Nowadays, when the Contra emerged from The Mountain to terrorize the campesinos, it must have felt like a violation; like, perhaps, the desecration of a shrine.
Forested mesas flanked the road; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon. Cattle and dogs shared the road with cars, refusing to acknowledge the supremacy of the automobile. When the trucks came, however, everybody got out of the way fast.
Tall cacti by the roadside. Women in fatigues carried rifles over their shoulders, holding them by the barrels. Moss hung in clumps from the trees and even from the telephone wires. Children pushed wooden wheelbarrows full of wood. And then, as we neared Matagalpa, we came upon a sombre procession carrying a distressingly small box: a child’s funeral. I saw three in the next two days.
It had begun to rain.
I was pleased to be getting out of Managua again. Matagalpa felt like a real town, with its church-dominated squares, its town centre. It was like returning to normal, but normality here was of a violent, exceptional type. The buildings were full of bullet-holes left over from the insurrection years, and dominating the town was a high, ugly tower which was all that remained of the National Guard’s hated command post. After the revolution, the people had demolished the Guardia’s fearsome redoubt.
The ice-cream shop had no ice-cream because of the shortages. In the toy shop the evidence of poverty was everywhere; the best toys on display were primitive ‘cars’ made out of a couple of bits of wood nailed together and painted, with Coca-Cola bottle tops for hubcaps. There were, interestingly, a number of mixed-business stores known as ‘Egyptian shops’, boasting such names as ‘Armando Mustafa’ or ‘Manolo Saleh’, selling haberdashery, a few clothes, some toiletries, a variety of basic household items – shampoo, buckets, safety-pins, mirrors, balls. I remembered the Street of Turks in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Matagalpa, Macondo did not seem so very far away.
The faces in the Egyptian shops didn’t look particularly Egyptian but then neither did the orientally named Moisés Hassan, mayor of Managua. In the cafés, I met some more familiar faces. Posters of the Pope and of Cardinal Obando y Bravo were everywhere, the Cardinal’s scarlet robes rendered pale pink by the passage of time. Sandinistas, unconcerned about the company they were keeping, drank hideously sweetened fruit squashes, including the bright purple pitahaya, and munched on the glutinous kiwi-like mamón, beneath the watching Cardinal. I talked to Carlos Paladino, who worked in the office of the delegado or governor of Matagalpa province, about the regional resettlement policy.
Large areas of the mountainous and densely jungled war zone in the north-eastern part of Jinotega province had been evacuated, and the population relocated in southern Jinotega, and Matagalpa province, too. It had been a ‘military decision’, that is, compulsory. The army had been having trouble fighting the Contra because the scattered civilian population kept getting in the way. The people were also in danger from the Contra, who regularly kidnapped campesinos, or forced them to grow food for the counter-revolutionary soldiers, or killed them. But wasn’t it also true, I asked, that many people in those areas sympathized with the Contra? Yes, Paladino replied, some men had gone to join them, leaving many women with children behind. The large number of one-parent families of this type had become quite a problem. But in many cases the men would return, disillusioned after a time. The government offered a complete amnesty for any campesino who returned in this way. ‘We don’t hold them responsible,’ Paladino said. ‘We know how much pressure the Contra can exert.’
Resettlement brought problems. Apart from the single-parent issue – how were these women to be involved in production when they had to look after their children? – the resettled northerners were people who were utterly unfamiliar with living in communities. They had led isolated lives in jungle clearings. Now they were being put into clusters of houses built close together. Their animals strayed into their neighbours’ yards. Their children fought. They hated it. Many of them were racially different from the local mestizos: they were Amerindians, Miskito or Sumo, with their own languages, their own culture, and they felt colonized. ‘We made many mistakes,’ Carlos Paladino admitted.
The plan was to have child-care centres at each co-operative settlement, but so far they had only been able to put in eleven such centres in over fifty communities. They had also managed to build some schools, some health-care facilities; but there was still a lot of resentment in the air.
The lack of resources (and, no doubt, the haste with which the operation had been carried out) had meant that in some places the authorities had been unable to provide the resettled families with completed houses. The ‘roof only policy’, as it was called, offered the uprooted families exactly what its name suggested: a roof. They had to build the walls out of whatever materials they could find. It was not a policy calculated to win hearts and minds. But, Paladino insisted, the state was doing its best, and international volunteer brigades and relief agencies were helping, too. There were even some unexpected individual initiatives. ‘A few days after the mine blew up and killed the thirty-two bus passengers,’ he told me, ‘a tall, fair-haired man appeared in the area, a foreigner, with fifteen hundred dollars to give away. He was just carrying it in his pockets, and looking for the families of the thirty-two, to hand over the money. It was his savings.’
Progress remained slow. ‘It isn’t easy,’ Carlos said. ‘Eight new communities have been destroyed by the Contra in the last six months. Hundreds of campesinos die in the attacks every year.’
Our best defence is the people in arms. ‘The people are more and more able to undertake their own defence. In November 1985 at Santa Rosa hundreds of Contra were killed. Since then, in the attacks on the new co-operatives, hundreds more.’
