Nicaragua Is a Mess, and Moscow Is Unhappy

The Sandinista regime in Nicaragua is in deep trouble. The contra forces have gained the military initiative. The economy, devastated by civil war and communist mismanagement, is a shambles. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

These startling assessments about the declining fortunes of the Sandinista government do not come from either the Nicaraguan resistance movement or its sponsors in the Reagan Administration. Rather, this remarkably pessimistic account was provided by the Soviet government newspaper Izvestia in a major article on June 24.

The article starts with a Soviet reporter being driven along a “horrifying highway” in the northern part of the country: “Along several tens of kilometers of the road one could count hundreds of burned skeletons of automobiles. Some of them were destroyed by mines, while others were caught in ambushes.” Sandinista regular army casualties are considerable. Izvestia talks about young lieutenants and captains whose obituaries regularly appear in local newspapers.

The contras are reported to be successful in penetrating most areas of Nicaragua. Izvestia says that “the ‘war zone’ in reality embraces two-thirds of the republic’s territory--the only exception is the relatively quiet Pacific strip, where the capital and the country’s other large cities are located.”

The Nicaraguan economy is in ruins. Shortages are pervasive, and the situation continues to deteriorate. Izvestia writes that “the majority of the stalls at the large central market in Managua are empty. There is no rice, meat, poultry or eggs. The price of tomatoes and potatoes has gone up several times in the last year . . . . The inflation level exceeded 700%.”

In Izvestia’s view the economic demise is not solely the product of contra attacks. The Soviet newspaper admits that “the crisis is being exacerbated by bad management.” Moreover, prospects for a recovery are poor. Izvestia quotes Omar Cabezas, a senior Sandinista interior ministry official, to the effect that “even if we make the fantastic assumption that economic growth will reach 5% as in 1983, we still won’t get out of the crisis.” That is because “difficulties caused by the war, underdevelopment and dependence on the foreign market are being intensified by parasitism, speculation and swindling.”

The Soviets are understandably disappointed with the disastrous performance of their Sandinista clients. Yet they are not prepared to accept the bill for Managua’s failures. Mikhail S. Gorbachev is a great believer in cost-effectiveness, and betting too much on losers is not his style. Moscow has assured the Sandinistas that Soviet oil supplies, at the level of 2.1 million barrels, will remain the same in 1987 as last year. However, other Eastern Bloc nations have cut oil deliveries to Nicaragua. Since most of these deliveries originated in the Soviet Union, it was the Kremlin in fact that opted to reduce the Sandinista energy ration.

The Gorbachev leadership has advised Nicaragua to seek help from Mexico and Venezuela. Soviet diplomacy increasingly encourages a peculiar international distribution of labor in which the Sovet Union provides security assistance to keep its clients in power while encouraging them to seek aid elsewhere, including the Western world, in order to keep their economies afloat. Unfortunately for the Sandinistas, appeals to Mexico and Venezuela for heavily subsidized oil supplies were met with, at best, a lukewarm response.

Meanwhile, to demonstrate its solidarity with the Sandinistas, Moscow rewarded Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto with the International Lenin Peace Prize. Since the prize traditionally has gone to Soviet fellow travelers, it fits him just fine. D’Escoto, a former Roman Catholic priest, managed to break records of sycophancy in saying recently that Gorbachev’s “attitude toward the fate of peace contains much loftier spirituality than is to be expected in some temples.”

Still, the big question for Gorbachev is how far to go in supporting the troubled Sandinista cause. The widely advertised Soviet “new thinking” notwithstanding, the Kremlin is unenthusiastic about encouraging a negotiated solution involving the contras. On the contrary, the Izvestia article strongly advises the Sandinistas to proceed with a crackdown on peaceful internal opposition that is accused by the Soviet paper of “trying to undermine the revolution from within.”

Gorbachev and his Kremlin colleagues would like to see the Sandinistas in charge of Nicaragua. But they do not want to pay a high price in terms either of greater economic assistance or in triggering U.S. military action by providing Managua with Soviet MIG combat aircraft. The Soviet leadership faces the choice in Nicaragua between a costly and risky commitment and the decline of a client regime. The hope in Moscow is that, by dropping the contras cold, the U.S. Congress will allow the Soviet Union to avoid this uncomfortable dilemma.