.S., you are anti-American, they are not willing to
listen to you.
They want to hear their own music.
The Pentagon calls it building a shield for democracy.
Daniel Ortega calls it a practice session for the invasion of Nicaragua.
It is the most impressive show of American military force in Central America in more
than a decade, training exercises that will be staged again and again for years.
The Pentagon won't reveal what it is spending on the construction of airfields, base camps,
and other military installations here, but the total is in the hundreds of millions.
And neither the Honduran Congress nor the U.S. Congress is asked for approval.
There are training opportunities there not available in the United States.
You can't go out anywhere in the United States and build a big dirt airstrip.
Our people have been able to do that in Honduras.
Secondly, I will tell you that I had an ulterior motive in pushing that program in the beginning,
and that was to see Americans, North Americans from small towns and cities all over the country
come to Central America, Honduras specifically, and begin to learn something about our neighborhood,
the area just beyond our immediate neighborhood, believing that if we ultimately are going
to cement relationships and bridge a wide gap of understanding between North America
and Latin America, then more North Americans need to appreciate that part of the world,
appreciate the problems, and appreciate what we can do to assist in improving the welfare
of those people.
The growing American presence, military payrolls and GIs spending them, provides a faint flush
of prosperity to impoverished towns like Comayagua.
It is new money in a very poor country.
Most of you know the people are real friendly down here towards Americans.
So far, you know.
But the U.S. policy produces losers, too.
The Contra War uproots thousands of peasants.
And small coffee growers suffer huge losses because the Contra Army now occupies a substantial
portion of Honduras.
The Contras are becoming an armed nation within a nation.
It is a war that is not ours, a war that's been brought here by the United States against
Nicaragua.
Let them fight against Nicaragua over there, but don't bring it here.
Don't bring us problems and misery.
If the purpose of the U.S. military strategy here is to intimidate Nicaragua, its immediate
impact is on Honduras.
For the GIs, it is a short tour in a strange place.
We don't stop them in Honduras.
I'm going to tell you, they're going to be in Kansas.
It's already been shown on national TV that the Soviet Union has one philosophy and one
is philosophy only.
We will dominate the world.
When the United States don't want to dominate, we just want to sort of put our sixth sense
worth in here and there.
We've got to stay strong.
We've got to support these people.
We've got to take care of them because they are our Latin American brothers.
And yeah, I hope the first of the year we kick some ass in Nicaragua.
In Nicaragua, the war is not fiction.
It is real.
And the Sandinistas begin to mobilize for a long and larger conflict.
In 1983, all young men over the age of 16 are subjected to a national draft.
To its architects in Washington, that means the policy is working.
As the Sandinista communist government tries to find the young men to push into its military
to grow to those huge sizes, the government of Nicaragua will become more unpopular and
more young men will decide to join the freedom fighters.
And so I think what you'll see over time, provided the Congress supports the president,
is the mass defection of Sandinista army units composed of young men who want democracy and
don't want to serve in communist armies.
And I think that as the tide of expectations turns inside Nicaragua in this political and
military conflict, I think you will see the crumbling of the armed forces of the Sandinista
movement.
And then the government collapses in the vacuum.
And then how the things will work out existentially is something that history will tell us.
Along the border, however, Washington's expectations are not being met.
History is playing out differently.
Contrafield commanders complain that their troops are being underfed and poorly led.
41 of them will mutiny against their leader, Enrique Bermudez, charging corruption and
mismanagement and demanding his removal.
When their plea is rejected by the American advisors, some of them will abandon the struggle.
It's a shame all those years I wasted there.
I did what I could.
I contributed my share towards a victory.
Arlen Blandon was a Contrafield commander, known as Comandante Gorion.
Yes, I was there.
I fought.
But being manipulated this way and being sent there to be slaughtered, to be used as cannon
fodder, as we say, no way.
By the spring of 1983, events have forced the question, does this proxy army have any
real prospects for victory?
While the troops flounder in the field, the American managers are called together for
a reassessment.
I had a lengthy session with William Casey.
Frank McNeil was our ambassador to Costa Rica then and a participant in the strategy session
called by William Casey.
