In his view, the CIA also was behind the brief detention of his lone Beechcraft light airplane last week in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, where it had flown to pick up supplies donated by Cuban emigrants in Miami.Īlfonso Robelo, who was allied with Pastora in the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, said the helicopter and some disputed light airplanes came under his control because their pilots deserted Pastora when the two leaders fell out last summer. 'The CIA is a son of a bitch,' Pastora declared.Īs Pastora described it, the CIA confiscated his one operational helicopter, a Hughes 500 that he used to ferry wounded combatants from inside Nicaragua to Costa Rican hospitals. The Clinica Biblica, a San Jose hospital where he was initially treated for burns when a bomb exploded at his feet in an assassination attempt last May, is still dunning him for monthly payments on that bill.Ī clinic in Caracas, Venezuela, where he convalesced for weeks afterward, has not been paid either, he said, even though his followers have sold trucks, airplanes and their wives' jewelry, and even though Pastora hocked a prized gold Rolex watch presented to him by the Sandinista National Directorate back in the glory days after they overthrew Anastasio Somoza in 1979. But according to a recent conversation with his accountants back in San Jose, Costa Rica, he admitted, the ragged army that would bring democracy to Nicaragua had the equivalent of $63 in its war chest.Ĭosta Rican authorities have cut off the telephones at his rear headquarters in San Jose because his political allies could no longer pay the bills. Pastora, who has more than 20 years' practice in the back rooms of revolution, said he knew a place in Panama where he could get 3 million rounds of ammunition for $500,000.

In the crackling radio conversations he had with his followers, Pastora advised them to do political work among the peasants if they could not fight. This year, Pastora acknowledged after some prodding, only 2,000 men are involved in the war, and each of these has only a handful of ammunition.

With the CIA money and $600,000 he said he received when Francisco Fiallos defected as Nicaragua's ambassador to Washington in January 1983 with the embassy bank account, Pastora claimed to have built a guerrilla force of 7,000 men who ambushed the Popular Sandinista Army from the Costa Rican border as far north as the Escondido River and the strategic Rama Road leading to Bluefields on the Atlantic Coast.īut that was last year. The CIA indirectly funneled between $300,000 and $400,000 a month to his forces from October 1983 to February 1984, he said, but since then has cut off the funding and gone out of its way to hinder his actions. 'Now that we are struggling against another dictatorship - the same ones who struggled against the first one - the left and the right again agree to call us erratic, mercurial, incoherent and picturesque.'īecause of decisions in Washington, this is a difficult moment in Pastora's lonely fight.

'We say no to gringo imperialism, but also to Russian imperialism,' he fumed, standing legs apart and chest thrust forward. But for Eden Pastora, who at 47 has made irregular warfare into a personal mystique, the struggle has never changed, only the enemy and the allies.

In another time, another war, it was Commander Zero. With the aid of bifocals to shift frequencies in the dark, the gray-bearded commander was making contact with guerrillas he said are scattered in redoubts across 12,000 square miles of southern Nicaragua's swamps and rain forests. Aqui Macombo, he radioed off into the night.

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