‘The People Laugh . . . It’s a Joke’ : Nicaraguans Still Waiting for July 4th U.S. ‘Invasion’

“Invasion will be July 4 at 3:45 a.m.,” said a front-page headline two weeks ago in the official Sandinista newspaper. To hardly anyone’s surprise Thursday, it turned out to be one more in a series of false alarms.

Sandinista army tanks and armored cars, deployed around Managua, sat silently through the sweltering day, guarding the city against another advertised U.S. attack that did not come.

The latest invasion alert began after the Village Voice, the New York City weekly newspaper, published a think-tank scenario of how an American invasion of Nicaragua might unfold. According to the scenario, the hypothetical invasion was to start before dawn on July 4.

Barricada, the official newspaper of the governing Sandinista National Liberation Front, picked up the story and ran. In its June 20 edition, Barricada called the invasion scenario a “Yankee plan to occupy and destroy Nicaragua.”

Denies Killing Connection

At the same time, Sandinista authorities issued a denial of White House statements implicating the Sandinista government in the terrorist slaying of six Americans, four of them Marines, in neighboring El Salvador. The Reagan Administration is trying to justify plans for “a direct intervention against Nicaragua,” said the Managua government.

“This situation coincides with the events that preceded the invasion of Grenada on Oct. 25, 1983,” it said.

A few days later, the Popular Sandinista Army mobilized tanks and armored personnel carriers in defense positions around Managua.

The last previous mobilization of tanks in Managua was at the beginning of November, after U.S. officials said they suspected that Nicaragua was about to receive Soviet MIG-21 warplanes.

That invasion scare had begun to brew a month earlier when President Daniel Ortega, then the head of the governing junta, warned that U.S. troops were scheduled to invade Oct. 15.

Neither the invasion nor the MIGs ever came.

The U.S. House of Representatives approved a measure last week that would allow military intervention in Nicaragua only under certain restricted conditions, among them the presence here of advanced jet warplanes such as MIGs.

The congressional vote triggered a new flurry of invasion warnings by Sandinista authorities.

‘Keep People Whipped Up’

“It is an extremely dangerous decision against Nicaragua that brings the plans of invasion closer,” said Interior Minister Tomas Borge, one of Nicaragua’s nine “ comandantes of the revolution.”

A foreign diplomat said that the Sandinistas use the periodic invasion warnings as a rallying cry.

“It’s simply an effort to keep people whipped up, to develop a bit of xenophobic nationalism,” the diplomat said, but he added: “That’s not to say that the comandantes don’t believe that under the right circumstances the United States will invade. They do.

“I think, in fact, that the comandantes are more worried now than they have been in the past.”

Many Nicaraguans, on the other hand, appear to be a bit jaded with all the invasion alarms.

“The people laugh,” Bayardo Guzman, a leader of the opposition Independent Liberal Party, said Thursday. “It’s a joke, because the people don’t believe in the least that an invasion is coming.”

A U.S. Embassy spokesman Wednesday repeated frequent Reagan Administration denials that any invasion of Nicaragua is planned.

“The idea that we are going to invade tomorrow (Thursday) at 3:45 a.m. is ridiculous,” the spokesman said.