Spectator's Journal/Central America's Hidden Refugees

...For example, while several non-Indian refugees told the Puebla delegation that the government wanted to confiscate their family-size farms and resettle them, the Sandinistas in 1985 partially reversed their policy of forcibly relocating the Indians from their homes into government-controlled camps...

...Richard E Burr is an editorial writer for the Detroit News, where he also edits the op-ed page...

...camps along Honduras's southern border alone...

...in Honduras, therange is from 30,000 to 100,000...

...As the Puebla figures on Nicaraguan refugees suggest, the Sandinistas' suppression of democracy and human rights has prompted voting of a different sort—voting with the feet...

...This represents at least 10 percent of Nicaragua's population of three million (as estimated in 1979...

...Support or potential support for the insurgency is being eliminated by killing people or causing them to flee elsewhere with meager, if any, belongings...

...The Honduran government had registered about 24,000 total Nicaraguan refugees by 1986, the most ever and up 39 percent from the year before...

...Of the group surveyed in the four U.N...

...Nevertheless, newspaper reporters need to get into the countryside to confirm whether this is a trend or an aberration...

...This despite the fact that some of the refugees did not support the insurgency (although certainly some were sympathizers...

...One exile from Nueva Segovia, Jose Esteban Marin, said he has been detained six times between 1980 and 1983 without facing a judge...

...without explanation, they were ordered to move into state-run farms and settlements...

...The same holds true for Costa Rica, where already in 1983 refugees from Nicaragua exceeded those from El Salvador...

...No official consensus exists on theby Richard E. Burr number of Nicaraguan exiles in the United States...

...We had to leave everything we owned behind...

...Thus in Costa Rica, government, press, and relief agency total estimates swing from 85,000 to 200,000...

...The Honduran numbers are made more ambiguous by the great flux in the Miskito Indian population as it moves into and out of Nicaragua...

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...camps in Honduras and Costa Rica, Shea writes: "None of the refugees . . . testified to contra abuses or said that they had left for that reason...

...founder of Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, has said unequivocally, "There are now more exiles than in all forty-five years of Somoza...

...It is almost impossible to confirm the accuracy of the reports further since the area in question is inaccessible...

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...In all, the exiles recounted thirteen such incidents since 1984, with six coming in the last year...

...In some cases, the same story was reported by former neighbors who were now in two different camps, each locked and guarded by armed Costa Rican Security officials and separated from each other by a 45-minute drive over rough rural roads...

...The group detailed more than ten reported incidents in which the Sandinista security forces shot, wounded, and abducted unarmed civilians...

...What does seem to be emerging, according to the exiles, is a pattern of Sandinista military attacks over the last THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 31 three years against civilians in the sparsely populated central and southern Zelaya region, where the contras actively operate...

...it does not include Nicaraguan refugees now living in El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Canada, and other countries, whose numbers are harder to estimate...

...These assaults have continued into the spring, refugees recently told James Le-Moyne of the New York Times, with soldiers even firing on a group of refugees attempting to cross the San Juan River on the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border...

...This apparently reflects a growing Sandinista crack-down on the rest of the population, which is suffering more human-rights abuses than before...

...By 1986, the Costa Rican government reported a total of approximately 22,000 registered Nicaraguan refugees...

...They say at least seven unarmed peasants were killed...

...Teofilo Garcia Garcia, a preacher and farmer, recalled the attack to the Puebla delegation just four days after he and 56 other villagers arrived from their six-week walk to the Costa Rican refugee camp: I saw bombing with six helicopters...

...It is impossible to verify the prison conditions the refugees complain of because the government won't even let into its State Security facilities the International Committee of the Red Cross, which routinely visits prisoners and detainees over the world in confidential agreements with host countries...

...Over the next two years, the number of registered exiles arriving from Nicaragua increased to more than 6,000 a year...

