effort THE highly publicised problems with Ronald "Rambo" Reagan's nose has not prevented him poking it even further into affairs in Nicaragua.
Even as the official flow of funds to the "contra" murder squads was being resumed, the White House admitted that a top US military man, Colonel Oliver North, had been constantly advising and liaising between the contra gangs and the President himself.
There is no doubt that clandestine CIA funding of the contras bolstered by lavish private donations from wealthy reactionaries in the USA - has continued and even increased despite the official ban imposed by Congress.
And while the $27m now released is supposed to carry strings which prevent it being used for purchases of arms or ammunition, it is clear that any material supplies to the ruthless army (consisting of almozdass mand
18,000 ex-Somozistas mercenaries) will free the other contra funds for arms.
Reagan now makes no effort to conceal his ambition for the Contras to oust the elected Sandinista government - making a nonsense of the flimsy initial pretext that contra operations were designed to block alleged arms flows from Nicaragua to the Salvador freedom fighters. As Secretary of State George Schultz crudely summed it up:
"We consider the problem of Central America basically to be Nicaragua, as supported by Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Now the White House hopes to persuade the endlessly gullible and chauvinist anti-communists in Congress to stump up even more money next year to enable an increase of the contra forces to 35,000 strong.
There is no doubt that Reagan can muster money, men and machinery to his reactionary course on the borders of Nicaragua: but so far over $80m million in CIA aid to the contras has produced only an embarrassing succession of squalid rape, looting, brutality and murder, with scarcely a military victory of any scope or duration. Even the active involvement of CIA equipment and agency men has failed to give the contras anything to write home to Washington about.
Instead the Sandinistas have been
By HARRY SLOAN able to rally the forces to drive out the contra armies to the South, and have inflicted major defeats on the laughably titled "Nicaraguan Democratic Force" to the North.
The grisly activities of the contras and the antics of the Reagan administration have antagonised even more capitalist governments in Latin America.
The original group of four "Contadora" countries seeking negotiated peace in Central America in order to head off any spread of revolution (Mexico, Panama, Colombia and Venezuela) has been reinforced by a "support group" of Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay each of which has in recent years disposed of US-backed military regimes.
Their obscurely-worded communique from Colombia at the end of August was interpreted by one of the foreign ministers involved as a call on the USA not to invade Nicaragua, and a plea for a negotiated settlement.
Reagan, indifferent to the sensibilities of any but the most thick skulled US redneck, is however firmly set on his trade embargo against Nicaragua, which by paralysing the supply of even trivial spare parts for US-supplied equipment is having a serious impact on the weak economy. In the medical school at Leon, for instance, a single $100 component for an ITT telephone switchboard has not o been replaced - causing havoc in day-to-day work. Socialist Viewpoint, No. 7, September 1985, Page 25
MEXICO
BELIZE GUATEMA
HONDURAS, EL SALVADOR OCEANO PACIFICO RICA
On a broader scale the Sandinistas have found new buyers in Latin America, the Arab countries and in Europe for Nicaraguan sugar, coffee and bananas: but with prices low and vital goods in short supply, life remains difficult.
Ironically it will be Nicaragua's private businesses which will be hardest hit by the embargo on US spares and equipment - and they may even be forced to replace US machinery with alternatives from elsewhere.
The present conditions of blockade and black market are certainly not the type of "mixed economy" advocated by the Sandinistas, and are a far cry from socialist planning.
But every atrocity by the contras reminds Nicaragua's small population of the recent horrors of life under the Somoza dictatorship and serves to strengthen the mass determination not to retreat.
The struggle to carry forward the Nicaraguan struggle for socialism must begin with the defence of the gains achieved so far and the defeat of the imperialist offensive. Central to this must be solidarity action from the labour movement in the USA and internationally. | NICARNAR
dumping in the Pacific "IF it is safe, dump it in Tokyo, test it in Paris, store it in Washington but keep my Pacific nuclear free.* (poster Nuclear &
Independent Pacific Movement) "There are only 90,000 people out there: who gives a damn?"* Henry Kissinger (1069) commenting
Ton Micronesia, W. Pacific. THERE have been nearly 1,500 nuclear test explosions since the first one in July 1945. This amounts to an average of one nuclear explosion per week being conducted somewhere in the world. Despite past attempts to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the USA and the USSR have continued nuclear testing at a terrifying rate. At the same time other states have joined the race with others on
notorious nuclear test took place on March 1 1954 when the US exploded a 15 megaton H Bomb (code named BRAVO) 1,200 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, completely wiping out an island at Bikini and sending a gigantic radioactive cloud over several inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands, which later encircled the earth itself.
