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United States under Carter sought to use aid as leverage with which
to reenforce the political role of the moderate democrats within the
regime, men like Arturo Cruz and Alfonso Robelo. Despite a United
Nations speech in which Daniel Ortega took positions "that were anti–
United States, anti-Chinese and pro-Soviet," the State Department
made a formal request to Congress for seventy-five million dollars in
supplemental funds to Nicaragua - an amount on top of other monies
that were extended, such as eight million dollars in programmed
funds for Nicaragua's National Bank, when it was almost without
any hard currency. The purpose, as the liberal diplomat Viron Vaky
put it, was ')ustified by the need to strengthen and support moder–
ates in the government, as well as to give the private sector and other
nongovernmental groups a chance to survive."
When the rupture between the United States and Nicaragua
finally came, it was over Sandinista refusal to end direct aid to the
Salvadoran guerrillas - aid which they saw as part of their revolution–
ary responsibilities - although publicly, they denied giving it. Indeed,
as I have indicated, long before Reagan was President, the Sandinis–
tas had moved to consolidate their power along classic Leninist lines.
They had imposed censorship of the press, created the neighborhood
committees to impose surveillance, modeled on the Castroite model
existing in Cuba, and built up a strong and fully equipped armed
force - tied directly to the Sandinista party, rather than to the nation
as a whole.
All of this created an internal polarization in Nicaragua, result–
ing, it must be emphasized, not from American aggression, but from
the policies pursued by the FSLN. The eventual outcome had to be
a civil war, as former supporters who wished the Revolution well
found no alternative but to support the very type of armed struggle
the FSLN had once engaged in against Somoza. To gain power, the
Sandinistas had shrewdly used the support of moderate political
leaders and members of the private sector, such as Ramiro Gurdian,
who told Christian that he had expected as a result of the Revolution
"a free society, with free press, with elections, with a very good legal
system ." After all, Gurdian explained to Christian, democratic Latin
American nations and social democrats like Venezuelan President
Carlos Andres Perez were among the major backers of the FSLN.
Once the CIA began to establish and support the
contras,
using
the convenient fiction that their goal was not to overthrow the San–
dinistas, but only to interfere with arms shipments to Salvadoran
guerrillas, that policy provided ample opportunity for the FSLN to