In the spring of 1983, in which the CIA official asserted that the Contras would be in Managua
in about six months, by Christmas time of 1983.
And I said that's nonsense, politely but strongly.
Was that a sincere belief of the operators that this was going to happen or were they
just building a reality that they could sell to the top?
I think probably there was a mixture of that among the operators.
If you're really committed, you believe what you want to believe.
It's also politically prudent to tell the boss what they want to hear.
In fact, a collective assessment by all American intelligence agencies predicts the Contras
will find it difficult to capture regional cities, let alone topple the Sandinista government.
In other words, on their own, the Contras can't win.
Here's where the role of William Casey becomes important.
He's the first director the CIA has ever had who is really more a politician than anything
else.
John Horton was a senior Latin America analyst at the CIA.
But the difference is with Mr. Casey that he runs the CIA and he can decide what the
CIA does and he can carry it to any limit he wants.
And I feel that his judgment on Central America and his desire to see administration policy
carried out there has meant, if not an abuse of the CIA, at least putting it back in the
position where it shouldn't ever be of being the main point element of administration policy.
The CIA director is running a war.
William Casey will not be deterred by either gloomy intelligence estimates or by squeamish
congressmen.
He has his intellect in one hand, then he has this feeling that, by God, these damn
Democrats are these liberals or these congressmen.
What gets him up there?
I mean, talking about the Soviet threat?
Well, yeah, and the Soviets getting away with things and the Sandinistas getting away with
it.
They're adding this little bunch of thugs confronting us and having their way.
Nicaragua and its army cannot be allowed to win, so the CIA escalates the war, taking
a direct role in the aggression.
From a mothership off the coast, the agency conducts its own attacks.
As detailed in this classified CIA document, dozens of sabotage missions are launched by
the agency's own employees, a special force of Latin mercenaries.
They are called Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets.
The missions were always controlled by the CIA.
Most of us who fought, who were, so to speak, the cannon fodder, were Honduran, but we were
controlled by the gringos.
They gave us the orders.
We were at their disposal.
While the mercenaries blow up refineries and mine harbors, U.S. pilots fly back up, firing
on Sandinista positions.
We sabotage harbors, refineries, shipyards, bridges.
We never use our own uniforms.
We use contra uniforms so that the foreign press will think the Contras were doing all
the work and the Americans could walk away with their hands clean.
The U.S. directed attacks on economic targets, as well as the mining of harbors, are defined
by international law as acts of aggression.
But the administration continues to claim its secret war violates neither congressional
restrictions nor national principles.
I think each victim is a tragedy, and it is part of war, and I think the moral responsibility
for every single victim rests with the communist government of Nicaragua, just as the responsibility
for every victim of World War II rests with Adolf Hitler, who initiated the conflict.
And so in the same way, the communist government of Nicaragua is responsible for the armed
resistance existing because it exists only because of their aggression.
By late 1983, the realities of war, as well as Sandinista mismanagement, have eclipsed
their original goals.
There is rationing instead of economic development.
Instead of solidarity, there is popular discontent.
I am the father of a son, and I can tell you that lots of men have died in the mountains.
It's not the fault of the people.
It's not the fault of the people of the United States or the people of Nicaragua.
It's the fault of the two governments that don't get along.
That's what's happening in Nicaragua.
There's not going to be any change for as long as the war between the contras and the
government goes on.
It's just going to get worse every day.
Communism is neither peace nor happiness.
We want to live in peace and happiness, and these guys are only bringing suffering to
Nicaragua.
The war threatens Sandinista's survival.
They mount a major diplomatic initiative trying to come to terms with Washington.
They told me that I could have a meeting with Secretary Schultz, so I went and I waited
for five days, never anywhere in the world, anywhere else had that happened.
I'm waiting there in the capital of the United States for five days, and then eventually
I'm told that the Secretary of State had to play golf in Atlanta, and would I not be amenable
to meeting with Langhor Motley?
And I said, well, yes, I came very far and I've been waiting many days, and so I met
with Mr. Motley and presented our proposal.
That weekend, Granada was invaded, and the Secretary, I think, was still at the golf
course in Atlanta.
