Letters
Violence in Nicaragua Tim Rogers' Update, "Silent War in Nicaragua: The New Politics of Violence," (January/February 2001) was nothing new, mostly a rehash of events of the early 1990s. For...
...The Pact divides the political turf between Liberals and Sandinistas, leaving other political expressions-in a supposedly multi-ethnic and pluricultural nation-out in the cold...
...During Hurricane Mitch, the fluid communication and participatory organization of the commissions helped to save lives in several areas...
...Paul Jeffrey Santa Lucia, Honduras Tim Rogers Responds...
...And many people are involved in important organization work for peace...
...For example, although it discussed the indigenous group Yatama, and used a photo of Yatama combatants, it failed to analyze how that group's uprising late last year, on the eve of nationwide municipal elections, grew out of frustration with the infamous "Pact" between President Arnoldo Aleman and former President Daniel Ortega...
...Despite threats of sabotage and an election boycott by Yatama leader Brooklyn Rivera, the protests did not change anything and the result was an 80% voter abstention rate in the North Atlantic region of the country...
...Therefore, there was no mention of the Yatama uprising in early November in the North Atlantic town of Puerto Cabezas, which left some 20 people injured and several others missing...
...M y deadline for the article was in September, two months before the municipal elections...
...To cover rural Nicaragua by only mentioning the violence (and tying that violence only to the war of the 1980s), without touching on today's politics, and not including the brave organizational efforts of ordinary citizens in rural villages, is a disservice to the complicated reality of the Nicaraguan countryside...
...The reality of the countryside, granted, is extremely complex...
...These commissions have played a key role in negotiating with armed groups to lower the conflict's impact on civilian populations...
...They have interceded at times on behalf of the rearmados when their cause was legitimate...
...An even more serious omission, however, is the failure to note the hundreds of local peace commissions in areas such as Nueva Guinea and Jinotega...
...Jeffrey correctly points out that the uprising was due to mounting frustration with the "Pact," which excluded groups like Yatama from participating in the municipal elections...
...For example, just this month, the "Viviana Gallardo Commando," the kidnap gang responsible for the 1996 abduction of two Europeans on the Costa Rican border, rearmed and had a shoot-out with the rural police...
...Ironically, there are more such groups today than at war's end...
...And by forming a grassroots expression of civil society in remote villages, the commissions have often taken upon themselves the tasks of local government which the central government has forsaken in its IMF-prescribed reduction of the state apparatus...
...My intention was not to neglect these folks, but to focus on the fact that much of the countryside remains a tinderbox of old guns, unemployed soldiers, extreme poverty and marginalization...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 5
