Calling-Card Surrender

The 112-man airborne rebellion against Nicaragua's Somoza brothers--President Luis and National Guard Commander Anastasio--fizzled toward failure last week.

The collapse was plain the first time a U.S. newsman made contact with the rebels. As TIME'S Mexico City Bureau Chief Harvey Rosenhouse walked toward a farmhouse in the jungled hills 90 miles east of Managua, he was met by Lawyer Jose Medina Cuadra, 30, leader of a group of 45 rebels. He and his troops, said Medina, were disheartened: "Our radio went dead. We were always short of food, and the peasants in these mountains do not have enough to spare." Medina was ready to give up. Rosenhouse sent a twelve-year-old boy to a nearby National Guard command post with a message on one of his calling cards: "Forty-five rebels want to surrender. They have laid down their guns. Please don't come in shooting." A Guard patrol surrounded the house, took the surrender. Three days later Medina's holdout leader, Pedro Joaquln Chamorro, editor-owner of Managua's anti-Somoza La Prensa, also gave himself up. That left 38 rebels still at large, scattered through the hills near the Olama River 65 miles northeast of Managua.

The rebels had overestimated their own toughness and underestimated the Somoza boys' strength, which included a well trained and loyal army, reliable reservists, and the neutrality of the urban and rural masses. Most Nicaraguans apparently are not interested in overthrowing President Luis, who has been liberalizing the dictatorship he inherited from his assassinated father, tough old Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza.

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