After the invasion of Granada, the Sandinistas move to full mobilization.
The U.S. response has made it clear that it has no intention of negotiating a settlement.
A diplomatic agreement would leave the Sandinistas in power, and President Reagan wants them
out.
A nationwide civil guard is organized in addition to the 40,000 regulars in the standing army,
all in preparation for the feared American invasion.
More Soviet helicopters, tanks, and heavy equipment are added to the Sandinista arsenal,
and U.S. aggression becomes the pretext for depriving political opponents of civil liberties.
We wanted to make sure that the United States was aware.
A direct military intervention in Nicaragua would be no weekend affair, that it would
be no picnic, that if they came here, they would stay here, and if Americans die, then
that is a heavy political price to pay back home.
Because Americans have been somehow educated into believing that the lives of other peoples
really don't matter all that much.
They don't say it that explicitly, but they really react if it's an American.
It could be 100,000 Nicaraguans in, who cares, but if it's an American.
This is the diabolical nature of the thing, using people to wage a war with little political
cost for the adventurer.
So you were going to raise the cost?
And so, but if they came here, we had to develop.
We had to give their arms to the people.
In Washington, Congress is belatedly embarrassed and angered by revelations of the secret mining
of harbors.
But it still evades the tougher decision, whether to halt the irregular war.
All of us here are political animals, and we cast our votes with an eye on what the
repercussions will be in the next election.
If we think that the president's position is strong and that the American people are
going to give some credence to him, we want to hedge our bets a good deal.
It's a little harsh to say that's a gutless way to do things.
It's the politically expedient way that you do when you're acting in a political
view, as all of us are.
Once again, Congress compromises.
No more military aid, no more involvement by the CIA.
But they vote $27 million in so-called humanitarian aid, and that's enough to keep the proxies
army alive.
There's no doubt Congress could have stopped most of the aid to the Contras if it really
wanted to.
Now the administration argued that since we didn't think the forces that we were supporting
had the capacity to overwhelm the government of Nicaragua, it wasn't violating the law.
But that's the kind of nicety of argument that no rational human being could have accepted.
And one of the lessons of it was that if the president could get away with violating the
law that was on the books, it must mean that the presidency had a great deal of authority
to ignore law itself.
1985.
Armed with a powerful mandate, his landslide reelection victory, the president raises the
political stakes on Nicaragua.
He does not intend to quit.
Alfonso, Adolfo, and Arturo, would you kind of come up here and stand by my side?
I want to tell you something.
We're in this together.
You are the future of Central America.
Today I give you my solemn pledge.
I will not rest until freedom is given a fighting chance in Nicaragua.
The three contrapolitical leaders, recruited and supported by the CIA, become their army's
salesmen.
Opinion polls show a majority of the American public has never supported the war.
But now the president mounts a campaign to change their minds.
They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help.
You know the truth about them.
You know who they're fighting and why.
They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French
Resistance.
We cannot turn away from them.
No evil is inevitable unless we make it so.
We cannot have the United States walk away from one of the greatest moral challenges
in post-war history.
We will fight on.
We will win this struggle for peace.
Thank you for inviting me.
Viva Nicaragua Libra.
Thank you and God bless you.
The president's zeal fuels a new secret operation.
Run from inside the White House, armed shipments to the contras are arranged in defiance of
Congress and paid for with money from private sources, foreign governments, and profits
skimmed from the Iranian arms sale.
CIA veterans of Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs are recruited to handle the traffic.
Even one of their planes is shot down over Nicaragua and the operation begins to unravel.
The private management of the war will become a public controversy, but not the nature of
the war itself.
Nicaragua is slowly bleeding.
Washington's strategy, low-intensity warfare, means a war aimed mainly at civilians.
Misery, it is thought, will lead to political upheaval.
Scores of health clinics and schools are destroyed, refugees crowd into Managua into deepening
scarcity and poverty, and riding on a truck down a rural road is as dangerous as wearing
an army uniform.
God warned me.
I was afraid, but I didn't know why.
I didn't know what was going to happen.
I just give thanks to God that my son is still alive.
This is my son, and my husband is here too.
I don't know.
They tell me he'll only lose his foot.
