Nicaragua Vows to Continue ‘Hot Pursuit’ Policy

Defense Minister Humberto Ortega said Saturday that Nicaragua will continue to pursue U.S.-backed contras into “border territories” inside Honduras and fight them there despite recent tensions between the two nations.

Ortega said, however, that Nicaragua “has no interest” in engaging in battle with Honduran forces.

Nicaragua’s highest military commander made his comments in an interview at the closing ceremonies of a three-hour war game near Managua. A mock U.S. airborne battalion that attempted to storm the capital city went down in ignominious defeat at the hands of Nicaraguan ground troops.

“We will continue our operations wherever the mercenary forces are, hunting them and striking at them,” Ortega said, using the ruling Sandinistas’ rhetorical term for the contras.

“We are not interested in fighting with the Hondurans or violating their soil,” Ortega added. “But there are border territories where we have to respond if attacked (by the contras) and where situations arise in which we give hot pursuit in our engagements with the contras.”

The majority of an estimated 10,000 anti-Sandinista guerrillas based in Honduras remain in camps just inside the border in a triangle of wooded mountains jutting into Nicaragua called the Las Vegas salient. Several hundred Sandinista troops patrolling in the salient early this month overran a Honduran army outpost. In an unexpectedly sharp retaliation, Honduran air force jets bombed two villages in northern Nicaragua.

In late March, more than 1,000 Sandinista troops surged into the salient in an assault on a contra military training center. They were repelled by the contras and suffered high casualties. But immediately afterward Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, the defense minister’s brother, asserted that the border area inside Honduras where the contras are based had become a “no man’s land” where Honduras no longer maintained its sovereignty.

The 900-troop maneuver here, attended by President Ortega and a dozen or so top Sandinista military officers, was the culmination of a month of military exercises in several regions. They were designed to show that Nicaragua is prepared to take on a foreign aggressor in conventional warfare while keeping the contras at bay with anti-guerrilla tactics.

It was the first time Nicaragua held maneuvers large enough to make them public. Present as formal observers were officers from Panama, Venezuela and France, as well as Col. Ed Lorenzen, the U.S. military attache and an aide, U.S. Air Force Maj. Victor Nell.