In a "Special Zone" on the Costa Rican Border
By Markar Melkonian
Special to The Guardian
May 1984
LA AZUCENA, Nicaragua-Five years ago, were echoing far beyond the borders of Nicaragua, many people in and around this city were unaware that a revolution was in progress.
This area, near the Rio San Juan just north of the Costa Rican border, was designated one of three “special zones” because of its under-development and isolation. The region is accessible only by boat-even the diesel truck in the grain warehouse was floated here on Word War 2 vintage landing craft.
[Last week this isolated, war-torn region was in the spotlight of much of the Western press when scores of journalists accompanied Eden Pastora’s CIA-sponsored “contras” as they attacked the evacuated city of San Juan del Norte. After holding the town just long enough to declare it “liberated” territory, the contras were driven back into Costa Rica by Sandinista counterattack.
Most of the several thousand peasont farmers here originally came from northern Nicaragua’s Chinadega and Leon districts. Uprooted during the cotton boom of the 1950s and 1960s, they relocated to this previously unpopulated jungle region in search of new land to cultivate. They planted small plots of corn, rice and beans and raised a few cattle, pigs and chickens. Gradually, an increasing number of them have become employees of the large landowners living in the towns of Los Chiles and La Azucena.
After the Sandinista revolution, the Government of National Reconstruction (GNR) developed a regional plan for large-scale cultivation of Soya, cacoa and palm oil, but the escalation of counterrevolutionary activity has hindered these plans. Increased contra violence last year caused especially heavy damage to the area’s economy, since peasants from the mountains abandoned their crops, to flee to the larger and safer towns located along the 12 mile dirt road connecting the river port of the Santa Fe with La Azucena and Los Chiles.
Because the region was historically so inaccessible, the population was spared some of the worst abuses of Somoza’s National Guard. Consequently the ideological climate in and around La Azucena is more conservative than in other areas of Nicaragua. For instance, the 1980 national literacy campaign had less impact here than in other parts of the country because it was opposed by the influential Catholic priest called Timoteo. Similarly, heath care, the information of mass organizations and collectivization of agriculture made little headway until about a year ago.
When Eden Pastora and his band of Costa Rica-based contras began their military offensive in May 1983, they expected to spark off an anti-Sandinista insurrection here. After that, Pastora planned to take over an area of land on Costa Rica’s border and declare an opposition government to be recognized immediately by Washington. They expected U.S. arms and supplies to flow in, creating the appearance of military symmetry between Nicaragua and El Salvador, which the U.S. has long hoped for.
It was a nice plan, but it didn’t work. Despite causing material damage and human suffering, the contra offensive succeeded only in accelerating the process of revolutionary change in La Azucena.
With typical Sandinista audacity, the GNR responded to the contra offensive by handling our rifles to the very peasants Pastora was counting on to join the counterrevolution. The Sandinistas had enough condifence in the popularity of their land reform program to believe that armed government supporters would vastly outnumber armed contra sympathizers. This Tactic worked well. Today, for every member of the Sandinista Popular Army in the area, there are 20 armed peasants. These, together with the uniformed militia, constitute the main military deterrent to the contras.
Alfredo, 23 is a commandar of the mixed Sandinista Popular Army and militia forces in La Azucena with eight years of fighting experience behind him. According to Alfredo, “at first, some of those, who were followers of [the priest] Timoteo, joined the contras, but after the declaration of amnesty [late last year, by the GNR], most of them have returned to their families, to live peacefully. Every now and then we receive groups of them, who turn themselves in, with their guns and ammunition.”
Nevertheless, there are still scattered attacks from contras who cross over the border from Costa Rica. In a recent attack of a jitney packed with civilians, the contras seriously wounded seven people including two pregnant women, and attempted to abduct eight others before Popular Army forces caught up with them, killing four and chasing the rest into the mountains.
Alfredo says, “The fact that the contras lately have been avoiding confrontation with our forces and have only been attacking civilians targets shows they have lost militantly. They are disorganized and their morale is low”
In addition to the problem of security, the GNR is faced with the problem of providing housing, food, and health care for the displaced population. There are two refugee settlements or asentamientos on the outskirts of La Azucena. 700 refugees inhabit Asentamiento Jacinto Hernandez (named after a peasant killed by the contras), and 400 inhabit Asentamiento 19 de Julio.
