Port surrounded, say guerrillas

Press, 16 April 1984, Page 10

Port surrounded, say guerrillas

NZPA-ReuterSan Jose, Costa Rica Right-wing Nicaraguan rebels say that they have surrounded the key Nicaraguan port of San Juan del Norte after heavy fighting. Orion Pastora, spokesman for the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, said yesterday that the insurgents had set up artillery positions around the town and were prepared to repel -any attack by the Army. Residents, journalists, and officials in the Costa Rican town of Bara de Colorado, some 20km south of San Juan del Norte, said that the rebels had seized the town. Four wounded Sandinist soldiers, taken in a Democratic Alliance helicopter to a rebel hospital in Ciudad Quesada, about 120 km north west of San Jose, the Costa Rican capital, told reporters that the town was under rebel control. Mr Pastora said that the alliance had caused more than 100 Government casualties in three days of fierce

fighting. Three rebels had been killed and at least 15 were wounded, he said. In Managua Nicaraguan Defence Ministry sources said that fighting continued yesterday about 2km from San Juan del Norte, but they refused to confirm that the rebels had seized the port, in an unpopulated area which holds only an isolated Army garrison. The soldiers said that the attack on San Juan del Norte had been lead by the alliance’s chief, Eden Pastora, a former hero of the 1979 Sandinist revolution which he now opposes. Diplomatic sources in Managua said that the usual supply routes to Sandinist forces in the port, some 300 km from the Nicaraguan capital, had been blocked by rebel artillery and mortar positions just inside Costa Rica, along the San Juan river.

On Friday an alliance spokesman in Costa Rica said that a 450-strong force backed by ground-to-air anti-aircraft missiles had captured the town. If true, it would be the

first town held by United States-backed rebels who have been fighting the Leftwing Government for more than two years. Government sources said that the magnitude of the latest rebel offensive had forced the army to mobilise some of 8000 freshly trained draftees. The interior Minister, Mr Tomas Borge, said on Saturday that 219 soldiers had died in the last two weeks of fighting. A senior military official put rebel casualties, for the same period at 310. He said that Nicaragua’s northern departments had also come under hit-and-run attacks from 8000 guerrillas of the Honduran-based Nicaraguan Democratic Force. Diplomats in Mexico familiar with Central America said that the extent of the rebel offensive could have been exaggerated by both sides. They doubted that the Democratic Force had been able to infiltrate its entire 8000-man force into Nicaragua.