Endorsed by Kinnock
XTeil Kinnock can now be considered a 1 specialist on Central American affairs: he knows where Nicaragua is. He also seems to know the difference between the 'Contadora' peace initiative, led by Mexico and Venezuela, and the Contras, who are of course the CIA-backed guerril- las fighting against the Sandinista govern- ment of Nicaragua. The same could not be said of Sir Geoffrey Howe when he visited Central America last autumn. He talked authoritatively about the 'Contradora Group'. Jet lag perhaps? Mr Kinnock says the Sandinistas should be given a chance. He is right. If the Reagan Administration would only give them enough rope, instead of getting tangled up in the noose itself, the Sandinistas would most surely hang them- selves.That's not quite what Mr Kinnock meant, admittedly. He saw a little country that had been bullied and humiliated by the United States all this century and is now being brought to its knees for its defiance and flirtation with communism. Anyhow, to say that the Reagan Adminis- tration should leave the Sandinistas alone is reasonable enough. The respectable wing of the Contras, fighting to save a betrayed revolution, has all but disinte- grated and the cause is now squarely in the hands of men who have recently taken to bayoneting coffee-pickers and gunning down bridesmaids. But Kinnock also says he sees encouraging signs of 'democracy' and 'pluralism' in Nicaragua. Tomas Borge, the Interior Minister and godfather of the revolution, has told us what he means by democracy: 'The masses put forward their demands. The PSLN proces- ses and synthesises these demands and returns them in the form of concrete tasks that the masses, using their inexhaustible creative capacity, put into practice.' Apd as for 'pluralism', Bayardo Arce, one of the 'nine commanders' in the national directorate, has given us a hint of what to expect: 'We are discussing', he said in a private speech that was secretly tape- recorded, 'first, the idea of putting an end to all this artifice of pluralism; that if there is a socialist and communist party, a social Christian and social democratic party etc, which have been useful to us up to now, that time has come to an end.' Enthused by the discovery that Nicaragua is not yet a tyranny, Mr Kinnock has failed to perceive his hosts"artifice'.
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