The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua By Timothy C. Brown University of Oklahoma Press, 2001, 352 pp., $29.95
In 1986, a Roman Catholic bishop from Spain visited Nicaragua and toured the Segovian highlands, where the authority of the Sandinista government in Managua was then under heavy challenge by an opposition guerrilla force--the so-called Contras--supported by the Reagan administration. The visit convinced the bishop that what was taking place in Nicaragua was not a civil war; rather, he told the international press, "the reality of death and destruction taking place [there] is a result of the war of aggression that the government of the United States has declared." He further explained that the Contras were, without exception, former officers of the dictator Somoza's hated National Guard, mercenaries hired by the CIA. Though negligible in number and lacking in popular support, the bishop continued, they survived due to the shameful policies of the United States.
The bishop's view was by no means exceptional. Quite the contrary. It was conventional wisdom throughout Western Europe, Latin America, and Canada and in time became so in the United States. A burgeoning movement of opposition to the Contras was spearheaded by church groups, human-rights organizations, intellectuals, artists, health workers, and civil libertarians--and by such distinguished lawmakers as Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-Rhode Island), then the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts); and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut). Between 1982 and 1990, not an evening passed that national television news did not chronicle some Contra "atrocity," and when an American activist was killed by a Contra patrol, the level of hysteria reached new heights. Finally, in 1987-88, Congress suspended military and economic aid to the force.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, the Contras did not go away. After the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, in which the Sandinistas' opponent Violeta Chamorro emerged--to the amazement of many--as the real choice of Nicaraguans, a mission from the Organization of American States was sent to the country to verify the demobilization of the insurgent army. By mid-1991, some 28,000 combatants emerged from the Segovias, roughly three times the number the mission had expected to encounter. Even more surprising were the social indicators. Fully 95 percent were highland indio peasants, and 7 percent were women. Some 9,000 returned to just seventeen peasant communities. Even more striking was the presence of 80,000 sympathizers who were living with them in their sanctuaries. When this army and its followers--100,000 in all--returned home, they were greeted by an organized support network of between 400,000 and 500,000 people.
Thus, Timothy Brown writes, the Contras were "not . . . a small, unrepresentative, American-created army, but merely the armed tip of a popular peasant resistance movement with more than a million and a half participants and even more sympathizers." Nothing else can explain the survival of the Contra phenomenon after the congressional cutoff of funds. The Real Contra War is its true story.
Brown is uniquely qualified to write it. A veteran of twenty-seven years of diplomatic service in Paraguay, Mexico, El Salvador, and Honduras, he served in Nicaragua in 1956-59 and again in 1987-90, when he was senior liaison officer to the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance (the name official Washington bestowed on the Contra force). Perhaps even more significant, he had previously spent ten years in the U.S. Marine Corps, studying insurgencies in Thailand, Burma, Laos, Indonesia, and the Philippines.
Thanks to the contacts he established in Nicaragua during his second tour there, Brown obtained access to 265,000 pages of resistance archives. These he supplemented with another 300,000 pages of formerly classified U.S. government documents, as well as the eight-volume investigation undertaken by a parliamentary commission in Costa Rica. Most important of all, he interviewed forty of the surviving resistance commanders. The picture that emerges is vivid, detailed, and wholly at variance with the "official" version (see, for example, Robert Pastor, Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua, 1987).
A Question of Identity
In reality, Brown explains, there were not one but five Contra armies. They were led primarily by former anti-Sandinistas, not former officers of Somoza's National Guard. Some 80 percent of their followers were highland peasants; the remainder were tribal Indians or black Creoles. "More than 96 percent of the troopers and combat leaders of Nicaragua's largest Contra army," Brown writes, "were simple mountain people: illiterate, unsophisticated, unworldly, perhaps, but also free, extremely attached to their land, homes, and families, and fiercely independent."
