Nicaragua's Other War

...Babies cried as a faint rain fell...

...The villagers walked through the darkness...

...The regime says the relocation is necessary to repel attacks from Honduras...

...One night this spring, starting out from a secret camp in Honduras, I accompanied 12 Indian insurgents, 13-24 years old and armed with American M-16 and Chinese AK-47 automatic rifles, on a raid against the garrison...

...Although the size of the force was later reduced substantially, Sandy Bay became a rebel target...

...The fear and uncertainty on every face contrasted oddly with tee shirts bearing such stenciled messages as "Property of the New York Cosmos" and "Help Stamp Out Disco in Your Own Lifetime...

...There were other problems too...

...Adults bent under the weight of their improvised backpacks...

...He has subsequently returned to Nicaragua...

...People from the village informed me that six months ago about 180 Sandinista soldiers had been stationed there, together with Cubans...

...Wiggins contends that the government shoves disproportionate numbers of Miskitos into the front lines against the contras—in a war Indians tend to associate with the defense of Sandinism, not of the nation...

...Village men complained that the only work available to them involved helping the Sandinistas build military fortifications in surrounding settlements, like Auastara and Da-kara...

...Apparently, the Miskitos have doubts of their own...

...Before starting off, they gathered in a clearing...

...Tensions died down during the Somoza era (1936-79), largely because that rapacious family, even though it certainly exploited the Indians and their mineral resources, forestry, and fishing, did not disrupt their way of life or expropriate their communal lands...

...If the travelers included any of them, the element of surprise would be lost...

...At dawn, they took cover in a grove of trees until dusk, fearing that the planes might take to the skies again and spot them...

...Somoza used to show up at the villages around election time," one rebel leader reminisced to me, "just to make a display of getting our vote...

...Since then, however, more have fled...

...Some of the refugees join the resistance and take part in raids on enemy strongholds—the outpost at Sandy Bay, for instance...

...Meanwhile, the armed struggle of the Indian rebels continues...

...Their destination was known to have a small number of informers, or "ears," quite as it had in Somoza's day...

...Those who have managed to avoid both fates cannot farm their lands, or they do so only within strict limits...

...For one thing, Miskitos on the Caribbean and Hispanics on the Pacific have been feuding since the former became British allies in the 17th century...

...For those three weeks, I was a witness to the Sandinistas' war on the Indians...

...The assault started at 5 a.m...

...My companions were upset...

...Many of the exiles, says Armstrong Wiggins, a Miskito resistance leader now working at the Indian Law Resource Center in Washington, D.C., are youngsters running away to avoid being drafted into the Army...

...Moreover, its ignorance of or insensitivity to the Miskitos' long-fallow agriculture had led Managua to rule that much of their land had been underused or misused, and it placed this patrimony under state control, in accordance with the new Agrarian Reform Law...

...Throughout the Indian region, the government had curtailed or even prohibited food production to prevent the rebels from getting their hands on supplies...

...One fourth of the Miskitos have either left Nicaragua or been detained forcibly within it...

...From the start this expedient failed, and the Sandinistas then reverted to Somoza's practice of relying for security on paid spies...

...During the battle, circling Sandinista planes had fired eight rockets into the area of the fighting...

...A day's march from the village, we spotted Indian civilians walking toward it...

...A bit earlier, he had been shot in the back of the head by besieged government troops defending their garrison in this Miskito village on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast...

...Three days and two nights later, the refugees from Sandy Bay joined the 18,000 or so who had already fled to Honduras...

...By nightfall, they had returned to Puerto Cabezas, another town not far away...

...Crossing the border at the Coco River —a dangerous frontier district where' the rebels armed Indian refugees after the Sandinistas attacked them last January, killing eight people—we met 260 reinforcements at a designated spot three hours downstream by dugout canoe...

...The Sandinistas assert that the 1,300, including Schlaefer, had been kidnapped by the rebels...

...SANDINISTAS Nicaragua's Other War BY RICHARD BODURTHA Sandy Bay The dead guerrilla, a Miskito Indian who had participated in almost 30 firefights against the Sandinistas and had once brought down one of their planes with an M-60 machine gun, fit neatly into a hastily dug grave...

...Every group of 20 attackers had one M-60, one RPG-7 rocket grenade launcher, one 60-millimeter mortar, and an antitank weapon —plus the M-16 or AK-47 and 250 rounds of ammunition carried by each individual...

...I recently spent three weeks alongside the Miskito rebels...

...Before the first shovel of dirt hit the body, a few of the fighters had started heading toward the center of town and the ominous rattle of nearby gunfire...

...Last December, 1,300 of them, accompanied by Salvador Schlae-fer, an American Catholic bishop who has spent 30 years in the country, broke confinement and escaped to Honduras...

...When the Sandinista government first discovered the hostility of the Indians, it tried to burden them with the same Comites de Defensa Sandinista it had set up elsewhere...

...These unhappy people occupy "a situation of inevitable economic dependence on the government as they have been deprived of their traditional means of subsistence," according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights...

...Richard Bodurtha, a free-lance writer, has covered the Nicaraguan war with the assistance of a grant from the Fund for Objective News Reporting...

...As a precaution, the villagers were detained overnight...

...Members of the Moravian Church, a Protestant sect active among the Miskitos in Nicaragua, claim that about 18,000 of them have been forced into such places...

...After the fighting died down, I had easy access to Sandy Bay...

...They take the land, kill the livestock and move us to the [resettlement] camps...

...But the Inter-American Committee for Human Rights points out that the refusal to assist the Indians financially pretty much "contradicts in fact the declared willingness of the government to allow that population to return" and pick up the threads of their lives...

...It insists that the unpopular policy really gives the Miskitos "opportunities they did not have with respect to health and education...

...By midmorning only two of them remained alive: a sharpshooter with an M-16 and another fellow firing an M-60...

...Marching with them from their secret camp in Honduras, I watched their assault on Sandy Bay and returned with them to base...

...They have fought more than 50 battles against the government's troops in the last three years, and no end is yet in sight...

...Mortar and M-60 tracer rounds lit the darkness like sparks flying between girded posts of an electrical plant...

...Afraid that the bombers would soon come back, the 1,200 men, women and children of Sandy Bay decided to strike out for Honduras...

...Almost from the start of Nicaragua's revolution five years ago, it has been clear that the two groups would not j oin in a common pursuit of the millennium...

...Twenty young Indians circled the pit, jabbing their rifles overhead, then kneeling—all the while chanting personal prayers...

...When the Sandinistas turn up, it's trouble...

...Most of the Sandinistas were killed in the early barrage...

...Paddling stern was a Miskito guide who looked to be around 60, had a machete tied to his waist, and was dressed in rainboots, cotton trousers and an old New York Yankees hat...