Rehearsing the invasion
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Managua
Up in the mountains of Nicaragua peasants have been busy stockpiling sharp rocks and making bows and arrows in preparation for the Yang ui invasion. Meanwhile here in Managua Russian AK- 47 rifles have been handed out to teenagers who have been let off school to help defend their capital.
But although the people pretend to believe that the Americans are really com- ing, last week's emergency mobilisation had the feeling of a dress rehearsal. In- deed, there was something of a festive atmosphere in Managua when the decrepit Soviet tanks lumbered out into the streets and positioned themselves prominently all over the city.
Well-wishers swarmed around the crews and the children got all excited clambering into the turrets and sliding down the gun barrels. One tank commander, looking ridiculous in his Siberian earflaps under the tropical sun, was quite unable to control them. But at 15 years old he was not much bigger than they were.
Over at a nearby anti-aircraft battery I saw an American television crew being greeted effusively by a sub-lieutenant. He ordered his men to look sharp and go through their battle drill while the camera- men rushed around taking spectacular footage of the Sandinista people's artillery. When that pantomime was over they all got 'together and had a good natter about the American baseball league.
There is stress in Managua, but it has little to do with the invasion scare: it is because the whole transport system has broken down and you are driven to cut- throat tactics to board a bus. You also have to fight to get off it again, for everybody piles in at both ends and leaves you wedged in the middle until you're way past your stop. Taxis are little better for they go on 'routes' known only to themselves, and sometimes leave you stranded in dingy corners of the ruined city.
You can find a few sharks who'll take you where you want to go for $20, though the price depends on how you change your money. Just outside the Intercontinental Hotel there is a little hut that is authorised to change currency by the Nicaraguan Central Bank. Although the official rate is 28 cordobas to the dollar they will usually start at 40 and are prepared to bargain. Up against the experienced haggler the Cen- tral Bank will compromise at as much as 80. But a French journalist told me he went straight to the top and got 250 from a senior government official, which was also convenient, as the minister accepted traveller's cheques. This ludicrous exchange rate, now nearly 300, has made Nicaragua perhaps the cheapest country in the world and a resort for travellers, journalists, revolutionary charlatans, and slobs in general. While the civil war has forced the Nicaraguan people onto emergency rationing, and basic pro- ducts like milk and toothpaste are practi- cally unavailable, hordes of foreigners come to Managua to stuff themselves, for half a dollar, at the Intercontinental's notorious 'swine buffet'.
So shameless have things become that a major party called for the deportation of foreigners in its recent election campaign. Even so, not all of them are hogs and gluttons. There are many who valiantly resist the temptation to defraud the Nicara- guan people and continue to change money at the official rate. Some, particularly the Latin and southern European communists, last only a few days before appetite pre- vails over ideology, but the Germanic types seem to be able to hold out inde- finitely. They are to be found in the modest comedores (eating houses) of Managua's Colonia Bolonia and their commitment to the revolution is unquestionable.
Many belong to 'international brigades' and are now on their way to the hills to save the coffee harvest. Others are doctors who have helped bring down Nicaragua's infant mortality rate from one of the highest in Latin America to one of the lowest, or engineers who show co- operatives how to keep their American tractors running in the face of a US blockade of spare parts. Good people, all of them: and while the world is fretting over the idiotic invasion scare they are confronting the very real war waged by the US on Nicaragua — the economic suffoca- tion, and the daily slaughter of peasants by marauding guerrillas.
The Reagan Administration has never come to terms with the Nicaraguan revolu- tion, and on the grounds that the Sandinis- tas have been 'exporting revolution' to El Salvador — which at one stage they may well have done — it has been organising
training and financing a counter- revolutionary force on the northern bord- er. These so-called contras are a motley crowd of Indians, kulaks and Somoza guardsmen, who are reviled in Nicaragua, and have about as much support as the British National Front.
The Sandinistas, however, have played their cards badly. Not only have they been strutting about in military uniforms and calling each other Comandante, evoking an obvious comparison with Castro's Cuba, but they have also been collecting heavy and potentially offensive Soviet weapons. It is true that their 120 or so T-54 and T-55 tanks are of Korean vintage, break down all the time, and have a nasty habit of crushing their gunners if the turret is turned when the tank is moving. But it still looks bad. It lends credence to the Amer- ican claim that Nicaragua really does have designs on Honduras and El Salvador. The tanks cannot be justified by the contra war, for they are useless in the mountainous terrain where the contras are active, nor would they offer much protection against an American invasion, being sitting ducks in a lightning air attack. But the Sandinistas can't resist these huge hunks of metal as a symbol of strength and defiance, and now they have set their hearts on MiG-21 fighter jets. Actually there is more logic to the MiGs than the tanks, for the Sandinistas have n° modern aircraft with which to shoot down the transport planes supplying contra attacks deep inside Nicaraguan territory. Even so, Sandinistas would have been better advised to choose a rather More discreet fighter, for though the MiG-21 is already obsolete in advanced warfare and would last only minutes against an Amer- ican F-16, the Reagan Administration long ago singled out the MiGs as the last straw and a pretext for armed confrontation. Not that armed confrontation would mean invasion, as everybody seems to be saying; it would mean only a 'surgical' strike on the aircraft or a maritime block- ade. But in any case we haven't even got that far yet. It came to light that the Russian cargo ship which recently docked at the port of Corinto wasn't carrying MiGs after all. The whole story was nonsense, pure disinformation put out by Washington to eclipse the Nicaraguan elections and divert attention from the landslide victorY of the Sandinistas at the polls. The effect has been that of a subliminal advertising campaign. Most Americans will now tend to associate Nicaragua with Russian MiGs and continue to see the country as a military outpost of the Soviet Union. What they will not realise is that two weeks ago the Nicaraguan Pe°P1,c defied the calls for an election boycott an in an open contest between seven parties turned out massively to cast their votes. Nor will they realise that the Sandinistas won 67 per cent of those votes and that Nicaragua now has the only democraticallY elected Marxist government in the world' That has passed unnoticed.
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