It wasn't just the events in El Salvador that were ignored by the mainstream US media during ... Honduras and Nicaragua), only in Nicaragua was there a substantial effort to ... to see the contras debilitate the Sandinistas by forcing them to divert scarce resources toward the war and away from social programs." They didn’t know what was going to happen. The 1980s contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua sustained the external focus of theHonduran military. But once again, their lands were confiscated when the Sandinistas took power in the 1979 revolution that ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza. This period also strengthened ties between Honduras and the United States;this partnership remains the strongest in the region. Violeta Chamorro, an outspoken critic of the Sandinistas, was elected president. The Sandinistas put 14,000 to 16,000 troops along the border.” Advertisement In October, the contras and Sandinistas engaged in conventional combat in Honduras … Honduran officials were reluctant to admit to this acute embarrassment, but U.S. officials used it as proof of Sandinista aggression and were thus able to obtain … The Reagan administration decided it could solve the problem of El Salvador's civil war by giving covert aid to rebels fighting the Sandinistas. Coincidentally, that next Sunday morning there is fighting on the border. During this period the United States spent millions of dollars funding the Contras and military establishments in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. They discuss a plane used by Mario Calero, brother of Adolfo Calero, head of the FDN, to transport supplies from New Orleans to contras in Honduras. The victorious Sandinistas and their governing junta stood on the threshold of a Nicaragua eager to be transformed form the exploited, dependent, and terribly poor nation-state it had been virturally since its independence from Spain into a truly new society based on popular will and welfare. Thousands of foreigners were so inspired by Nicaragua's communist revolution that they flocked to help the country in the 1980s. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed. The Sandinistas were not attacking tha rebels but rather tha base camps and war* probably surprised at the large number of combatanti they encountered. Sandinistas vs. Contras “The Sandinistas are on a … Like the Somozas, the Contras were … The main contra force, the FDN, grew out of the Fifteenth of September Legion, which was established by Somoza’s National Guardsmen who had fled into neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala as the Sandinistas took power in July 1979. While the loans were officially for development, they were used to strengthen the authoritarian regime and increase the wealth of Somoza and his clique. In his entry for August 9, 1985, North summarizes a meeting with Robert Owen ("Rob"), his liaison with the contras. The Sandinista Popular Army (or People's Army; Ejército Popular Sandinista, EPS) was the military established in 1979 by the new Sandinista government to replace the National Guard, following the overthow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle.In post-Sandinista Nicaragua, it has been remolded into the National Army of Nicaragua. During the Reagan administration, and while Negroponte was ambassador to the country, "Contra" militias were trained in Honduras. Eugene Hasenfus was paid $3,000 a month (about $7,000 today), to fly C-123’s out of El Salvador and Honduras and into Nicaragua. The Sandinistas advocated gender equality, and women were also drawn into the fight against the Contras. The Sandinistas actually pursued some Contras back into Honduras and the Hondurans were very concerned. The results were grim. The Hondurans are very antsy about the fighting. The FPM claimed responsibility and claim to have killed one U.S. soldier and injured at least 20 U.S. troops in the past year during five attacks (State Department). There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. As was typical in guerrilla warfare, the Contras were engaged in a campaign of economic sabotage in an attempt to combat the Sandinista government. About 500,000 people were homeless, more than 30,000 had been killed, and the economy was in ruins. Norwegian People’s Aid began its long-term partnership collaboration in Honduras in 1985. 1. July 13, 1989 Seven U.S. Military Policemen of the 549th MP Co, from Panama, based in Honduras were injured, four seriously, in a grenade attack in La Cieba, Honduras. The eight years of fighting between Sandinistas and Contras resulted in 43,000 Nicaraguan casualties. Joaquín Cuadra was chief of staff, serving Defense Minister Humberto … The people behind the killing, however, remain at large. Western diplomats say the Sandinistas have moved as many as 1,000 soldiers into Honduras over the last three months and have as many as … In 2019, seven persons were convicted of Berta’s murder, including two employees of the hydro-electric project. When the Sandinistas lost power in 1990, most left, but not all. It wasn't just the events in El Salvador that were ignored by the mainstream US media during the 1970s. Thank you for the A2A, Michael The civil war in Nicaragua ended, and the leaders under Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the Somoza family dictatorship were overthrown in 1979 by the Sandinistas. The party of the Nicaraguan revolution was in fact officially founded in neighboring Honduras. In the ten years prior to the overthrow of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, US television - all networks - devoted exactly one hour to Nicaragua, and that was entirely on the Managua earthquake of 1972. The Sandinistas were a rebellion group in honor of Sandino. For most of the 20th century, Honduras was relatively free of the political violence that plagued its Central American neighbors: Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Some were in Sandinista concentration camps, and some were in refugee in Honduras. The armed resistance to the Sandinistas in Honduras initially called itself the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) and was known as the 15th of September Legion. But in the 1970s and 1980s, Honduras became the staging ground for the U.S.-backed … The party’s founders, Carlos Fonseca, Tomas Borge and Silvia Mayorga were outside the country when the FSLN was officially born. The FSLN Was Founded in Honduras. This was shortened to Contras, a label the anti-socialist forces chose to embrace. Near and across Nicaragua's border with Honduras were about a thousand anti-Sandinistas who had taken up arms, some of them former Sandinistas – not unlike the … Posters were used to rally support for the revolution inside and outside Nicaragua. Bush and Baker moved to demobilize the contra camps in Honduras and test Arias's prediction that a withdrawal of military pressure would lead to a Sandinista defeat in the election in light of the resentment toward some of their more heavy-handed policies and accumulated economic problems. Battalion 316 was responsible for the kidnapping, torture, and murder of hundreds of people suspected of undesirable political orientation. ... who were based in Nicaragua's neighboring countries like Honduras. After the latter left the country with most of their assets, the new Sandinista government was in dire need of funding in order to implement progressive policies and encourage industrialization. The Sandinistas subsequently withdrew without ever encountering the Honduran army. The Contras operated out of camps in the neighboring countries of Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. When Nicaragua took steps to comply with the Arias accord, reporters joined US officials in denigrating the moves. The ratio of Nicaragua coverage to that of Salvador was 5 to 1; Honduras, 22 to 1; Guatemala, 26 to 1. Any time the crew flew into Nicaragua they were … Inevitably, some Hondurans still got out of line, but they were handled by Battalion 316, the “CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun recalls. They established a junta that nationalized such industries as banking and mining, postponed elections, and moved steadily to the left, eventually espousing Marxist-Leninist positions. Eden Pastora and many of the indigenous guerrilla forces, who were not associated with the "Somozistas," also resisted the Sandinistas. Furthermore, the units involved in the incursion had been In the border area since the beginning of the year and wereosition to capitalize on the situation. The early economic gains of the Sandinistas were wiped out by seven years of sometimes precipitous economic decline, and in 1990, by most standards, Nicaragua and most Nicaraguans were considerably poorer than they were in the 1970s. In 1979 the Sandinistas launched an offensive from Costa Rica and Honduras that toppled Somoza. The following May it named a 47-member Council of State, which was to act as an … Whether this was going to evolve into a bigger fighting…. 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