Reservists Train to Repel Feared U.S. Attack : Nicaragua Upgrading Capital’s Defenses

With a spirited bayonet charge across a cow pasture, Alberto Garcia’s army reserve platoon fought back an imaginary invasion by U.S. paratroopers on the shores of Lake Managua.

“I can see the North Americans coming soon,” the 23-year-old telephone operator said. “Ronald Reagan should know that we Nicaraguans are ready to defend our revolution at any consequence.”

The exercises by a 600-man reserve battalion, which ended Thursday, marked a new effort by the Sandinista Popular Army to strengthen the capital’s untested defenses in the sixth year of a guerrilla war against U.S.-backed contras.

Thousands of men between the ages of 25 and 40 have been conscripted into the reserves since February, reflecting the leftist Sandinista government’s concern that slipping U.S. congressional support for the Nicaraguan rebels could bring direct American involvement to end Sandinista rule.

Sees Greatest Threat

“They are looking for the precise conditions to launch an invasion,” President Daniel Ortega declared in a speech last week. “At no other time has the threat been so clear.”

Ortega was reacting to an announcement of plans by the Pentagon to deploy 50,000 servicemen next month in the largest Central American training exercise it has ever staged. The show of force, code-named Solid Shield, will simulate an American response to a request from neighboring Honduras to help fight Nicaraguan forces.

Lt. Raul Venegas, a Sandinista army spokesman, called the war games here “an answer” to Solid Shield. They were held, he said, to train one of the reserve units that would ring the capital, along a rough circle with a five-mile radius, in the event of a large-scale attack.

Asked about the imaginary enemy, Venegas declared: “We are preparing for a North American invasion. The mercenaries (contras) are not capable of invading Managua.

“This is not a monstrous exercise like the North Americans will hold in Honduras,” he added. “But it shows we can defend our neighborhoods.”

The men of Battalion 32-50 were drawn from three northeastern neighborhoods. Some are veterans of the 70,000-man regular army. Others are among the first non-veterans ever conscripted for a reserve infantry force now estimated to be at least that large.

Defense Minister Humberto Ortega said recently that reserve combat training will intensify in the first half of this year.

Reserve battalions in Managua and other cities are being called up for staggered 45-day training periods as well for sentry duty around such rebel targets as electric power stations.

Reporters invited to watch the final phase of Battalion 32-50’s call-up had to wait more than two hours at its training headquarters until the soldiers arrived in buses, ate breakfast, assembled in platoons and were ready to go.

In contrast to the teen-age soldiers who often engage the contras on rural battlefronts, many of these reservists wore beards and long hair under plastic helmets and paunches under an odd collection of green or brown shirts. Some wore tennis shoes instead of regulation boots.

But there was no lack of enthusiasm when the men of Garcia’s platoon scrambled across a concrete drainage canal with Soviet-made assault rifles, ran 80 yards through a hot, dusty field and crawled on their bellies to within a few feet of half a dozen grazing cattle.

‘Reagan Is Going to Laugh’

In an invasion, Garcia explained after catching his breath, the reserves would be alerted in their neighborhoods by loudspeaker. The invaders, he said, would likely use the broad lake-front pasture as a place to land by parachute or helicopter.

Some of his men were not too sure of their effectiveness.

“The enemy is so much better fed and equipped that Reagan is going to laugh at these maneuvers,” said Mario Sanchez Perez, 25, a textile factory worker.

The battalion has also been guarding steel pylons spaced every 100 yards along the lake front to carry electricity along high-tension lines to Managua.

The nighttime sentry duty was assigned after an unguarded pylon was damaged, but not felled, by a pre-dawn blast March 16. It was the contras’ first attack ever in Managua and the first of 10 towers damaged or toppled around the country in a growing rebel campaign to black out parts of the country.

In two diplomatic protests to the United States since then, the Sandinistas have accused the CIA of choosing urban targets for sabotage by the rebels to compensate for battlefield reverses in the countryside.

Spring Offensive

The government, with overwhelming manpower and a fleet of Soviet-made helicopters, holds the upper hand over a rebel force that numbers an estimated 20,000 at most. But the contras are now better armed than ever and are being resupplied by clandestine air drops as they infiltrate deep into Nicaragua from base camps in Honduras for a spring offensive.

The Reagan Administration won a narrow victory in Congress last month when a move to delay the final $40 million of this year’s $100 million in aid to the rebels was defeated in a close vote.

In recent interviews, Sandinista officials who closely follow events in Washington said they viewed as uncertain the chances that the Administration will get another $105 million in aid to the contras that it has said it will request for next year.

While these officials believe that the Tower Commission report may have weakened congressional backing for the rebels, they see the revelations about the Administration’s Iran-contra dealings as proof of its deep, unending determination to bring the Sandinistas’ rule to an end.

‘Paying a High Price’

“We are paying a high price for this obsession in lives and material resources, but the counterrevolutionaries have no possibility for success on their own,” Vice President Sergio Ramirez said in an interview this week.

“The real danger is a confrontation between Nicaragua and the United States,” he added. “President Reagan has survived the scandal, and Nicaragua is still the first priority on his agenda.”

In a strategy reflecting this concern, the army has moved all six of its radar-equipped anti-aircraft guns from rural war zones to defend Managua against a possible U.S. air strike, two Western observers said. Until late last year, the guns had been aimed at rebel supply planes.

“The Sandinistas are becoming more concerned about Managua as a focal point of the war,” one of the informants said.

The reserve call-up has been accompanied by a continuing clampdown on the unarmed internal opposition. Dissident leaders say the maneuvers are aimed not only at defense but also at tying up opposition activists in obligatory reserve duties.

“These maneuvers create a sense of danger that distracts people from the government’s failures and keeps them from organizing,” said Mauricio Diaz, president of the Popular Social Christian Party. He said five top leaders of the legal opposition party have been called into the reserves in Managua.