World: Who Are the Sandinistas?

To President Somoza, Nicaragua's uprising is nothing more than a Communist plot aimed at unseating him. "As long as the Communists in Cuba and Panama continue to supply the weapons, there will be a battle," he maintains. The Carter Administration is also concerned about Fidel Castro's influence on Nicaragua's civil war and on the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a broadly based collection of Marxist and non-Marxist leftists held together mainly by hatred for Somoza's regime. The evidence of such influence is scant, though U.S. intelligence reports indicate that since late May a...