Nicaraguan parliament approves destruction of more missles

[Judi Lynn]

UPDATED: 11:32, July 14, 2006
Nicaraguan parliament approves destruction of more missles

Nicaragua's National Assembly on Thursday agreed to destroy 651 surface-to-air missiles that the United States wants scrapped for fears that they may end in terrorist hands.

After a stormy session, legislators in favor of the missiles' destruction established a quorum to vote for the destruction of the batch of shoulder-fired SAM-7 missiles bought in the 1980s.

Nicaragua dismantled 1,000 of its missiles in 2005. Washington has sought to convince it to destroy its estimated 1,000 remaining SAM-7s, but Nicaragua insists on keeping 400 of the missiles for its own national defense force.
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http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200607/14/eng20060714_283049.html

[Posteritatis]

1. While disarmament generally doesn't bother me

It happening at the "request" of another country for frankly spurious reasons does. The reasoning for that request is kind of a slap in the face of Nicaragua's military, to say the least.

That and, well, they're SA-7s, not field artillery or tanks or Harpoons or any other intrinsically offensive kind of weapon. I can't see myself having a problem with a country stocking up on air defense weapons.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Decided to see if I could find out more about how Nicaragua got those

missiles from the U.S. in the 1980's. This was a quick answer:

Topic 1: Buyer of SAM-7 Claims He Was Paid by CIA

One of the men convicted of selling a SAM-7 surface-to-air missile in Nicaragua, Jorge Ivan Pineda, said he was paid $1,000 by the CIA to buy the weapon and that the whole thing was planned at a meeting in the US embassy in the presence of the US ambassador Barbara Moore on Dec. 23 2004. The head of the Nicaragua Army, Gen. Javier Carrion, said he believes there could be an international campaign to discredit his institution. \

According to Pineda, two former contras were also present at the meeting at the US embassy. These two men went by the names of "Cascabel" and "Arandu" and were the ones who obtained the weapon, which had never been in possession of the Nicaragua Army but was one of 100 SAM-7 missiles that the US government had given to the contras to fight against the Sandinista government in the 1980s. These weapons have never been recovered and apparently are still in the possession of ex-contra fighters in the northern mountains of Nicaragua.

Pineda went on to claim that Silva Clarence, the head of the anti- drug directorate in the National Police force, is really an undercover CIA agent. Those who orchestrated the whole thing, says Pineda, "even asked "Cascabel" and "Arandu" to take a photo of the weapon as proof. This photo would be shown to Bolaños and Moore.

All this comes in the same week that George Bush named John Negroponte as head of the US intelligence services. Negroponte, in his acceptance speech, said that his most important work in this post would be to reform the intelligence services so as to be able to fight with more efficiency in the war against terrorism.

The news was met with horror in Nicaraguan press. The headline in El Nuevo Diario's Feb. 18 edition read "State Terrorist as Supreme Chief Against Terrorism." The article went on to remind readers of the horrors that were carried out against Nicaraguan citizens by the contra forces, funded and trained by the US army in Honduras, and against El Salvador citizens by death squads also funded and trained in Honduras during Negroponte's time as US ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s.
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http://www.nicaliving.com/node/800

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Wondering why _Bush is pressuring them to lose the weapons NOW, I remembered the "leftist" Sandinista leader the Republican Party dispises as much as clean elections is Daniel ORTEGA, and if he wins, he would have control of these weapons. Looks to me as if _Bush wants to get rid of them because he fears Ortega is going to win, if they can't figure out a way to control the election results.

Nicaragua just lost one of the candidates, which narrows the field. Here's a link which might help:

Unexpected Death of Lewites Further Complicates Nicaragua’s November Elections
Written by Kristen B. Shelby
Tuesday, 04 July 2006
The outcome of the November 2006 presidential elections in Nicaragua has become even more uncertain in the wake of the unexpected death of Herty Lewites, the presidential candidate for the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS).

Herty, who served as Minister of Tourism during the revolutionary decade of the 1980s and mayor of Managua from 2000-2005, died from a heart attack Sunday, July 2, in the Hospital Metropolitano Vivian Pellas in Managua. Herty was expelled from the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in February of 2005 over a dispute with the party’s president, Daniel Ortega, regarding the party’s selection of a presidential candidate. The FSLN led the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, which overthrew the decades-long US-backed Somoza dictatorship. The revolutionary government’s socialist-inspired reform programs and its adoption of a mixed economy brought it head to head with the Reagan administration in the United States. The US imposed an economic embargo on Nicaragua and funneled money and arms to the Contras, the ex-dictator’s National Guard, fueling a bloody civil war that resulted in 50,000 deaths. Daniel Ortega served as Nicaragua’s president from 1984-1990, when a coalition headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro defeated the FSLN in internationally observed elections. Since 1990 and the end of the Revolution, Nicaragua has seen a drastic cut in social spending and a push towards free-market reforms, culminating in the CAFTA agreement, which went into affect in April 2006.

The November elections, which will take place under close international scrutiny, mark a historic shift in the Nicaraguan political landscape. The four-way electoral split reflects the crisis that the two main political parties, the FSLN and the Partido Liberal Constitucional (PLC), have entered into since the last presidential elections in 2000. The FSLN has been the mainstay of the left since the Revolution, though it has lost credibility since 1990 due to corruption scandals and pacts with the right, most notably the pact formed in 1998 between Daniel and PLC leader and then-president, Arnoldo Alemán, to divide the major branches of the government between the two parties. The FSLN’s opportunism combined with Daniel’s iron grip on the party has angered many former Sandinistas, and many leaders prominent in the 1980s, such as former Vice-President Sergio Ramirez and former Minister of Health Dora Maria Tellez, broke with the FSLN to form the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista (MRS) in 1994. However, the MRS remained on the margin of Nicaraguan politics and in a strategic alliance with the FSLN until recently, when it decided to end this alliance and fully support Herty’s presidential candidacy. This created a sharp split among voters of the Nicaraguan left, divided between supporting another presidential bid by Daniel Ortega on the FSLN ticket or Herty Lewites on the MRS ticket.
(snip/...)

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/344/1/