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About The Georgia bulletin (Atlanta) 1963-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 4, 1983)
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta Vol. 21 No. 27 Thursday, August 4,1983 $10.00 Per Year BY BREAD ALONE - Father Augustine Moore, foreground, abbot of the Monastery of the Holy Ghost in Conyers, lends a hand as the Trappist monks prepare 1,900 loaves of white and wheat bread for baking. A converted chapel serves as the bakery. (NC Photo by Roger W. Neal) Nicaragua New U.S. Policy Sharpens Debate BY AGOSTINO BONO NC News Service President Reagan’s two-track approach of favoring regional negotiations to solve Central America’s problems while announcing a build-up in the U.S. military presence to isolate Nicaragua has caused confusion about U.S. policy and sparked diverse views about Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Nicaragua says it favors negotiations but U.S. intervention, which includes support for guerrillas seeking to overthrow the Sandinistas, is not establishing the proper atmosphere. Nicaragua is participating in discussions “with a pistol placed at our head,” said Father Miguel D’Escoto, Nicaraguan foreign minister, referring to regional talks sponsored by Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia and Panama. In announcing the military build-up, Reagan said it was to provide a “security shield” against Nicaraguan aggression. Cuban President Fidel Castro, whom Reagan accuses of using Nicaragua as a military base for spreading Marxist revolution in Central America, said he would abide by a regionally-negotiated agreement involving an end to outside military interference. But U.S. reaction to Castro’s (Continued on page 7) Father Gerry Conroy: Most Nicaraguans Support Sandinistas BYTHEA JARVIS (Father Gerry Conroy is part of a three-man team of Glenmary priests involved in promoting justice in Appalachia and the deep south. He left his home in Atlanta recently for a week-long trip to Nicaragua as the southeastern representative of the Conference of Major Superiors of Men Religious.) In the Nicaraguan border town of Jalapa, a peasant woman rushed up to Father Gerry Conroy and threw her arms around him. Weeping, she recounted her loss of two sons and a daughter to the revolution that toppled the ruling Somoza regime four years ago. She did not regret her sacrifice, she said, but was distraught because of American opposition to the present Sandinista government. “You have to tell the American people that since the revolution we are free,” she pleaded. The woman was one of countless Nicaraguans Father Conroy met during a week-long July stay in that troubled Central American nation. The Glenmary priest was one of 160 Americans from 31 states organized by the Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central American (CITCA) who went south to investigate the political turmoil in Nicaragua and pray for peace in the region. In Jalapa, a village close to the Honduran border, the group conducted a prayer vigil that earlier had been threatened due to fighting in the area. “We went not knowing whether we could do it or not,” Father Conroy admitted, citing a talk by a Nicaraguan military officer warning the Americans that there had been border action two days earlier and if more surfaced the vigil could not be held. The Honduran border is America’s launch pad for their support - otherwise known as “covert action” - of the rebel “Contras,” former members of the Somozan national guard and others who work toward the overthrow of Sandinista rule. (Another group of “Contras” operate out of Costa Rica and are opposed to the border “Contras.”) In addition to their prayerful plea for peace, the ecumenical group toured Nicaragua, traveling in a line from Jalapa to Managua, talking to workers, government officials, missionaries and army officers. They wanted answers to questions about popular support for the Sandinistas, human rights violations and economic survival for the poor. “The government leaders had a sense of honesty and humility that I found just incredible,” Father Conroy said, adding that such openness was “a happy surprise.” “There was not an issue or area of investigation that we were denied,” he continued. ‘^No door was closed to us.” The group found the government to be doing “an incredibly good job,” Conroy observed, following the goals of popular liberation promoted by the famed Nicaraguan peasant leader of the thirties, Augusto Sandino. Such goals include agrarian reform, opposition to foreign intervention and, most importantly, the welfare of those who toil in agricultural and industrial production. Moreover, Father Conroy related, almost all those he spoke to during his trip were supportive of the Sandinista government. On a bus trip in the mountains, the group’s transport became stuck in a river bed. When a nearby farmworker emerged from the fields to help, Father Conroy asked him, in his fluent Spanish, what he thought of the Sandinistas. The farmworker, like most of those Conroy interviewed casually, without preliminary introductions, responded with enthusiasm for the government. “They would say the same thing as people in the formal sessions,” he remembered. In a similar conversation with two coffee pickers, (Continued on page 6)
