U.S. Help for the Contras

It’s the time of year for the Contra vote in Congress again, and the usual American totalitarian apologists and communist sympathizers are again actively fighting to prevent Congress from funding the anti-Sandinista resistance.

These are the same types that assured us that Castro was a nationalist leader, not a communist. Now, of course, Cuba is the number-one puppet of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Red Army not only ravishes Afghanistan, but through its thousands of Cuban proxies in Africa, brings Marxism, war and starvation to Ethiopia, Angola and Mozambique.

Nicaragua is twice a puppet, dancing on both Russian and Cuban strings to an evil melody in the struggle for the Americas and for the Caribbean Basin sea lanes, the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico through which 45% of our strategic supplies and exports must transship.

Nicaragua is building an army of 600,000 in a nation of 2.5 million.

Isn’t it amusing how some of our American so-called humanitarian groups have to journey all the way to a socialist country like Nicaragua to dispense medicine, food and clothing, while failing to see, 15 miles to our south in Mexico, the suffering of the hungry, ill and cold living in cardboard shanties. I have taken food and clothing to people in Mexicali so depressingly poor that it’s difficult to return. Why go to the tropics of Nicaragua when our Mexican neighbors shiver and die of exposure and lack of medicine?

You’ve got to love our country. It allows American citizens to use our freedom of expression to promote the end of such freedoms in struggling countries like Nicaragua.

Peace and the continuance of American democracy is always going to be a struggle; we can’t have it both ways. We can either opt for our way of life by keeping a steady, clear eye, our powder dry, and by a firm hand when fellow democracies are threatened, or we can settle for the alternative which is the peace of the gulag and the peace of the grave.

DAVID C. KOLPACOFF

El Cajon