Nicaragua No-Man's-Land

By Janice Castro

Humberto Torres sat in a lean-to in a camp about 100 miles north of Managua last week, cradling the youngest of his five children, as he recalled his forced evacuation in March from Los Encuentros, a hamlet in northern Nicaragua. "The Sandinistas made us get out," he said, "because they told us they were going to destroy the houses." Like some 50,000 other peasants, Torres, 56, and his family have been moved south by the government in an effort to isolate an estimated 8,000 U.S.-supported contra rebels roaming through Nicaragua's five northern provinces. Villages are being emptied--some destroyed--in an operation that President Reagan, with considerable exaggeration, last week described as "Stalin's tactic of Gulag relocation."

No one understands the value of civilian collaboration better than the Sandinistas, themselves former guerrillas. The resettlement program, under way since January, has been speeded up in recent weeks as the government attempts to systematically deprive the contras of a popular base that provides food, refuge and, occasionally, recruits. Described in the official Sandinista newspaper Barricada as "the rescue of thousands of peasants from the isolation that allowed the counterrevolution to utilize them," the evacuation could bring about an escalation of the war. Once the farmers are safely out of the way, the Nicaraguan military will have created a free-fire zone in which it can use some of the dozen or so Mi-24 "Hind" helicopters it has received from the Soviet Union. The gunships, equipped with rockets and fast-firing guns, wield devastating firepower. Said Orlando Osario, a refugee evacuated with his family to the town of Jinotega, some 100 miles north of Managua: "I figured it was better to get out alive."

In contrast to its brutal relocation of 10,000 Miskito Indians from the Atlantic coast in 1981 and 1982, the government is giving the new evacuees a few days' notice, then sending in troops to help them pack up and move. Some owners of coffee plantations have even been paid market rates for the farms they were forced to leave. The government is also providing food, temporary shelter, medical centers and individual farm plots to the 7,000 evacuated families that will be placed in 47 resettlement camps. While many of the refugees are suspected of having collaborated with the contras in the north, movement in and out of the camps has not been restricted. In fact, a few campesinos destined for the camps have instead made their way to contra- controlled areas along the border with Honduras.

As the Sandinistas see it, the evacuation has other advantages: it could boost agricultural production while giving Managua greater control over some of Nicaragua's subsistence farmers. In a speech last month, Agriculture Minister Jaime Wheelock Roman noted that while independent peasant farmers worked 48% of the nation's farmland to produce 26% of the crops, large cooperatives using only 24% of the land grew 49% of the harvest. Each of the new camps is attached either to a collective farm or to a privately owned cooperative, where some of the refugees have been given work.

Despite the efforts of the Sandinistas to present the forced evacuation as a benevolent act of government, some of the evacuees, particularly those who saw their homes destroyed by government soldiers, are less than happy. Said Estaba Menes Hernandez, a refugee from Los Encuentros: "They can promise us a good life, but it will never be the same."

With reporting by June Erlick/Managua