Contras Keep Low Profile, Stage Surprise Raids While Awaiting U.S. Aid

The U.S.-backed guerrillas move in small groups through the rugged Nicaraguan backlands, hitting and running, conserving their limited ammunition, avoiding head-on battles with the well-equipped Sandinista army.

The main objective of the contras, as the rebels are known, is to maintain a stinging presence while waiting for the greater firepower that they say they need to carry out a more ambitious strategy.

The money for such heavier weaponry is in the pipeline now that the U.S. House of Representatives has voted to allow $100 million in aid to the contras, $70 million of it for weapons and military equipment.

Nevertheless, the contras claim that even their current small-scale action is exacting a troublesome toll on the Soviet-supplied Sandinistas.

112 Clashes Reported

The Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the main contras organization, said in a summary of its operations during May that guerrillas engaged in 112 clashes in nine Nicaraguan provinces that month. According to the summary, they killed 718 members of the “pro-Soviet army” and wounded 941.

Independent analysts say that the rebels routinely exaggerate casualties inflicted on the Sandinistas but that it is clear they are active in large areas of rural Nicaragua. However, a military analyst in Central America said the contras are still far from the basic aim of rural guerrilla warfare.

“The whole idea of a rural-based insurgency is to spread the Sandinista forces out,” the analyst said. The wider the army is dispersed, the more vulnerable it will be in any one area, he said.

For now, the contras are limited to cat-and-mouse tactics, the analyst said.

“They can maintain a presence and can continue to be a nuisance,” he said, “but they can’t fight a sustained battle.”

He said that the contras need many more resources and a long building process before they can pose a strategic challenge to the Sandinistas.

Diogenes Hernandez, 27, a contras commander who leads more than 1,000 guerrillas, said they need more bullets to confront the crack Sandinista “irregular warfare battalions” and ground-to-air missiles to defend against heavily armed MI-24 helicopter gunships supplied by the Soviet Union.

“Because of the scarcity of ammunition, because we don’t have missiles, what we do is make lightening strikes, surprise attacks, ambushes and stay constantly mobilized to avoid being located by the Sandinistas and bombarded by the MI-24s,” Hernandez said in an interview.

He was in Tegucigalpa after a trip to Washington, where he and other rebel leaders lobbied Congress for more U.S. aid to the contras.

“We told the congressmen that we need missiles,” said Hernandez. “We aren’t going to stop the helicopters with rifles.”

Hernandez, whose guerrilla code name is Comandante Fernando, has a boyish face, a shy smile and four years of combat experience. Before he joined the contras, he said, he was a theology student in an evangelical Protestant institute.

Today, he is one of four regional commanders in the Jorge Salazar Task Force, a major contras unit named after a businessman who was killed by Sandinista security forces. The task force was started two years ago with about 250 guerrillas in the mountainous central province of Matagalpa.

Hernandez said the force now has about 6,000 men. The total number of armed contra combatants is about 17,000, according to Enrique Bermudez, the group’s top military commander.

The Jorge Salazar Task Force is spread around the provinces of Matagalpa, Boaco, Chontales, Rio San Juan and Zelaya--all in the east-central hinterlands.

“Since we made our first infiltration in Matagalpa, the Sandinista forces have not been able to dislodge us,” Hernandez said. “The Sandinistas say we are defeated. If we were defeated, the Sandinistas would have thrown us out of the zone.”

But he acknowledged that the task force is unable to take control of any town, even for a few days.

“How are we going to take a city if right away they are going to bring in the aviation, the helicopters, and kill our people and civilians?” he said.

He said that if the contras could take over cities, it would galvanize support for them among the population.

“This would produce an insurrection,” he said. “There are many people in the cities who want to join the fight but can’t.”

Hernandez said the contras are not especially interested in conquering and controlling a “liberated zone” because it would require manpower and firepower that are needed to spread the contras’ presence around the country.

“We are not going to defend a piece of land,” he said.

Logistical Woes

Even when the Nicaraguan Democratic Force has sufficient supplies, the Jorge Salazar Task Force often lacks them because of logistical problems, he said. Boots, bullets and other vital provisions are delivered by occasional air drops.

“The airplanes are old planes,” Hernandez said. “Sometimes they break down and we go six months without provisions.”

Indalecio Rodriguez, 47, one of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force’s top civilian leaders, said that a DC-6 supply plane has been out of order since May. A smaller C-47 was recently repaired after three months out of service, Rodriguez said.

As a result, up to 3,000 guerrillas lacking supplies have had to come into camps in Honduras from the Nicaraguan interior, Rodriguez said. He said that as many as 6,000 guerrilla fighters are now in the camps--still fewer, however, than the 11,000 he said were there in January.

The camps are in Honduran territory near the Nicaraguan border. In the same area are about 50,000 civilian refugees, contra families and supporters, Rodriguez said.

Many of the refugees have come out of Nicaragua during the last year as Sandinista forces have tightened their control in northern areas once dominated by contras.

Rodriguez went to a map on the wall of a contras office in Tegucigalpa and pointed to the northern part of Jinotega province, where he said most of the refugees are from.

“All of this here was ours,” he said. He said the contras lost their foothold in the area because they lacked supplies to resist the Sandinista offensive there last year.

U.S. military aid to the contras, previously administered through the CIA, was cut off by Congress in 1984. Since then, the contras have depended largely on private contributions for arms and ammunition.

“There are bullets, but they are in short supply,” Rodriguez said. “There are units that are surviving on captured ammunition.”

According to the summary of rebel combat activities in May, the guerrillas captured 266,000 rounds of ammunition from the Sandinistas during the month.

The U.S. Congress authorized $27 million in non-military assistance to the contras last year, but the supplies were slow in getting to the guerrillas. Rodriguez said the aid has been poorly administered by a special State Department office set up for the job.

“Precious time has been lost, many months,” he said.

For several months, the Honduran armed forces blocked delivery to the contras of supplies brought from the United States. Since March, however, the supplies have been flowing smoothly.

According to widespread but unproven allegations, Honduran military officers received payoffs from the aid money. The U.S. General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said this month that checks were written by rebel suppliers for $1.4 million to the armed forces of a Central American country, which was subsequently identified as Honduras.

John A. Ferch, the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, told reporters this week that a trace made of the dollar checks showed that they were legally exchanged in the Honduran central bank. Checks for the equivalent amount in Honduran currency were issued to the Honduran suppliers who wrote the dollar checks, Ferch said.