December 2018
Rev. Dan and Rick Meet the Contras
Rev. Dan and I were members of a Witness for Peace two-week delegation in 1991. The first week was spent in Managua visiting all types of actors involved in the Contra War, which lasted, from roughly 1979 to 1992. (1) Witness for Peace was created in the early 1980’s as an activist response to the Contra – Sandinista War. The Reagan Administration as an alternative to the communist inspired Sandinistas underwrote the Contras.
There is a story circulating that in the early days of the Contra War some North American ministers were touring the country when Contra shells started to fall. The locals implored the visitors to stay, believing that the Contras would not risk killing the North Americans out of fear of severe reprisals from the US news cycle. Another primary motivation was for the visiting teams or delegations to get educated about the situation in Nicaragua and then go back home to counter the stories coming from the Reagan administration’s oversimplification of the situation.
Some of the groups that we talked with during the first week were officials in the socialistic Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) or Contras, US AID, UD Diplomatic Mission, various members of the religious community and a variety of local NGO activists.
For the second week, Rev. Dan and I paired up and were given two 20 pounds sacks of rice and beans, additional sacks of salt and sugar, which was enough for the two of us and our host family for the week. The entire delegation headed northward to the Jinotega Province for a weeklong homestay with a local family.
The journey north took us through some of the most spectacular countryside that one could imagine…rolling green, misty mountains perfect for growing coffee.
Our host family’s dwelling was a 10x15 shack with a cloth partition for the master suite, which consisted of a hand-made bedframe, held together with old tire inner tubes and stabilized with a sheet of plywood. Rev. Dan and I slept there. The rest of the family (mother, father and four children) slept on a plastic tarp on the dirt floor of the main room. A small calf joined them at night, as did the saddest & scrawniest chicken, which later showed up in the thanksgiving rice, beans and tortillas. This was the daily menu for all three meals. The father was a Pentecostal minister, who held very loud daily services in the building next door. The services created a high level of emotionality supported by a squealing electric guitar. The mother, who looked 60 but was 35, reported that she had had 13 live births. The infant mortality rate for the area was about 50% before the age of two.
The town and the area surrounding it had seen some of the heaviest fighting of the Contra War. Much of this was due to the nearness to the Honduran border, which was the staging area for the Contras. The town contained both Contra and Sandinista supporters. It seemed that either side of the main road was populated by only one of the groups.
During the 1980’s the Canadian Socialist Farmer’s Alliance was given a large piece of land by the government to develop a coffee co-op for 70 internally displaced families. Simple cinder block homes and production facilities were built and the coffee bushes were planted. Unfortunately, this experiment was targeted by the Contra’s over and over again, killing the teacher, social worker and random others. Many of the original residents had fled and the project was failing.
One day we walked upon a field of former Contra fighters who were raising cabbages on expropriated land. Our dialogue with them revealed some dramatic ironies.
As hostilities drew to a close, the government promised to each Contra fighter, who turned in his gun, $200 US, a machete, a grinder for corn and coffee and a piece of land. Unfortunately, the land never materialized. They were now squatting and had formed a collective, similar to the one’s that they had tried to destroy during the war.
Most of these men were in their twenties and had joined the contras in their early teens.
They shared their experiences from that time and one of them captured the irony/reality of the Contra war by stating, “we were poor people fighting other poor people on the other side for the benefit of the rich.”
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witness_for_Peace
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