But the Contra were doing damage, all right. For a country in Nicaragua’s position, the loss of an estimated forty per cent of the harvest was a crippling blow.
When Carlos Paladino came to work in Matagalpa, he was highly critical of the way the revolution had handled the resettlements, and won the approval of the regional delegado, Carlos Zamora, for his new approach. He went into the jungle, with his staff, and lived with the peasants for months, to learn about their way of life and their needs, before attempting any resettlement. This altered the layout of the new settlements, and greatly increased the officials’ sensitivity to the people’s wishes. Paladino became an expert on Miskito Indian culture, and had started writing about it. In his spare time (!) he was doing a history degree. Not for the first time, I felt awed by the amount people were willing to take on in Nicaragua.
After I’d been talking to him for more than an hour, I discovered that Paladino had been in hospital twenty-four hours earlier, having a .22 bullet removed from his lung. It had been there since before the ‘triumph’, the result of an accident: he had been shot in training by a careless cadet. He opened his shirt, after I had bullied him to do so, and showed me the scar. It was an inch away from his heart.
I stayed in a wooden chalet in the mountains high above Matagalpa, and that night the delegado, Carlos Zamora, and his deputy, Manuel Salvatierra, dropped by to inspect the escritor hindú. Zamora was small, slight, moustachioed; Salvatierra of much bigger build. They were old college friends. We sat down to a dinner of beef in hot pepper sauce, squash with melted cheese, and banana chips.
On the 19th, Zamora volunteered, the Contra had moved a thousand men into Jinotega province. Their plan had been to attack one of the two hydro-electric stations and cut the power cable. They had also intended to ambush campesinos on their way to Estelí. ‘They failed completely,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘Our intelligence was good enough. But 700 of them are still in the region, still in Nicaragua. The rest have returned to Honduras.’
Salvatierra stressed the Contra’s morale problem. ‘They’re scared of us,’ he said. ‘Dollars won’t help that.’
I changed the subject. Was it true that it cost six head of cattle to get a car se
rviced? They laughed. ‘Or ten hectares of maize,’ said Carlos Zamora. So, then, I said, if prices are that high, tell me about corruption. They looked embarrassed, not unexpectedly, but they didn’t refuse to answer. Yes, Zamora said, there was, er, some. ‘About the car service,’ he said. ‘You see, a mechanic will tell you that a certain part is unavailable, or can be ordered for crazy money, but he just happens to have one at home, for a price.’
The black market accounted for maybe forty per cent of the country’s liquid assets. ‘Anything that can be bought can be sold down the road for more,’ Salvatierra said. ‘There is an old woman who hitchhikes from Matagalpa to León every day, with a suitcase full of beans, mangoes and rice. She earns 5,000 córdobas a day. I earn about 3,000.’
Zamora and Salvatierra had been ‘bad students’ in Managua when the FSLN recruited them. Zamora’s father was a garage mechanic. (I had accidentally hit on the right subject when I talked about servicing motor cars.) ‘He wasn’t against the revolution but he wasn’t for it, either.’ I said that it seemed at times that the revolution had been a struggle between the generations – the Frente’s ‘muchachos’, kids, against the older generation of Somocistas and cautious, conservative campesinos. No, no, they both hastened to correct me. But the impression stuck.
‘How old are you?’ I asked them. They giggled prettily.
‘Thirty,’ Carlos Zamora said. He had fought a revolution and was the governor of a province, and he was nine years younger than me.
Later, when a little Flor de Caña Extra Seco had loosened things up, the old stories came out again: of the battle of Pancasán in 1974, at which the Sandinistas suffered a bloody defeat, but after which, for the first time, the campesinos came to the Frente and asked for arms, so that the defeat was a victory, after all, the moment at which the muchachos and the peasants united; of Julio Buitrago; of the local boy, Carlos Fonseca, who was born in Matagalpa. Sandino and Fonseca were both illegitimate, they told me. ‘So what’s the connection between bastards and revolutions?’ I asked, but they only laughed nervously. It wasn’t done to joke about the saints.
I tried to get them to open up about the period in the ’70s during which the Frente had split into three ‘tendencies’, after a bitter dispute about the correct path for the revolution. (The ‘proletarian faction’, led by Jaime Wheelock, believed that a long period of work with the campesinos, to politicize and mobilize them, was the way forward, even if it took years. The faction that favoured a prolonged guerrilla war, and based itself in the mountains, included Carlos Fonseca himself; and the third faction, the terceristas, which believed in winning the support of the middle classes and proceeding by a strategy of large-scale urban insurrection, was led by Daniel Ortega and his brother. The factions united, in December 1978, for the final push to victory, and it was the tercerista plan that carried the day.)
Zamora and Salvatierra denied that there had been any internal power struggles; the division had been tactical and not a real split. ‘I’ve never heard of a revolution without a power struggle in the leadership,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t it true that Jaime Wheelock was accused of being responsible for the split? Wasn’t it true that Daniel Ortega became President because the tercerista faction won the internal fight?’ No, they said, anxiously. Not at all. ‘The directorate has always been very united.’
