In January, two men were arrested in a sting operation by U.S. and Nicaraguan authorities reportedly attempting to sell one of the missiles. Congressional testimony in Washington warned of al-Qaeda recruiting operatives in Latin America and a new “axis of evil” across the Western Hemisphere, from Venezuela, through Nicaragua to Cuba. Nicaraguan president Enrique Bolaños gave Washington assurances that destruction of the missiles would proceed.

But a bloc in the Nicaraguan legislature of members of the conservative Constitutionalist Liberal Party and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) passed a series of measures that weakened the Bolaños administration, including a provision that requires the agreement of the Nicaraguan congress before destroying weapons.

Tomás Borge, FSLN vice-secretary, accused Washington of meddling in Nicaragua's internal affairs out of fear that the Sandinistas will win Nicaraguan presidential elections scheduled for 2006, said the Associated Press. The FSLN claimed the sting operation was orchestrated by Washington to press Managua to disarm.

Arriving in Argentina March 21 at the start of a Latin America visit, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “A MANPAD is something that the handlers, the operators, can be managed by terrorists or by revolutionaries, or others…terrorists who are willing to, anxious to kill people and to threaten people, a MANPAD is a very effective weapon.” In Managua that day Peter Brennan, deputy chief of the U.S. embassy there, said, “These missiles are not necessary to a country that is not at war.”

In July 1979 a popular uprising throughout Nicaragua led by the FSLN overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Failing to economically strangle the revolutionary government, in late 1981 Washington organized a counterrevolutionary army, known as contras, and began a war to overthrow the revolution. The contras were headed by former officers of Somoza’s military and armed and supported by the U.S. military. They were defeated after a six-year-long war.

It was during that war that the Nicaraguan government armed itself with these portable air defense systems to defend the country from airborne assaults by the Contras.

The FSLN leadership retreated from the anticapitalist road they began down in 1979. By 1989 the FSLN had become a bourgeois electoral machine and increasingly advocated policies that relied on market mechanisms and deepening integration of the Nicaraguan economy into the world capitalist market.

The FSLN lost the presidential election in 1990 and Washington subsequently restored diplomatic relations. Formal relations with the Nicaraguan military, in which former Sandinistas are said to still hold high positions, was not restored until two years ago, when Managua sent a small number of soldiers to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In a joint press conference with Bolaños last November, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised the performance of Nicaraguan troops in Iraq.

“This is not the way you treat friends,” Nicaraguan defense minister José Adán Guera complained March 18, according to the New York Times. “We have supported the United States in Iraq. We have supported them on Cafta. And this is what we get for it?”

Guera was referring to the Central America Free Trade Agreement with the United States, which also includes El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic. The trade pact opens up the economies of those countries to further penetration by U.S. finance capital.  
 
 
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