NICARAGUA seems to be a rather awkward neighbour. Last summer
she connived at, and must to some extent have assisted, a military pronunciamento by Guatemalan ertiles which, with the help of a few aircraft initially based on Nicaraguan terri- tory, successfully overthrew the Communistically inclined regime of President Arbenz. What exactly is now happening to her southern neighbour, Costa Rica, is not entirely clear at the time of writing, but Costa Rica, who complained last week to the Organisation of American States that Nicaragua har- boured aggressive designs upon her, seems to be undergoing a rather one-horse invasion, led (it is said) by an ex-President. The Nicaraguan Ambassador in Washington debies that any invasion is taking place, and says that the disturbances are a spontaneous expression of the Costa Ricans' discontent with their government. I suspect that the person who knows more about what is really going on than anybody else is Mr. 'Whitey' Willauer, the United States Ambassador to Nicaragua. Mr. Willauer, a burly, energetic man in his forties, is very far from being a career-diplomat, and it can hardly have been -far his ' ' knowledge of protocol that he was sent to his first post in Nicaragua. He was in and out of China a good deal during the war, and afterwards helped General Chennault to operate an air-line in that country. A colourful character, exuding the sort of breezy mystery one associates with gun-running, he invited me, last time he was in London, to his room in the Savoy Hotel, showed me a model of a landing-craft and asked me whether I could interest the powers-that-be in a project whose nature I have forgotten but which had something to do with Formosa. But that was before he became a diplomat.
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