The War That No One Can Cover

By John Borrell/Tegucigalpa

Driving to the sleepy Honduran market town of Las Trojes, the visitor travels along a dirt track that hugs the Nicaraguan border. The boundary is no more than a hundred yards away in most places, marked by three strands of barbed wire clinging to rotting posts hidden in chest-high grass. At a point where the road elbows its way out of forested hills and runs through open country, a Honduran soldier on patrol warns, "The Sandinistas will shoot at anybody." No wonder. Thousands of U.S.-backed contras have infiltrated that barbed-wire border to set up a base camp nearly 20 miles inside Nicaragua.

Las Trojes, however, is the closest journalists can get these days to covering the elusive war between the Sandinistas and the contras. For the past year, not a single reporter for a major U.S. publication or TV network has been allowed past Las Trojes to spend time with the contras. Questions about whether the contras received money from U.S. arms sales to Iran dominate the headlines and the Reagan Administration vows to seek continued aid for the rebels, but there is little reporting on exactly how the contras are faring in the field. Even after thousands of newly armed rebels began streaming into Nicaragua in December for what contra and U.S. officials describe as a make- or-break offensive, reporters have had no better luck. Says Newsday Correspondent Jim Mulvaney: "We are not really covering this war."

The news blackout is largely the work of Honduran President Jose Azcona Hoya, who took office in early 1986. Honduran officials have always been reluctant to admit that the contras launched attacks from Honduran soil, but Azcona has gone one step further by blocking access to camps on both sides of the border. Honduran soldiers guard the road from Las Trojes to the base inside Nicaragua, and the government has refused to issue passes to reporters. A few daring souls have sneaked into the camp by resorting to subterfuge or bush paths, but usually such ventures involve a grueling and dangerous ten- hour hike. Occasionally, Honduran officials will sponsor a press junket to the Las Trojes region, but only under tightly controlled circumstances. "It gets more frustrating all the time," complains a U.S. photographer based in Tegucigalpa. "You are just not allowed to get anywhere near any kind of action even if it is patently safe."

Rebel leaders and U.S. embassy officials in the region insist that they favor more coverage, but CIA officers apparently feel different. "There are turf and policy battles going on," says an observer familiar with the guerrilla operation. "The State Department wants to provide access for correspondents because it needs to convince Congress that continued contra funding is worthwhile. The CIA reckons the chances of winning are better without the press looking over its shoulder."

While these battles over access are waged, correspondents struggle to fill their notebooks with anything more than rumor or innuendo. They follow a well- trodden path to the contra offices in a sprawling bungalow on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. The spokesperson is charming but uninformative. On a good day, a journalist might run into Contra Leaders Adolfo Calero or Enrique Bermudez, but they are not always forthcoming.

Most reporters rely on Honduran sources or travel the four hours to Las Trojes to interview refugees from the border fighting. Some check in regularly at the U.S. embassy, a heavily guarded building on a hill overlooking downtown Tegucigalpa, but officials there are generally wary of the press. "This region is the kindergarten of overseas journalism," complains a veteran officer. "A lot of the people working in this area are young and committed and out to crucify U.S. policy to advance their careers. They don't care about ground rules or anything. So I am less open than I would like to be."

Reliable details about the war are equally hard to get from the Nicaraguans. Managua's numbingly ponderous bureaucracy is a major and perhaps deliberate obstacle. Newsmen in the capital can grow old filling out endless forms for everything from an interview with a minor official to permission to travel to contested areas. And they can grow even older waiting for official approval. Many visitors give up after a week or two and head for home. "The government says war, war, war, but they won't let us cover it," says Jan Howard, a Managua-based reporter for CNN. "The biggest complaint among the press here is lack of access to information."

Caught in a crossfire of deceit, red tape, censorship and logistics, truth is usually an early casualty in any war. Guerrilla conflicts are especially difficult to cover, since there are no front lines and battles are usually fleeting. Nonetheless, the secrecy surrounding the contras is both excessive and ill conceived. After all, the Reagan Administration has made the rebel effort a centerpiece of its foreign policy. Congress, which approved $100 million in military aid last summer, is likely to debate the issue of further help later this month. Without extensive and independent reporting about whether the contras are making progress, Congress -- and the public, for that matter -- will have no objective way to judge whether the cause is worthy of continued support. "Whistle-stop tours by Congressmen to a contra camp are obviously no substitutes for solid reporting on the war," says a European diplomat in the region. "Neither are guided tours put on by the Sandinistas."