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the anti-Sandinista war began not during the Reagan years but in 1979, which is to say, during the first months of Sandinista rule. It continued for three years without outside help or interference; it was only in 1982 that the United States sponsored an alliance between these resistance fighters and selected former officers of the guard. More intriguing still, there is what Brown calls "an enormous amount of evidence, everything just short of a smoking gun," that in its final months the Carter administration reversed its policies completely and ordered the CIA to initiate contact with exiled former guard officers for the purpose of "helping their paramilitary efforts against the Sandinistas." Presumably these feelers came to nothing, but their very existence gives the lie to the moralistic posturing of the ousted Carter team, including Pastor, which made life miserable for the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
The Roots of Rebellion
The sudden shift from anti-Somoza to anti-Sandinista fighters is easily explained. The Sandinistas' vision for Nicaragua was hugely at variance with the wishes of their own people, particularly the fiercely independent mountain people. Having promised a regime similar to that of democratic Costa Rica, once in power the Sandinistas began to reshape their country in the image and likeness of Castro's Cuba. The morning after victory their comandantes, most of whom were "white" city folk from the country's Pacific coast who looked down on the Indians, moved into the mountains to impose a new order on society. On the pretext of confiscating the lands of Somocistas, they helped themselves somewhat indiscriminately to property and animals. Even many of those who had opposed Somoza were required to hand over their farms or livestock under the rubric of "loans to the revolution"; any who objected were labeled "counterrevolutionaries" and detained, tortured, or killed. Those who were allowed to keep their lands were forced to sell their produce at low prices and buy their necessities at high prices from the government.
The Sandinistas also showed a marked disrespect for the Catholic Church, mocking traditional religious practices and even quartering their troops in chapels. Uniformed officers of State Security treated young peasant women just as disrespectfully as their hated National Guard predecessors had. Young students were taken from their families and sent far away, to Pacific coast cities for ideological indoctrination. And peasant families were required to house and feed "literacy workers," many of whom were arrogant and condescending.
The highland peasants were faced with two stark alternatives: to join the new Sandinistas' agricultural cooperatives, a covert form of land expropriation, or resist. Their response was shrewd and creative. Many served in the new Sandinista army during the first six months of the revolutionary regime, taking advantage of their situation to stockpile arms and ammunition. By the time the Reagan administration brokered an agreement between them and former guard officers, the Contras were already veterans of three years of hard fighting in a terrain they knew well.
Brown's account suggests some interesting comparisons between the anti-Somoza struggle of the Sandinistas and the anti-Sandinista struggle of the Contras. The former was relatively contained geographically and involved a small number of fighters; it also enjoyed regional and international support (at the very end of the anti-Somoza struggle, all the Latin American countries withdrew their ambassadors from Managua, and some countries--not just Cuba--were actively shipping arms and ammunition to the rebels). From the very start the Contra war had a bad press; it was opposed by all the major international and regional organizations; its support from the Argentine military and later the Reagan administration was fitful and inadequate. And yet the Contra war turned out to be longer, more widespread, and more genuinely popular. In a sense, it also turned out to be victorious.
Indeed, Brown makes the point that from both a geographic and ethnological point of view the Contra war was merely an extension of longer struggles in Nicaraguan history. Its geographical area coincides with the pre-Columbian homeland of the Chibchan Indians of South American origins, and the particular comarcas (that is to say, communities) that rebelled coincide with the places where Indian-Spanish battles occurred from 1526 to as recently as 1923. "The Contra war," he concludes, "can thus be viewed as simply a modern manifestation of a centuries-old pattern of resistance with deep if latent ethnic roots." The problem for the Sandinistas was that they triggered "an ethnic war. By employing Pacific coast urban standards and outsider ideologues who were openly ethnocentric, intolerant, and unwilling to treat the [peasants] with respect, they made impossible what would already have been extremely difficult"--namely, the Cubanization of Nicaragua.
A Troubling Question
Although The Real Contra War does not pose the question, one might well speculate how the true nature of the Nicaraguan insurgency managed to elude the understanding of so many intelligent and otherwise well-informed people, particularly given the intense media attention devoted to it for nearly a decade. Evidently, there is no single answer. Partisan politics, wishful thinking, and reflexive anti-Americanism (or anti-Reaganism) by foreigners and elite Americans influenced perceptions. So did the endless search for utopias elsewhere by overprivileged Westerners and an organized campaign by communists and their sympathizers worldwide. Above all, attitudes were shaped by ignorance of the ethnology and sociology of rural Nicaragua.
It is perhaps worth noting that Brown's book appears almost at the same time as the memoirs of former Nicaraguan vice president Sergio Ramirez (Adios muchachos, una memoria de la revolucion sandinista), published in Spain. Although writing from a different ideological perspective, Ramirez confirms--in the spirit of deep self-criticism--many of the findings of The Real Contra War. The books converge in spirit, suggesting that a drastic revision of recent Nicaraguan history is in order.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.