Reagan Renews Plea for Support Against Sandinistas

President Reagan, fresh from a series of victories in Congress over funding for the MX missile, asked the nation Saturday to support Administration efforts to oust communism from Central America by aiding the rebels known as contras fighting Nicaragua’s Marxist-led government.

In one of his most unyielding statements on Latin America, he argued that the United States must meet the challenge posed by what he called “the Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan plan to destroy the fragile flower of democracy and force communism on our small Central American neighbors.”

“U.S. support for the freedom fighters is morally right and intimately linked to our own security,” Reagan said in his weekly radio broadcast from the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md.

The President did not directly mention the showdown expected late next month, when Congress will be asked to free $14 million earmarked for the Nicaraguan rebels. But he said, “If we refuse to help their just cause, if we pull the plug and allow the freedom fighters to be wiped out by the same helicopter gunships the Soviets are using to murder thousands of Afghans, then our ultimate price to protect peace, freedom and our way of life will be dear indeed.”

Contending that the Soviet Union has long been striving “to turn Central America into a beachhead for subversion,” Reagan said the Soviets “will find it much easier to expand their empire” if they can tie down the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

“We know,” Reagan said, that the support Nicaragua gets from Cuba, Bulgaria, East Germany, North Korean, Libya, the PLO and Iran is a threat to our security because the dictators of Cuba and Nicaragua have not only pledged to spread communism--they’ve been caught . . . trying to do just that.”

Failure by the United States to meet its “obligation” in Central America will amount, Reagan said, to “an unmistakable signal that the greatest power in the world is incapable of stopping communist aggression in its own backyard.”

Although “many well-intentioned people would rather not accept these facts,” Reagan said, “we who have the responsibility for governing cannot afford to be ostriches with our heads in the sand.”

In the Democratic Party’s broadcast response to Reagan’s comments on Central America, Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), assistant whip of the House, suggested that, however much the United States dislikes the Sandinista regime, support of the contras amounts to unilateral U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and “violates U.S. law that respects the sovereignty of other nations and the right of self-determination.”

Although Reagan has voiced support for the approach to a negotiated settlement through the peace process sponsored by the four-nation Contadora Group, Alexander said “his actions sound the trumpets of war.”

He added that by the end of April, the United States “will have about 10,000 U.S. troops in Central America.” The Pentagon has announced that about 7,000 American troops will be in Honduras, which borders Nicaragua, on a two-week counterinsurgency exercise scheduled for the end of April.

This maneuver is separate from the Big Pine III exercises under way in Honduras since February with a 2,200-man U.S. troop commitment.

“Mr. Reagan’s alliance with violence in Nicaragua is against the American way,” Alexander said. “It is contrary to the principles of our founding fathers. For the real enemies in Central America are poverty, ignorance, hunger, social injustice and political corruption.”

Charging that the Administration’s policies have failed to bring peace, order or plenty, Alexander declared that “the effect of Mr. Reagan’s reign of terror in Nicaragua actually strengthens the Sandinista government he wants to overthrow.” Reagan opened the broadcast by noting that Saturday was the fourth anniversary of the assassination attempt in which he was wounded. He thanked those who saved his life and asked for “continued prayers and support” for White House press secretary James Brady, who suffered a near-fatal head wound in the attack and who is slowly regaining speech and motor skills.