Once More onto the Beach

By Kenneth W. Banta

War games in Honduras, war jitters in Nicaragua

As 24 landing craft surged into the shallows off the white sandy beaches, carrying hundreds of U.S. Marines in tropical camouflage gear, Harrier jump jets streaked overhead. A six-ship task force was anchored two miles out to sea, while clattering Cobra helicopter gunships provided cover. After landing, the troops pressed forward through swampy terrain. In about two hours they had seized their first objective, an airport twelve miles inland.

Less than four weeks after the invasion of Grenada, U.S. soldiers once again had launched an amphibious assault in the hemisphere. But this time no one shot back. The landing at Puerto Castilla on Honduras' northern coast marked the beginning of a seven-day training mission with 700 Honduran troops. It was part of a series of joint military exercises involving the U.S. and its staunchly anti-Communist ally. Though billed as routine, Big Pine II, as the exercises are called, reflected a major buildup of U.S. military might aimed largely at intimidating Honduras' southern neighbor, Marxist-led Nicaragua.

The choice of Honduras was yet another sign of that country's growing role in the Reagan Administration's Central American strategy. Since 1982, the government of President Roberto Suazo Cordova, 56, has allowed American-backed anti-Sandinista rebels to use Honduras as a staging ground for raids into Nicaragua. The U.S. has built new concrete runways capable of landing C-130 military transport planes and has installed a radar station on Tiger Island in the Gulf of Fonseca, while 6,000 Honduran soldiers, roughly half the nation's army, are being taught American field tactics. In turn, U.S. troops have gained valuable jungle-combat training. The arrival of 1,800 Marines last week brought the number of U.S. combat troops in Honduras to more than 5,000.

Already shaken by the assault on Grenada, the Sandinista regime responded to last week's U.S. muscle-flexing by claiming that an invasion was imminent and stepping up the nation's preparations for war. Since the beginning of the month, Managua has echoed with the sound of rifle fire as civilians crawled on their stomachs and practiced elementary combat maneuvers under the eye of military instructors. Last week large headlines in the government-controlled newspaper Barricada and the pro-government daily Nuevo Diario shouted EVERYONE TO THE DEFENSE and BOMBS CAN FALL ON EVERYONE. Radio stations regularly announced that militia units on the Honduran border were standing by for an air-and-land invasion expected at any moment.

The alert may have been part of an attempt by the Sandinista regime to revive flagging popular support for its policies. But Nicaraguan leaders also seemed convinced that an attack is in the offing. Officials said they would guarantee the safety of all foreign nationals, including U.S. embassy personnel. Such assurances were presumably aimed at preventing invaders from justifying an assault on the grounds of rescuing citizens. During a visit to Panama for talks with President Ricardo de la Espriella, Nicaraguan Junta Leader Daniel Ortega Saavedra laid out a number of possible scenarios for an invasion, including an incursion by rebels based in Honduras or Costa Rica.

As if to confirm some of Ortega's worst fears, the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.) announced last week that it had launched a new "general offensive" against the Sandinista government. Meanwhile, a Nicaraguan radio station claimed that several hundred contras who support former Sandinista Leader Eden Pastora Gomez were massing on the Costa Rican border. The rebels said they were fighting in ten separate locations in southern Nicaragua, though the Sandinistas acknowledged fighting in only one. The rebel announcement came as something of an embarrassment to Costa Rican President Luis Alberto Monge. Even as the attacks were under way, Monge had been reaffirming that Costa Rica was "permanently neutral" in international conflicts.

U.S. officials professed bemusement over Nicaragua's anxiety. The successful invasion of the flyspeck island of Grenada, they insisted, provided no precedent for an offensive against Nicaragua's well-armed and well-trained combined regular army and militia force of 100,000. "The fears of the government are exaggerated," insisted U.S. Ambassador Anthony Quainton in Managua. "You have to understand that Grenada and Nicaragua are completely different countries and situations." Said a State Department official in Washington: "It's a terrible idea. It's impractical and impolitic. It's also absolutely unnecessary."

Still, the rattled nerves in Managua could only have pleased the Reagan Administration in Washington, which has long sought to curb Nicaraguan support for leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The four nations that form the so-called Contadora Group (Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela) announced last week that all the region's governments, including even a wary Nicaragua, had agreed on a schedule for substantive discussions about a comprehensive Central American peace plan. If the Big Pine II exercises and Grenada invasion have encouraged Nicaragua's cooperation, said a State Department official tartly, "so much the better."

A negotiated settlement remains only a distant possibility. In the meantime, the Reagan Administration remains committed to a strategy of countering Nicaraguan-sponsored insurgency with covert CIA support for anti-Sandinista rebels. That policy has drawn increasing attacks on Capitol Hill from legislators who believe the real aim is to destabilize and, if possible, overthrow the Nicaraguan regime. Led by Massachusetts Democrat Edward Boland, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, opponents in the House tried to block money for further covert aid to the rebels. A Senate bill, however, retained funding for continued covert support. After a compromise reached last week, the contras will receive $24 million.

The Administration has also come under mounting criticism in Congress and elsewhere for its policies in El Salvador. Since 1979, right-wing death squads that are backed, and in many cases staffed, by the military and by government security forces have murdered thousands of people suspected of leftist sympathies. Stung by charges that it has not pressed the government of Alvaro Magana hard enough on the matter, the White House sent Under Secretary of Defense Fred Ikle to San Salvador two weeks ago to demand action. In a major policy statement delivered in Dallas after his return, Ikle declared that "the death squads of the violent right and the death squads of the guerrillas fight not each other but the democratic center and the government that seeks to hold fair and open elections." He added: "If we want to help democracy and human rights, both must be defeated."

This message apparently was not enough to prevent yet another string of atrocities. In Copapayo, some 45 miles northeast of San Salvador, survivors told foreign journalists last week that troops of El Salvador's elite Atlacatl battalion herded at least 20 women and children into a house, then turned machine guns on them. In a separate incident near by, the soldiers reportedly fired on a group of more than 30 civilians, killing some outright and forcing others into a lake, where they drowned. Said a guerrilla boastfully: "This type of behavior reflects the agony of an army that can't defeat us on the battlefield."

--By Kenneth W. Banta.

Reported by Timothy Loughran/Managua and David DeVoss/Tegucigalpa

With reporting by Timothy Loughran/Managua, David DeVoss/Tegucigalpa This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.