Moving the Miskitos

By Russ Hoyle

Nicaragua uses brutal force on its proud, once friendly Indians

For weeks, Honduran soldiers stationed across the Coco River from the Nicaraguan village of Leimus watched with mounting concern as Sandinista troops began moving into the bustling town, a stronghold of the country's independent-minded Miskito Indians. Then, on a moonlit night just before Christmas, the Hondurans began hearing bursts of automatic rifle fire. An Indian mineworker, Roberto Vidal Poveda, 18, recounted his ordeal to TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, who talked to a number of Miskito refugees: "During the night, the Sandinistas took us out and started to kill us, one by one. They made me stand by the river, but I jumped when they started to shoot. Two bullets hit me in my arm. They shot at me as I swam. I finally reached the other side and lay on the beach until morning."

A local farmer, Orvino Gonzales, 37, was coming down the Coco River in a boat the night the shooting in Leimus started. Said he: "It was dark, but I saw maybe 15 people taken out of a building and lined up in a launch on the water. The Sandinistas shot them with automatic rifles. The bodies fell into the water." Two days later the Sandinistas burned houses in Wiwinak, where Gonzales lived. Several miles upstream, the village of San Jeronimo was reduced to ashes.

The reported bloodbath in Leimus, in which as many as 50 Miskito Indians were shot or drowned, was part of an operation ordered by the Sandinista high command in Managua to evacuate a zone some 50 miles deep on the Nicaragua-Honduras border from Santa Isabel eastward along the Coco River to the coast. Beginning in mid-December, Sandinista forces evacuated or burned between 25 and 40 Miskito villages, allegedly killed an estimated 200 inhabitants and resettled 8,500 to 10,000 more at internment camps in the Nicaraguan interior near Rosita and Siuna. Reason for the Sandinista campaign: the Miskitos, some of whom fought alongside the Sandinistas to overthrow Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had begun to chafe under Sandinista rule. Some were even known to have joined forces with anti-Sandinista exiles across the Honduran border.

"Everybody has the same story," said Tom Hawk, the director of the overflowing United Nations-sponsored refugee camp at Mocoron, Honduras. "You hear it again and again." The camp is in a muddy meadow of thatched lean-tos surrounded by jungle. It has become home for 5,100 Miskito Indians who fled across the border into Honduras. Another 3,000 to 5,000 are expected in coming weeks. Food shipments are infrequent, and many of the refugees had not eaten in three days when Willwerth visited.

The Sandinista operation was the regime's first concerted military effort to neutralize the Miskito minority, which makes up some 4% of Nicaragua's population of 2.7 million and occupies most of the country's vulnerable northeast region. The Sandinistas fear that the porous Honduras border, and the 336-mile Caribbean coastline, might eventually be used as a staging area for an invasion led by anti-Sandinista units. The forcible resettlement of the Miskitos was designed to prevent them from providing food, shelter and intelligence to the anti-Sandinistas. Whatever the reason, the Sandinista action against the Indian minority was being sharply criticized last week as an indefensible abridgment of human rights.

Besides those killed or forced to abandon their homes, 160 Miskitos were jailed in the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas and 71 were found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity. Early in February the northern part of the department of Zelaya was declared a "military security zone." Even so, the Managua government still has cause for concern. A small but growing number of Miskito refugees who have escaped into Honduras are arming for revenge.

The tension between the Miskitos and the Sandinistas has been growing for some time. After the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, they initiated ambitious reform programs to improve conditions of health care and literacy among the Miskitos. Sandinista volunteers and Cuban cadres made some headway, but the Indians soon bridled at the accompanying ideology--and the fact that literacy classes were initially held only in Spanish. Disgruntled Miskito leaders quickly became a major nuisance for the Sandinistas. Suspecting growing separatist sentiments among them, Sandinista forces last year arrested 33 Indian leaders, and shortly thereafter four government soldiers and four Miskitos were killed during a Shootout at a Moravian church in Prinzapolka. One of those arrested was Steadman Fagoth Miiller, 27, a militant young Miskito leader feared by the Sandinistas. On his release in May, he quickly fled to Honduras, where he unambiguously declared himself in opposition to the Managua government.

According to Sandinista documents, Miskito leaders have been involved with anti-Sandinista exiles in at least 26 cross-border raids against Nicaraguan forces since November. During one of the antigovernment actions, insurgents are claimed to have driven a stake into the chest of a wounded soldier, disemboweled him and slit his throat. That grisly incident may be pure propaganda. But there is little doubt that the offensive it was intended to justify--an undeclared war on the mostly peaceful, independent Indians who only recently were among the Sandinistas' friends--marks a new, brutal and tragic phase in Nicaragua's revolution. --By Russ Hoyle

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