That simply wasn’t true. Where had they spent the insurrection years, I asked; ‘In the cities,’ Zamora replied; Salvatierra nodded. Now I understood: they belonged to the urban-insurrectionist, tercerista faction, the winning team. They didn’t want to seem to be gloating over the victory.
To stir things up, I said that the case of Edén Pastora suggested that the divisions were deeper than they cared to admit. After all, Pastora had been a tercerista himself, he had been the famous ‘Commander Zero’, glamorous and dashing, who had led the sensational attack on the Palacio Nacional, taken the entire Somocista Chamber of Deputies hostage, and obtained the release of fifty jailed Sandinistas plus a half-million dollar ransom; and there he was today, in exile in Costa Rica, having tried to lead a counter-revolutionary army of his own … He had been defeated by the Sandinistas, but surely his break with the revolution he helped to bring about was significant? There were grins and embarrassed laughs from the delegado and his deputy. ‘Edén Pastora wanted personal glory,’ Salvatierra said. ‘He joined the wrong army in the first place.’
The next day I drove up into the north. I knew that the road I was on, the one that went up past Jinotega and headed for Bocay, was the one on which the Contra mine had exploded, killing ‘the thirty-two’, and even though that had happened a good deal further north than I was going, I felt extremely fearless as we went over the bumps. ‘How do you protect the roads?’ I asked the army officer who was accompanying me. ‘It’s impossible to guarantee total safety,’ he replied.
‘I see,’ I said. ‘Yes. By the way, how do you know when there’s a mine in the road?’
‘There’s a big bang,’ came the straight-faced reply.
My breakfast of rice and beans – ‘gallo pinto’, it was called, ‘painted rooster’ – began to crow noisily in my stomach.
There were vultures sitting by the roadsides. Low clouds sat amongst the mountains. The road-signs were punctured by bullet-holes. In the jeep, the driver, Danilo, had a radio, or rather a ‘REALISTIC sixteen-band scanner’, on which he picked up Contra transmissions. We passed co-operatives with resolutely optimistic names: La Esperanza. La Paz. The mountains thickened and closed: walls of tree and cloud. There was a flash of electric-blue wings; then, suddenly, a peasant shack surrounded by trees and hedges clipped into cones, domes, rectangles, spheres, all manner of geometric shapes. To be a topiarist in a jungle, I reflected, was to be a truly stubborn human being.
Then there was a tree lying across the road, blocking our way. Was this it? Was this where Contra fiends with machetes between their teeth would burst from the foliage, and goodbye escritor hindú?
It was just a tree across the road.
The Enrique Acuña co-operative was named after a local martyr, who had been murdered by a wealthy local landowner after Somoza’s fall. (The killer got away, fleeing the country before he could be arrested.) It was a ‘CAS’, a Cooperativa Agrícola Sandinista, that is, a proper co-op, with all the land held and farmed collectively. Elsewhere, in areas where there had been resistance to the co-operative idea, the government had evolved the ‘CCS’, the Co-operative of Credits and Services. In a CCS the land was owned and farmed by individuals, and the government’s role was limited to supplying them with power, water, health care and distribution facilities. There was no doubt that the campesinos were encouraged to adopt the CAS structure, but the existence of the alternative was an indication of the authorities’ flexibility; this was not, surely, the way a doctrinaire commune-ist regime would go about its business.
The houses were built on the ‘miniskirt’ principle: metal roofs stood over walls that were made of concrete up to a height of three feet, and of wood above that height. This had become the campesinos’ favourite building method. The Contra couldn’t set fire to the roofs, or shoot the occupants through the walls while they lay sleeping. The houses were arranged around wide avenues, with plenty of space between them. Pigs were snoozing in the shade. There was a tap with running water, and even a shower. In a ramshackle shed, a playschool was in progress: clapping games and songs. In the next room, there was a baby care centre with instructions for the care and diagnosis of diarrhoea pinned up on the wall, written out and illustrated by the children themselves. The disease was the main child-killer in the rural areas.
All around the co-operative’s residential area was a system of trenches. The campesinos did guard duty on a rota basis, and many of the men were familiar with the workings of the AK-47 automatic rifle. They were also geniuses with the machete. The campesino who had hacked to pieces the tree that had held us up could have shaved you without breaking your skin. Alternatively, he could have sl
iced you like a loaf.
Last November, the Contra had attacked the Acuña co-operative, by daylight and in force: around 400 of them against thirty-two armed defenders. Arturo, the burly young man who was in charge of the defence committee, told me proudly that they had held out for three hours until help arrived from a neighbouring co-operative. In the end the Contra were beaten off, with thirteen dead and around forty wounded. ‘We lost nobody,’ Arturo boasted. Since then, the Contra had been seen in the neighbourhood twice, but had not attacked.
A thought occurred to me: if the opposition were correct, and the Sandinistas were so unpopular, how was it that the government could hand out all these guns to the people, and be confident that the weapons would not be turned against them? There wasn’t another regime in Central America that would dare to do the same: not Salvador, nor Guatemala, not Honduras, not Costa Rica. While in tyrannical, ‘Stalinist’ Nicaragua, the government armed the peasantry, and they, in turn, pointed the guns, every one of them, against the counter-revolutionary forces.