Here We Come? Here We Go?

The Sandinistas shot the seven Christian guerrillas, said the old man from Nicaragua, and towed them by the feet through our village. Then they propped the bodies against the wall of our church during Mass, shouted obscenities through the doorway, and bayoneted the dead through the eyes or cut out their tongues.

WE must be grateful for surprising unanimities. The most general expectation of the Bipartisan Commission on Central America, when it was set up last July, was that it would unite on massive economic aid for the region but on little else. The members of the commission were known mainly for their party affiliations, rather than for their wisdom about the region. Henry Kissinger publicly congratulated the President of the United States on appointing as chairman of the commission the only man in the United States who knew nothing about Central America, and in the early days expressed private doubt that the commission had the cohesion or the competence to arrive at any recommendation useful to anybody. A common assumption was that the Republicans on the commission would cry havoc on migrant millions at the border, that the Democrats would plead for faith in Marxist constitutionalism, and that Kissinger might be driven to file a lonely cogency on the national security.

JH

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John Hutchinson

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The Sandinistas shot the seven Christian guerrillas, said the old man from Nicaragua, and towed them by the feet through our village. Then they propped the bodies against the wall of our church during Mass, shouted obscenities through the doorway, and bayoneted the dead through the eyes or cut out their tongues.

WE must be grateful for surprising unanimities. The most general expectation of the Bipartisan Commission on Central America, when it was set up last July, was that it would unite on massive economic aid for the region but on little else. The members of the commission were known mainly for their party affiliations, rather than for their wisdom about the region. Henry Kissinger publicly congratulated the President of the United States on appointing as chairman of the commission the only man in the United States who knew nothing about Central America, and in the early days expressed private doubt that the commission had the cohesion or the competence to arrive at any recommendation useful to anybody. A common assumption was that the Republicans on the commission would cry havoc on migrant millions at the border, that the Democrats would plead for faith in Marxist constitutionalism, and that Kissinger might be driven to file a lonely cogency on the national security.