...After talking to refugee officials in Honduras and Costa Rica, the Puebla delegation (Nina Shea, the Institute's Washington director, and Ronald Radosh, a City University of New York history professor) found that about 314,000 documented and undocumented Nicaraguans have fled their country since 1979, when the Sandinistas came to power-57,000 to Honduras, 107,000 to Costa Rica, and 150,000 to the United States...

...That some may have given food to the contras or that some contras may have been mingled with the villagers does not justify lethal military assaults on a peasant community at large...

...But Alita Payne, an associate at Americas Watch, emphasized that the accounts have not been confirmed, something the group, rather naively, has asked the Sandinista government to do...

...The human rights organization Americas Watch followed up the Puebla delegation and also heard stories of atrocities from refugees in Costa Rica...

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...Meanwhile, the press has not shown much interest in the plight of another, growing group of exiles...

...Nicaragua's state of emergency also prevents the ascertaining of a detainee's well-being through habeas corpus...

...Even neo-Stalinist Alexander Cockburn of the Nation has complained, from New York, that some journalists cover the Nicaraguan war from their hotel rooms in Managua...

...There was no warning, they only wanted to kill us...

...It is possible that some may have collaborated with the contras and that their farms had provided the contras with a source of food," Shea says in the report...

...In fact, as Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez noted ominously in February, the number of Nicaraguans in his country would double or triple if the fighting continued—or, more significantly, if Nicaraguans lost all hope of having "a pluralistic regime that respects individual liberties...

...But Shea says the press frequently reports that 100,000 Nicaraguans alone live in the Miami area, which is also a haven for Cuban exiles...

...The attention has concentrated on Salvadoran and Guatemalan refugees, smuggled into the United States by the so-called sanctuary movement, who tell of hardship and repression under their authoritarian, U.S.- backed governments...

...indeed, the State Department says that as many as 500,000 Nicaraguans may have fled since 1979...

...The most important discovery in the Puebla report is the magnitude of the Nicaraguan refugee problem...

...Many of the men, predominantly farmers, said others in their area were arrested simultaneously, perhaps in a coordinated roundup...

...There are signs of internal protest of these abuses—a new movement has recently been formed of 4,000 Nicaraguan mothers and other relatives of prisoners, which recalls similar movements in Argentina and Guatemala where the people protested widespread atrocities...

...Refugees from the same village were able to corroborate each other's accounts," Shea writes...

...Whatever the precise figure, Jose Esteban Gonzalez, the exiled 'Available from the Puebla Institute, 44 W. 36th St., New York, NY 10018...

...I took my wife and eight children and left the same day...

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...Most of the refugees said that armed rebels had either passed through their villages or were several miles away," Shea says...

...Miskitos have always made up the largest number of Nicaraguan exiles in Honduras, easily exceeding the documented number of Spanish-speaking ladinos...

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...The attacks usually would begin without warning, the refugees told Radosh and Shea, with aerial bombing and automatic fire that seemed de-signed to destroy everything: homes, workers, livestock...

...In fact, said Serge Male, a French administrator of the U.N...

...C ome specifics will convey the difficulties encountered by those trying to enumerate the refugee problem...

...Rounding out these practices, which Amnesty International classifies as "preconditions of torture," is the frequent incommunicado interrogation of detainees for periods of two to four weeks or longer...

...T he Sandinista army's acts seem to I reflect a government counter-insurgency strategy aimed at undermining any contra network that may have sprouted in the villages...

...Officially, only 4,360 Nicaraguans have received asylum since 1979...

...Indeed, the fact that they weren't involved in any other groups, especially such government organizations as the Sandinista Defense Committees, may have aroused the government's suspicion...

...T he cause of this hemorrhage of 1 people from Nicaragua is Sandinista persecution and harassment—including, according to Shea and Radosh, restrictions of freedom of religion and conscience, military draft evasion, and economic hardship and reprisals...

...So the contras may not be their own worst enemy, turning the people against the insurgency with alleged atrocities, as some experts have been recently suggesting...

...Meanwhile, the Sandinistas' resettlement programs, similar to that employed against the Miskitos in 1981, have proceeded even though, some refugees said, no fighting had occurred in their area...