Living conditions are rough. Rainproof housing has been provided for many refugee families, and despite the shortage of building materials, the GNR is frantically trying to construct more. Nevertheless, many refugees still live in cane and thatch shelters and it is not unusual for fifteen people to share a single room. This cramped and inadequate housing situation has exacerbated the health problems inherited from the Somoza period—rampant malnutrition and an infant mortality rate of more than 20%.
Javier, the doctor at the La Azucena health post, recalls that when h first arrived a year ago, “every single child had one disease or another—skin infections, intestinal parasites, diarrhea, meningitis, malaria.” The waiting room at the health post is crowded all day with patients. At night the health post doubles as dormitory for the medical staff and the examination tables are converted into beds.
This health post was supposed to operate only temporarily, until a small hospital was completed, but construction of the sorely needed facility stopped last May when a “task force” of about 300 contras capture the exposed hospital complex, mounted a mortar barrage on La Azucena and killed seven civilians before being repulsed by the militia.
For the past year, Mariano has been working with the Nicaragua Union of Small Farmers and Ranches (UNAG) developing cooperatives for refugees in the area. Accoding to him, “The revolution is really only one yer old here in La Azucena.” There are 104 widows in La Azucena and the two outlying refugee camps. For these women, collectivization has become a necessity. It would be next to impossible for them to clear land for cultivation, while at the same time raising children. But with Mariano’s help the widows, together with abandoned mothers and other women have formed a cooperative called Madres Unidas.
About 30 members of Madres Unidas work in horticultural coorperative, and the group even produces its own organic pesticides. “Madres Unidas” has other projects in the works too. In response to a scarcity of zinc roofing materials, the women’s cooperative decided to produce roof tiles. Their first task was to dig a well, then prepare bricks and build an oven to bake the tiles. The coop now makes titles and sells them to the Ministry of Housing, which uses them for refugee housing.
Maria Magdalena, a member of the roofing tile coop, is a widow whose activist husband was gunned down as he walked to a May Day rally at La Azucena. Now, Magdalena lives with two other widows and their 11 children in a house appropriated from a local contra. At the coop, she works side by side with widows of both Sandinistas and contras.
Cooperatives are catching on. Recently, 20 widows in Los Chiles decided to start a cooperative bakery despite inexperience and a lack of materials.
The opposing ideologies of the contras and the Sandinistas clash most discordantly over the role of the church. Predominantly Roman Catholic, the residents of the Azucena area have also been proselytized by the Baptists and the Assembly of God sect. Mariano explains that some people still believe the words of a priest are the actual word of God.
Before the triumph of the revolution, the faithful of this region had not seen a priest for years, but after the Sandinista victory, the right-wing archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, dispatched the Spanish priest named Timoteo to the area. During the two years Timoteo was active in the region, he preached against the revolution, reportedly going so far as to claim that the Bible exhorts Christians to oppose all revolutions.
Mariano and many others believe that Timoteo’s two years of “ministry” were part of the coordinated attempt to prepare the population ideologically for the contra military offensive. Whether or not this accusation is true, Timoteo’s brand of religion meshed well with the propaganda of the contras.
Finally, with the escalation of counter-revolutionary violence, the Nicaragua government asked Timoteo to leave. According to former member of Timoteo’s congregation, the priest vowed just before his departure to return to La Azucena with U.S. dollars to complete construction of the church he had begun. Since Timoteo left, the Christian base community has erected a small wooden shed inside the rusting skeleton of Timoteo’s uncompleted church.
Between Asentamiento Jacinto Hernandez and the town of La Azucena, construction workers ware sawing the trunks of hard pochote trees into lumber. Forty-two housing units have been constructed before the rainy season, and now their only chain saw is burning out.
Down the street, all the Sandinista Community Center, five cultural workers from Managua are playing guitar. They are here for three months, organizing local musicians into groups and encouraging regional folk music. A singer dedicates a song “to the poet Ho Chi Minh”:
“When the people start to stand up.
And everything has to change,
We’ll all agree together
That it’s not enough just to pray.”
After the last verse, we notice that about a dozen young women dressed in their Sunday best have quietly entered the room and taken their seats. They are here for a youth organization meeting. We take the hint, and make our exit.
Outside, compañero Alfredo squints up at the sun and shifts his hat on his head. He pronounces the words carefully and firmly, “We’re going right on ahead with this revolution.”