It is a longer-term problem that the United States has taken on, and we have to be patient
enough to see it through.
But meanwhile, General, we are financing at least a modest level of proxy war against
the Nicaraguan government.
That's what I read in the newspapers.
I do not find that illogical or morally repugnant.
What is that supposed to accomplish if you have to wait for all of these other developments
in order for the Nicaraguan people to see that they don't want the Sandinista government?
It reduces the freedom of action of the Sandinista government.
It engages their armed forces.
It is a way to alert the Nicaraguan populace and develop a degree of popular support that
ultimately will result in an uprising and an overthrow of the government.
It is a way to speed along the process.
It does pose problems and put pressures on the Sandinista government that can be helpful
in reducing the length of time required for this, what I'm really talking about, as an
evolutionary solution of the problem.
You're talking about five or ten years, eh?
Perhaps.
We need to have that kind of patience.
By 1986, more than 20,000 Nicaraguans on both sides have died.
Another 20,000 have been wounded.
Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!
A majority of the American people still oppose funding the Contra War five years after its
beginning.
But Congressional Democrats, driven by a mad political logic, fear that if they end the
war, they will be accused of losing Nicaragua, as they were once accused of losing China
and Vietnam.
I don't believe there's a majority in the Congress or the country that counsels passivity,
resignation, defeatism in the face of this challenge to freedom and security in our own
hemisphere.
In August 1986, Ronald Reagan wins what for Washington is really a political war.
Congress votes $100 million for the Contras.
But the victory will be short-lived.
What began as a proxy war fought in a foreign land will come home as an epic scandal in
American politics.
The war goes on.
Our proxy army is in the field and fighting.
Honduras is armed.
The Sandinistas are stronger than ever.
And America's own fighting forces hover alongside.
Some things are not different this time.
Nicaragua appears, like Vietnam, to be a war without an ending.
Once again, innocent bystanders have been pulled into our struggle.
Once again, the U.S. government did not tell the truth about its intentions, nor did it
confront the real cause.
And once again, an American cause has become someone else's tragedy.
Most people have these fantasies, enemies, or things in their head.
So they are not fighting Sandinistas.
They are fighting themselves.
They are fighting their own dreams, their own fantasies.
And they get caught in this.
And they end up believing it.
So it's a kind of a self-deception, you know.
Because when you go and see the enemy, you find that these poor ignorant peasants, or
these poor women, children, and so on, you know, who their only problem is that they
are poor and ignorant, you know, and neglected.
So I just one day wake up and say, this is crazy, you know, this is insanity.
Because we are inventing reality in our heads.
And then we put it on people.
And then we say they are communists.
We need to label them to kill them.
In this war, the people who will be killed live in cooperatives like Miraflores.
Coming here, one discovers the nature of the Contra War and comes face to face with its
realities.
Silvio was a real special guy.
He was a peasant.
He was killed about 50 feet away from here.
Paul Rice is an American agronomist who works for the Nicaraguan government, helping the
peasant farmers here.
When I walked over and saw the trench where he died, I just wanted to cry.
He was here the day that this cooperative was attacked, and he grabbed a gun to defend
it just like any of the other members of the cooperative.
The next day, when we came up to evacuate the dead and the wounded, we found that Silvio
had been castrated and that his stomach had been sliced open with a bayonet.
He was alive.
This is our war.
It is fought in places like this.
But one thing is different this time.
In our war on Nicaragua, there are no American casualties.
Nicaraguans have done all the dying.
In recent weeks, the Contras have stepped up their military operations in Nicaragua.
The administration is hoping for some military success to help persuade a skeptical Congress
to vote for $105 million of additional aid by this fall.
I'm Judy Woodruff.
Please join me again for Frontline.
Good night.
Frontline, Box 322, Boston, Massachusetts 02134.
Frontline is produced for the Documentary Consortium by WGBH Boston, which is solely
responsible for its content.
Funding for Frontline was provided by this station and other public television stations
nationwide and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Schools, colleges, and other organizations interested in purchasing or renting video
cassettes of this program may call 800-424-7963 or write PBS video.
Post Office Box 8092, Washington, D.C., 20024.