"Say Uncle," Says Reagan

By Evan Thomas

For months, if not years, he has fairly itched to come out and say it, and last week he almost did. Asked at a nationally televised news conference if he wanted to "remove the Sandinista government in Nicaragua," President Reagan replied, "Well, remove it in the sense of its present structure," which he described scornfully as "a Communist totalitarian state" and "not a government chosen by the people."

Seeing that Reagan was on the verge of a startling policy pronouncement, the reporters asked four more times whether he wanted to topple the Sandinistas. < But now the President bobbed and weaved, aware of the uproar that such a declaration would cause. The Administration would not seek to overthrow the Sandinistas, he explained, if they agreed to "say Uncle" and put in place a more pluralistic form of government that would include the contra rebels who have been fighting the Marxist-Leninist regime. "You can say we're trying to oust the Sandinistas by what we're saying," he noted opaquely, and returned to his oral bashing of the Nicaraguan regime. "I don't think the Sandinistas have a decent leg to stand on. What they have done is totalitarian; it is brutal, cruel."

Reagan's remarks were part of a concerted effort to pressure Congress into restoring aid to the contras. Congress has specifically barred the use of U.S. funds "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua." Last October the lawmakers voted $14 million for the reb-els, but stipulated that the money not be spent until Congress took a second vote this March.

That vote now looms large not only to Reagan but to the Nicaraguan combatants. A decision to release the funds would mean lifeblood to the contras. A vote not to would be an enormous morale boost to the Sandinistas. Each side knows that a successful major offensive in the next few weeks could help sway fence-sitters on Capitol Hill, and fighting has accordingly intensified. The fitful guerrilla war has spread to eight of the country's 16 departments, and the death toll is mounting. In the first two weeks of February alone, the Sandinistas claimed 189 contra casualties.

To win the war of public opinion at home, Reagan is resorting to a tactic used by all Presidents: taking his case straight to the country. He launched the p.r. drive in a radio address two weeks ago. Reagan called the contras "our brothers" and compared them to such "freedom fighters" as Lafayette, Steuben and Kosciuszko, the French, German and Polish officers who fought with the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. Secretary of State George Shultz joined the offensive at a congressional hearing last week. He declared that the U.S. had a "moral duty" to rescue the people of Nicaragua, who had fallen "behind the Iron Curtain." That statement seemed a bit hyperbolic. It is not established that the Sandinistas take their orders from the Kremlin the way the East bloc countries do. But it is clear that they are mightily beholden to the Soviets for a steady stream of aid and arms, and highly attentive to the Cubans.

The real objective of Administration policy, said Shultz in a speech in San Francisco on Friday before the Commonwealth Club of California, is not to overthrow the Sandinistas but to modify their behavior. The Administration wants to force the Sandinistas to make four major concessions: to stop serving as a Soviet surrogate and expel the Soviet and Cuban advisers at present in the country; to reduce the size of their armed forces, now numbering more than 100,000, to the size of those in neighboring countries (18,000 in Honduras, 49,000 in El Salvador); to "absolutely and definitively stop their support for insurgents and terrorists in the region"; and to live up to their commitment to the Organization of American States in 1979 to embrace pluralism by including opposition groups in the political process.

The Administration's initial support for the contras, which began in 1981, was justified on much narrower grounds: to cut off the flow of arms from Nicaragua to rebels in El Salvador. The statements by Shultz and Reagan last week are simply a "more realistic expression of policy," explained a senior State Department official. "If there is a shift, it is in going from saying 'No, the downfall of the Sandinistas is not what we want,' to saying 'Fine, if that's what happens, so be it.' "

The Reaganauts are convinced that the Sandinistas will bargain in good faith only if under military pressure. "People and nations do not move to the negotiating table simply because it's a nice piece of furniture," Assistant Secretary of State Langhorne A. Motley told a congressional committee. "If anyone knows of a more effective way to create a bargaining situation with the Sandinistas, let us know." Administration officials hasten to add, however, that the U.S. has no intention of using U.S. ground forces to bring the Sandinistas to heel. "It's just not in the cards," says a White House official. "It's not in the President's mind at all."

The U.S. has given the contras $80 million since 1981 (the U.S. authorized about $130 million for the Sandinistas in the early, more promising days of the revolution), but not a cent since last June. The rebels were getting about $1 million a month from the CIA when aid was suspended; lately they have been raising an estimated $500,000 a month from right-wing groups in the U.S. and sympathetic foreign governments. The rebels even plan to sell % "contrabonds," similar to the U.S. war bonds that helped finance this country in World War II. "The aid is still coming in, but it's just enough to maintain the fight, not expand it," says a top-ranking contra.

