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Contra-versy in Congress
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# : |
11008 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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6 / 1986 |
2,531 Words |
| Author
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Timothy Goodman
Timothy Goodman works at the council for Inter-American
Security and writes occasionally on Catholic church issues. |
The Contra aid debate figures to be this years' biggest political drama. U.S. military assistance to Nicaraguan rebels seeking to overthrow the communist Sandinista regime has become the top foreign policy initiative of President Regan's second term.
The Nicaraguan struggle constitutes the first major test of the "Reagan Doctrine": the worldwide rollback of communism. The preliminary front for this struggle is the U.S. Congress, which for months has debated whether or not to approve military aid. This unusually partisan and acrimonious debate has sharply divided Congress.
Until this year House speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill (D-Massachusetts) and Majority leader Jim Wright (D-Texas) had been able to defeat Contra aid almost at will. In 1984 Congress barred all U.S. aid to the rebels, ending three years of covert CIA support.
On April 23, 1985, the House decisively rejected $14 million in military aid, and the following day it rejected by a narrower margin the same amount in humanitarian aid. Only after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega flew to Moscow to request Soviet aid did Congress reverse itself and approve $27 million in humanitarian aid.
By January 1986, though, congress appeared to be tending more in Reagan's direction. The Sandinistas had by then lost almost all of their friends in Congress, due primarily to Ortega's October 15 crackdown in which he rescinded what few civil liberties had been allowed to persist in Nicaragua until that time. The incontrovertible evidence of Sandinista human rights violations, the growing Soviet
... (1997 of 15906 Characters)
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