Indians Caught in the Middle

By George Russell

A jungle war flourishes over the right to land and autonomy

Of all the territory caught up in Central America's diverse wars, none is less hospitable than the steaming jungles, malarial swamps and sluggish rivers that make up Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. There, bands of Miskito Indians, their uniformed shoulders draped with bandoliers, travel on foot, by leaky dugout canoe and on horseback. Using modern, U.S.-made M-16 automatic rifles and M-60 machine guns, they are carrying out a hit-and-run campaign of harassment and sabotage against the government. Their mission: to regain the ancestral lands and autonomy that they feel were taken from them by the Sandinistas who have ruled Nicaragua for the past five years.

Some 65 miles south of Nicaragua's border with Honduras, at a cluster of settlements known as Tasba Pri (Free Land), Sandinista officials hail what they describe as a model of revolutionary Indian development. Everything is new, from the tin-roofed wooden houses to the local schools and clinics. Equally new are the residents, some 8,500 Miskitos who were forcibly moved to the settlement two years ago from 42 villages near the Honduran border. A blanket of benign restrictions governs Tasba Pri; the residents are free to travel, for example, only after they apply for permission. Above all, the newly domesticated Indians are forbidden to enjoy the kind of free-roaming, communal existence that was the Miskito heritage for centuries before the Sandinistas took power.

The problem is as old as the European conquest of the New World. Between 86,000 and 110,000 Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indians, members of tribes that had lived for centuries in relative isolation from the rest of Nicaragua, are now locked in a battle for the survival of their culture and lifestyle. Since the Sandinistas took power, escalating clashes between the natives and the revolutionary government have slowly developed into something approaching a full-scale Indian war. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Miskitos have taken up arms against the Sandinistas, operating from Honduran and Costa Rican bases with covert U.S. support. Hundreds of Indians have died in the conflict, while an unknown number have been imprisoned, often without charges. Some 20,000 Indians have been forced by the Sandinistas into relocation camps such as Tasba Pri; another 21,000 have fled to Honduras and Costa Rica.

The size and bitterness of Nicaragua's Indian war have long been obscured by the broader hostilities between the Reagan Administration and the revolutionaries in Nicaragua. The Sandinista government has painted the native rebels as mere pawns of the CIA. Similarly, Washington has lumped the Miskito guerrillas together with the entire fractious spectrum of 15,000 active anti-Sandinista rebels known as the contras. As a result, the Miskitos have been tarred with conventional political labels, even though the Indians have jealously guarded their own goals within the loose contra alliance. Says Tom Hawk, Central American director of World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals: "The Miskitos are being used by everybody. They are caught in the middle."

The Miskitos and the much less numerous Sumos and Ramas make up at most 4% of Nicaragua's 2.9 million people. Their traditional lands include most of the country's northeast region, which to the Sandinistas has strategic value as a buffer against Honduras. The underpopulated and economically neglected Miskito territory is a trove of timber and gold. Less than a year after they took power, the Sandinistas began to seize control of the area by transferring authority over land ownership to the state. Eventually they launched a direct assault on the Miskitos by proclaiming an agrarian reform law that, according to Miskito leaders, ignored traditional Indian claims and set up rules for giving Indian land to others. The Miskitos so far have received only four land titles, totaling 37,152 acres, for nontraditional farming cooperatives at Tasba Pri.

Privately contemptuous of the Miskitos as "politically and culturally backward," in the words of a Sandinista commandante, government officials shunted aside the Indians' "councils of elders" in favor of tightly controlled Sandinista defense committees operating on orders from the capital. When a native association known as misurasata tried to raise the issue of Indian autonomy, the organization was disbanded. The misurasata leadership, headed by a young Miskito named Steadman Fagoth Mueller, fled into exile and began to organize an armed resistance. Meanwhile, the Sandinistas turned on the other major pillar of Miskito society, the Moravian Church,* as "counterrevolutionary." As harassment led to violent encounter, the Sandinistas finally committed what is widely considered a massacre of as many as 50 Indian workers near the town of Leimus in 1981. When the Indians struck back, the Sandinistas began their relocation, and warfare started in earnest.

In a cautiously worded report issued in May, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States reviewed a shower of accumulated charges against the Sandinistas. The accusations have ranged from illegal killings, disappearances and torture to indiscriminate air attacks on Miskito settlements, unlawful expropriation and cultural genocide. The commission recommended that the Sandinistas hold a conference of reconciliation with the Miskitos to improve the situation. The Nicaraguans accepted the idea in principle, but balked at calling such a meeting, the commission reported, under "prevailing circumstances."

TIME'S Jon Lee Anderson recently joined a squad of 20 Miskito rebels on a foray by boat that ended some 80 miles inside Nicaraguan territory; the guerrillas eventually camped in a mangrove swamp near a Miskito settlement south of the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas. At dusk, several of the rebels approached the village. The residents were friendly: women prepared food for the guerrillas, while a young instructor at a local Sandinista center for popular education complained about the pressures for political conformity from the revolutionary regime. Commented Leonard Zuniga, 46, the Miskito rebel commander: "The village protects us. The Sandinistas know the people help us, but they can't do anything about it."

Lately, the government has embarked on a new scheme to address the demand for a separate Indian identity. "We want the Miskitos to organize and elect representatives who can tell us their thoughts," explains William Ramirez, the Sandinista commander of the Miskito region. In June the Sandinistas for the first time named a Miskito, Myrna Cunningham, 36, as civilian governor of North Zelaya province, the Indian heartland.

Last month 300 delegates convened at Puerto Cabezas to organize a regional Indian council that is ostensibly designed to give the Miskitos a recognized political voice. Says Cunningham: "I think people are ready for the responsibility." The trouble is that the new council shows signs of being a consultative "mass organization," without legislative power. The Miskitos are not likely to accept such a cosmetic institution in exchange for the rest of their identity.

--By George Russell. Reported by David De Voss/Tasba Pri

*A communitarian Christian sect, the Moravians began proselytizing American Indians in the 18th century. An estimated 80% of Nicaragua's Atlantic coast residents are members.

With reporting by David De Voss