Posted on 03/20/2005 10:12:13 PM PST by Righty_McRight
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, March 20 - Raising tensions that have revived the politics and personalities of the cold war, the United States has suspended military assistance to Nicaragua because it has failed to move forward with the destruction of an arsenal of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles that the Bush administration considers a possible terrorist threat.
American diplomats here said Friday that about $2.3 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Army had been suspended pending the destruction of the Soviet-made SA-7 missile systems. In Washington, a senior State Department official confirmed that "part of our security assistance is on hold" while an agreement is worked out, and added that Nicaragua had made a commitment to President Bush to scrap the missiles.
"These missiles are not necessary to a country that is not at war," Peter M. Brennan, the deputy chief mission at the United States Embassy, said to reporters here. "These missiles represent a danger to the world. We know that terrorists are trying to get them."
Defense Minister José Adán Guerra said he had not been formally informed of a suspension. He said, however, that he had received "verbal notification" and that he intended to travel to Washington in the coming days to seek a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The suspension in aid, Mr. Guerra said, sent a chill through relations that have taken more than a decade to thaw, and stirred up old anti-American resentments that linger just beneath society's surface. In the 1980's, Nicaragua was a principal battleground of the cold war. President Reagan suspended aid to this country, imposed an economic boycott and sponsored a guerrilla war against Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
The United States restored diplomatic relations after the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990. But Mr. Guerra said formal relations with the Nicaraguan Army, which remains controlled by former Sandinista fighters, were not restored until two years ago when the Nicaraguan government sent a small but symbolically important unit to serve with United States forces in Iraq. Ties between the countries were recently strengthened when Nicaragua agreed to join the Central American Free Trade Agreement, or Cafta, with the United States.
"This is not the way you treat friends," Mr. Guerra said Friday. "We have supported the United States in Iraq. We have supported them on Cafta. And this is what we get for it?"
The pressure on Nicaragua began last year, after a meeting here between President Enrique Bolaños and Mr. Rumsfeld. In that meeting, Mr. Bolaños said his government had destroyed 1,000 surface-to-air missiles in 2004. And after a sting operation in January by United States and Nicaraguan authorities discovered two Nicaraguan men trying to sell an SA-7 on the black market, Mr. Bolaños quickly reassured the Americans that he would proceed with those efforts.
Then those plans were foiled by the Sandinistas, who were led by Daniel Ortega, one of the region's most embattled cold warriors. Even though Mr. Ortega has run unsuccessfully in the last three presidential elections, and ranks lower than other leaders of his own party in political polls, his political machine still has vast influence in the country's courts and electoral institutions.
An unlikely alliance between conservative legislators of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party and leftist legislators of Mr. Ortega's Sandinista National Liberation Front enacted a series of measures aimed at weakening Mr. Bolaños. Among them was a measure requiring the president to get congressional approval to destroy military weapons.
In February, during a celebration to commemorate the assassination 71 years ago of the Nicaraguan revolutionary leader Augusto C. Sandino, Mr. Ortega charged that the discovery of the SA-7 missile on the black market had been orchestrated by the United States to inflame fears in Washington. And he condemned the United States' pressure on the military as part of an effort to undermine Nicaraguan sovereignty.
That position has deeply resonated in this country, where United States-backed conservative governments in the past 15 years have been widely condemned as being as corrupt as the Ortega administration they succeeded and have failed to lift this country out of extreme poverty.
Mr. Ortega is also hoping the political tide that has moved Latin America decidedly to the left will also propel him back to power in the presidential elections next year. Political analysts and diplomats suggested that the threat of an Ortega presidency was as alarming to Washington as Nicaragua's missile arsenal.
"There are forces in Washington, like Ortega, who are still living in a cold war warp," one diplomat said, "They have put away all the carrots and begun beating this country with a stick."
Vidaluz Meneses, a Nicaraguan poet and rights advocate, said Mr. Ortega's electoral chances would depend on the power of this country's memory, or lack of it.
"Many people fear him, because he led this country through a brutal war against the Americans," she said. "Many other people admire him for the very same reason."
Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
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