The Nicaraguan Democratic Force (F.D.N.), by far the largest contra group, has between 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers, up from 6,000 last year. Operating from enclaves in Honduras and bases in northern Nicaragua, they have swept as far south as the city of Matagalpa, about 60 miles north of Managua. New F.D.N. recruits must rely on rusty, World War I-vintage Mauser bolt-action rifles, given by the CIA in 1982. Though weapons and ammunition have been in woefully short supply, the stockpile is growing again. According to high- level F.D.N. sources, the contras possess an unspecified number of surface- to-air missiles to counter the Soviet Mi-24 Hind-D helicopters that the Sandinistas received last fall. For the past two months, truck convoys have ferried weapons from Honduras, including West German G-3 automatic assault rifles and dynamite.

Other contra groups are not faring so well. The Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ARDE), operating in southern Nicaragua, not only remains estranged from the F.D.N. but is badly split. Eden Pastora Gomez, the swashbuckling ARDE leader who once commanded 2,500 men, has been reduced to door-to-door fund raising in San Jose, Costa Rica's capital. There have been reports of Pastora's followers selling their guns for food. On the Caribbean Coast, an estimated 1,000 Miskito Indian rebels are divided into two rival factions and poorly equipped.

The Sandinistas have fought back, especially against the F.D.N., by sending troops to overwhelm rebel strongholds. When the opportunity for an ambush arises, the government dispatches its version of the Green Berets: one of several elite battalions about 600 strong trained in antiguerrilla warfare by North Korean and Vietnamese military advisers in 1983. The Sandinistas have a big edge in modern equipment, like Soviet AK-47 rifles and T-55 tanks. The rebels are nervously waiting for the Sandinistas to deploy their new Hind-D helicopters, which can fly 200 m.p.h. and carry air-to-surface missiles.

Without question, the contra campaign is having a severe effect on the Sandinistas' ability to run the country. The fighting now drains off over half the regime's budget. Says Daniel Nunez, a Sandinista deputy in the National Assembly: "The war is a curse." Billboards throughout the country implore EVERYTHING FOR THE COMBATANTS, EVERYTHING FOR THE WAR FRONT. Draftees as young as twelve are willing to die for the cause, but increasing numbers of middle-class parents are sending their sons out of the country. Many Nicaraguans have grown increasingly disenchanted with the Sandinistas over the past few months. Consumer goods remain in short supply, and prices have spiraled upward. The country's economic straits are "hellish," says President Daniel Ortega Saavedra. Yet the number who are angry enough to support the contras continues to be small, perhaps because the rebels have done such a poor job of defining what they stand for, aside from the overthrow of the Sandinistas.

Whatever the situation on the ground in Nicaragua, Reagan is going to have great difficulty persuading Congress to rally round the contras. If anything, say many Congressmen, the President's recent bellicosity has harmed his case on Capitol Hill. The U.S., they say, should not be trying to bring down established governments. Declares House Democratic Majority Leader Jim Wright: "We don't have any call to appoint ourselves as God's avenging angels." Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes of Maryland, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs, asserts that "the Administration is using two contradictory arguments to justify itself. One says that the contras are modifying Nicaragua's behavior, but the other says that internally the regime is getting worse. Which is it?" At the very least, Reagan's remarks will set off a hot debate. If the vote on aid to the contras were held today, the Administration would probably lose.

Yet if the Administration succeeds in getting aid, even a reduced amount, the result might be continued stalemate. Subsidizing a protracted civil war in a foreign country, Reagan's critics charge, is a bloody and immoral policy. They are worried that continued war in Nicaragua could dangerously destabilize its neighbors. The Administration argues that if the U.S. is unable to fence in such a tiny country, the rest of the hemisphere will doubt its resolve.

But to the Administration, and to many foreign policy authorities, support for the contras is an appropriate response to a state bent on spreading revolution in Central America, and relatively innocuous compared with, say, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Indeed, the practical advantages to the U.S. are considerable. The civil war keeps the Sandinistas from meddling | with neighboring countries. It checks their repressive tendencies at home. And it greatly weakens their economy. Reagan may not be able to overthrow the Sandinistas, but he plainly hopes that continued pressure will force them to "say Uncle"--and to stop making mischief.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Janice C. Simpson/Mexico City