...For this and other reasons, Shea writes that the 314,000 figure is a conservative estimate...

...Taken all together, these detention practices easily amount to violations of international human-rights standards against arbitrary detention and torture...

...The most recent assault confirmed by the Puebla delegation occurred on December 9, 1986, in Punta Gorda, a town on the Atlantic Ocean coast...

...Contras weren't present during the attacks, the refugees said, and there apparently was not any crossfire or return fire during the attacks, which might excuse some killings as being accidental or the result of combat...

...They are Nicaraguans, Central America's silent refugees—silent, because few reporters and human-rights groups have aggressively investigated how many Nicaraguans are refugees, and why...

...According to sources Shea considers reliable, however, between one-third and one-half of these Indians later returned to Nicaragua for a variety of reasons, including a Sandinista peace proposal...

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...Now the Puebla Institute, a New York-based lay Roman Catholic human-rights group, has challenged this indifference with a report titled, "Fleeing Their Homeland...

...They were held as long as fifteen months without charge in the State Security detention centers, where detainees are held before being charged or tried and where, according to confirmed reports, a number have been tortured...

...Refugee officials told the Puebla delegation that they have little hope the Nicaraguan exile population will significantly decline soon...

...When the Sandinista army attacked Indian villages along the Rio Coco in late March 1986, more than 10,000 Miskitos fled to Honduras...

...But their interviews with more than one hundred randomly selected refugees, mostly campesinos, revealed some previously unreported and under-reported human-rights abuses...

...The Washington Post's Julia Preston, in a break with the media's general silence on the issue, reported in February that as many as 24,000 Nicaraguan exiles live outside the U.N...

...Their government also has committed many human-rights violations...

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...Most Nicaraguan exiles, however, live in these countries illegally and are unregistered by the government...

...This would seem to account for much of the massive refugee movements into Costa Rica...

...These refugees and others may now become documented and the official figures increase, because of the Supreme Court's Cardoza v. Fonseca decision this year, which relaxed the standard of proof for asylum applicants...

...Before the assaults, some refugees said, Sandinista officials had called them "contra collaborators" who provided food, shelter, or information...

...High Commission on Refugees program in Honduras, "Nicaraguan refugees now compose the majority of refugees fleeing from countries in Central America...

...In 1983, there were about 13,800 Miskitos compared with about 2,500 ladinos, a more than five to one ratio...

...But by last year, the number of ladinos had grown to about 8,200 compared with 16,000 Miskitos...

...Soldiers sometimes would follow with mop-up operations, in the process apparently making no effort to disting4ish between military and civilian targets, or even between the young and old, or men, women, and children...

...They used grenades and automatic weapons...

...This allows the refugees greater mobility and a better chance to find work, particularly on farms...

...We left quickly, but we saw people who were killed in the river, including a 70-year-old man I recognized, named Gilberto...

...The number of arriving Nicaraguan refugees even surpassed the number of Salvadoran refugees, who had formerly made up the largest migration into Honduras during the 1980s...

...Almost one-third of the about 80 adult men interviewed in the refugee camps had been imprisoned by the government during the past six years...

...Most former detainees did not know why they were held, insisting they were not actively involved in any labor union or political group...

...Unfortunately, in Nicaragua the situation doesn't promise to improve...

...Approximately 50 adults, representing nearly every refugee the Puebla delegation interviewed in the Costa Rican camps," Shea writes, "told of fleeing from surprise strafing or bombing attacks by the Sandinista Popular Army...

...In response, Attorney General Edwin Meese recently directed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to encourage more Nicaraguans to seek refuge here, because a high proportion of Nicaraguan applicants for asylum in the past have proved that they have a well-founded fear of persecution if they were to be deported...

...If they warned us, we would have fled before...

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...Those who aren't fortunate enough to flee to safety face the very real possibility of arbitrary arrest or detention...

...But the mix has been changing rapidly...