Nicaragua's Bloody Holiday

Anti-Somoza rebels resume their offensive

Practically every Nicaraguan, from Dictator Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza Debayle to his opponents in the Sandinista National Liberation Front, usually tries to go on vacation in Holy Week. The traditional holiday was shattered last week by a bloody eruption of the country's sputtering civil war. Discarding a truce they had announced for the week before Easter, 100 battle-hardened guerrillas took up positions in trenches and behind concrete barricades in the city of Esteli (pop. 25,000), where hundreds died in the bloodiest fighting of last September's Sandinista uprising. They were quickly joined by young protesters, who pledged to fight to the last man beside the guerrillas.

From Managua, a heavily armed column of Somoza's National Guardsmen, equipped with tanks and supported by rocket-firing airplanes, laid siege to the rebel positions. In the savage fighting that followed, hundreds died and more than 15,000 sought refuge in the surrounding villages. Predicted one guerrilla: "Only the dead will remain here. We will die, but we will take a lot of Guardsmen with us."

Somoza was vacationing in Florida with his children. The country he had left behind was in chaos: teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to secure loans from international banking organizations, bitterly estranged from its onetime supporters in Washington. Despite the ruthlessness with which Somoza's Guardsmen had suppressed last year's rebellion, in which at least 2,000 people were killed, he has been unable to contain the guerrillas. In the past few weeks, rebels have wiped out a small government garrison in El Jicaro and shot down an armed C-47. In response, the dictator beefed up the National Guard from 8,100 to more than 12,000, and imported an arsenal of new weapons, including Israeli assault rifles and machine pistols. The National Guard, which is commanded by the dictator's half brother, Colonel Jose Somoza, is now so preoccupied with battling the rebels that routine police work has been sacrificed and street crime is rampant. Complains the manager of a bottling company whose trucks were robbed 51 times in March alone: "The average citizen doesn't know who is going to hit him over the head or put a gun in his ribs and take the money from his pockets."

Somoza's critics now include a majority of the nation's businessmen; they claim that none of this would have happened if the Carter Administration had more forcefully pressed the dictator to step down. They point out that U.S. Marines were instrumental in installing the Somoza family in power 46 years ago. In light of that, they charge, Washington should have gone well beyond the cutoff of economic and military assistance that the Carter Administration ordered after Somoza last January rejected an American proposal for a plebiscite to determine his government's future. "Such sanctions have no impact on a ruler with a feudal mentality," charges Alfonso Robelo Callejas, leader of the moderate Broad Opposition Front, which has been losing members to more extremist organizations.

For his part, Somoza contends that the U.S. aid cutoff was unwarranted and contributed to an exodus of foreign investment that worsens Nicaragua's economic plight. "As the most capitalistic country in the world," he told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich, "the U.S. should not be disturbing small countries like ours and disturbing investors to these countries. I am sorry to say it, but I have to, goddammit."

Nicaragua is not the only Central American military regime plagued by political violence. In El Salvador, one of the hemisphere's most densely populated countries (531 people per sq. mi.), foreign businessmen are packing their bags because of a rash of terrorist kidnapings. In the past 16 months, the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN), one of three well-organized leftist groups, has collected an estimated $40 million in ransoms. The leftists mean business; last month the FARN killed Coffee Exporter Ernesto Liebes, 74, after he instructed his family not to pay the $10 million ransom demanded by his abductors. Despite demands from El Salvador's wealthy oligarchs for an all-out crackdown on the terrorists, the military government of General Carlos Humberto Romero Mena has been unexpectedly restrained. Romero repealed a draconian antiterrorist law, contending that it had proved "of no value" in combatting the leftists.

In Guatemala, much of the violence comes from the ultraright. In January, Alberto Fuentes Mohr, a Congressman and former Finance Minister, was gunned down in the streets of Guatemala City, only a day after the government had cleared the way for the legalization of his small opposition Revolutionary Party. Last month the country's most popular leftist leader, Manuel Colom Argueta, was also assassinated. The killing came a week after his party, the United Revolutionary Front, had been granted formal recognition. President Romeo Lucas Garcia has denied government complicity in either murder; in fact, he had provided Colom with one of the two bodyguards involved in last month's attack. Most observers blame the killings on G2, the intelligence branch of the army. With the leaders of both major opposition parties, as well as numerous union leaders, dead, "the outlook for a compromise now with liberal forces is very pessimistic," said Vice President Francisco Villagran Kramer. Colom may have put it better. A year ago, he told a Mexican journalist: "Here there are no political prisoners. Just dead politicians."

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