BRAVO that prompted Neville Shute to write his nuclear age BRAVO that led Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to Manifesto of 1955. It was BRAVO that was described by journalist James Cameron at the scene: was like a gigantic door clanging shut in the bowels of Hell."
Aside from the Marshallese of of Rongelap and Vtirik atolls there were also the 23 Japanese fishermen caught in the area in their trawler "Lucky Dragon" and the 28 US Air Force weather personnel stationed on Rongerick Atoll 130 miles away from Bikini. At the time US officials blamed "wind shifts" for the lethal fallout of Bravo but in 1982 the former Rongerick weather unit commander Gene Curbow told the New York Times:
*The winds were heading straight at us for days before and during the tests.
No nuclear d
When asked why he had never mentioned this before, he replied "a mixture of patriotism and ig norance." More recently Karl Z Morgan, an eminent American health physicist, before the US Congress that USA Government data had underestimated radiation risk in the Marshall Islands by a factor of between 10 and 100 and that the full extent of radiation damage to the people and the ecology of the Pacific had been covered up.
The Reagan administration is al present using legal loopholes avoid any responsibility for the health and well being of the Marshallese people or for that matter of any American people affected by radiation from nuclear testing. billion in lawsuits now pending in US federal courts would thus null and void.
In 1963 the Partial Test Ban Treaty atomspheric nuclear testing. In a rush to get in as many before the Treaty as possible, the US conducted in 1962 a series of 40 nuclear biasts as part of "Operation Dominic" Christmas Island and Johnston Island
Since 1963 nuclear testing has taken place underground with less obvious dramatic results to people directly but perhaps even greater long term risks to the whole world. In the Nevada Test Site, for example, 1,350 square miles of desert some 65 miles North West of Las Vegas, two large drilis holes for the underground tests; one is at work every day, 24 hours a day. Each test costs between $6 million and $60 million. In 1984 nuclear test site spending in the USA was at a record $852 million.
Since the 1963 PTBT the arms race has centred more on accurate missiles rather than larger bombs. The Pacific has now become the target of missiles fired from Califor nia and tracked from the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands. The tremendous amount of money spent on these projects contrasts the squalor in which the local people live, the ruin of their health and ecology and the racism with which they are treated. Socialist Viewpoint, No. 7, September 1985, Page 26
NAURU PAPUA NEW GUINEA SOLOMON ISLANDS Coral Sen AUSTRALIA VANUATU TONGA Orean NEW ZEALNI ppronimate Limit of clear-free Zom Countries shown in black boxes are nembers of the South Pacific Forum. 60%
Greenpeace and French
nuclear testing. THE first French nuclear testing was in the Sahara desert but this was stopped in 1962 when Algeria became independent. General de Gaulle then turned the Foreign Legion troops to Tahiti and Polynesia in the Pacific and commandeered 100,000 square miles of international waters for atmospheric tests, contrary to the 1963 PTBT.
It was in 1972 that Greenpeace first set sail from New Zeland in the 38 foot yacht Vega to Mururoa Atoll. On July I the yacht was rammed by French warships and taken to Mururoa. By 1973 more peace boats set sail and strongly about the nuclear testing. followed, including in Paris, and the French government declared that in future they test underground at Mururoa. In total 41 French nuclear bombs had been' "tested in the South Pacific"
In 1975 the first Conference of the Nuclear Free Pacific movement took place on Fiji and was originally named the ATOM Conference (Against Testing on Mururoa) but it became more and more obvious that the progreater than just Mururoa.
There have been recurring reports of ill-health, poisoned fish, gross ecology around Polynesia - and
develops