Naval Facility Used as Target by 50 Protesters

S.H. Anderman, a retired dentist wearing a golf beret, looked more like an elderly gentleman headed for the links than an outspoken opponent of the U.S.-backed covert war in Nicaragua.

“I protested against fascism and Naziism decades ago, so this isn’t new to me,” the 79-year-old South Bay resident said with a laugh. On Saturday he and about 50 other protesters sang peace songs, chanted slogans and held signs demanding “Hands Off Nicaragua” outside “the belly of the beast” (as one called it)--the Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, home of special counterinsurgency units.

At one point, a car sped by and several men inside shouted, in unison, an obscenity. The slightest hint of a smile crept across Anderman’s face as he shook his head and cracked: “If communism didn’t exist, the Pentagon would have gone out and invented it.”

Buoyed by the House of Representatives’ vote on Tuesday to kill aid to the Nicaraguan contras, the protesters gathered to “denounce the use of Seals (sea-air-land) . . . the elite combat units of naval special warfare to conduct counterinsurgency operations, underwater demolition and naval sabotage in the coastal waters off Nicaragua and El Salvador,” as their press release said. “Counterinsurgency in time of peace is terrorism!”

From noon to 1 p.m, the protesters stood in a single line on a bike lane in the middle of Silver Strand across from the base. Some held signs that declared “Your Tax $$ Kill Children in Central America” and “Children Starve While We Send Bombs.” Others had painted white makeup and pink peace symbols on their faces.

The Seals mine harbors and are preparing for an invasion, said co-organizer Tanja Winter, 57, of La Jolla. “We don’t want our tax money used for that.”

“Killer for Hire” read a sign worn by Bob Holzman, 25, a bakery employee who was garbed in a typical Seal outfit--wet suit and swim fins. “We Mine Harbors” declared a sign on a female pseudo-Seal, Charly Paige, 25.

Coronado police and naval security officers watched the protest from across the street but didn’t intervene.

Navy spokesman Ron Morse, present during the demonstration, declined comment on the protesters’ allegations. He said that there are two Seals bases in the United States, the one at Coronado and another at Norfolk, Va., and that the former has fewer than 500 personnel. (“The specific number is classified,” Morse said.) The Seals are trained in skills ranging from scuba diving to parachuting.

Some of the protesters--who ranged from bakery employees to tree trimmers--chuckled over President Reagan’s recent statement comparing the contras, who oppose the Nicaraguan government, to the America’s Founding Fathers.

But to at least one woman, the presidential remark wasn’t funny at all. “The contras killed my brother, cut off his genitals and put them in his mouth,” said Marlene Miranda, 45, her voice shaking.

Miranda, an employee of a San Diego insurance company, said her family lives in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, and would never want to see the contras--some former associates of ex-Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza--overthrow the Sandinistas who expelled the Somoza regime in 1979. “At least now we don’t have the death squads. (Under Somoza) they would come into your home and kill everything, even the cats and dogs.”

American counterinsurgency work has undermined the Nicaraguans’ fight to improve health standards, said another protester, Dr. Miriam Sharp, a San Diego family practitioner who spent a month working as a volunteer in that country. “In ’81 they went out and immunized about 80% of the population. They still have problems; the really big things are the infant illnesses--diarrhea and dehydration, particularly. There’s polio, malaria . . . Simple things like measles can kill a child.”

Despite the odds, the Nicaraguan government is attempting valiantly to establish a democratic and modern society, protesters said.

“They’ve just had an election with over seven parties. Sixty percent of the economy is still in private hands,” said a former Nicaraguan, 37-year-old Isabel Tercero of San Diego. She held a dove-shaped sign that declared, “Nicaragua Wants Peace.”