Nicaragua Gives Farmers Role in Defending Land

Most days at dawn, Marcos Giron grabs an AK-47 assault rifle and marches out with his two young sons to till a field bordered on three sides by the hostile hills of southern Honduras.

Two or three times a week, he says, shelling from Nicaraguan rebel camps a mile away in those hills rains onto his 20 acres.

Until it stops, the 42-year-old farmer-militiaman puts his family in an underground shelter and takes up his assigned combat position to repel another would-be invasion by the U.S.-backed contras.

For nearly two years, after June, 1983, when the rebels overran this village of 2,000 people and made off with 160 head of cattle, Giron stayed away from his property. Now he is back, stooping with a machete to reap his second straight bean crop, the rifle slung awkwardly from his shoulder.

Campaign to Fortify Valley

“The contras know that next time it is not just the army but the people who will defend the land,” he told a visitor to this last outpost of the Jalapa Valley in northwest Nicaragua. “Now, everyone is armed here, and we’re having a good harvest.”

The farmer’s optimism stems from a campaign by the Sandinista government to fortify the valley, reclaim land abandoned in the five-year war and make it a breadbasket that will feed half the country’s 3 million people.

On the military side, the Sandinistas in recent months have sent hundreds of troops into Honduras to force an estimated 18,000 contras to defend their base camps instead of infiltrating into Nicaraguan territory and sabotaging food production.

The civilian side of this “forward defense” strategy involves resettling in Jalapa hundreds of farmers from other war zones, where the contras had some support, and turning them into agrarian foot soldiers with militia training and weapons.

Controversial Effort

“You yourselves are an army,” Interior Minister Tomas Borge recently told members of a newly formed agrarian cooperative.

It is a controversial effort. Some new settlers say they feel worse off economically and not much safer. There are debates on whether the Marxist-led Sandinistas want to protect these campesinos or push them into collectives.

Nevertheless, the campaign has increased grain production and appears to have discouraged serious rebel attacks. That is good news for a government struggling to overcome politically costly food shortages in the cities as well as the insurgency in the countryside.

According to government figures, the Jalapa Valley is now harvesting 11,285 acres of corn, its principal crop, more than triple the acreage harvested in 1983.

David Valenzuela, technical coordinator for the Ministry of Agrarian Development and Reform in the town of Jalapa, said that another 10,012 acres have yielded or are about to yield rice, beans, potatoes and sorghum.

A record 50% of the valley’s arable land, he said, is under cultivation, with the proportion rising steadily each year since 1984, when the resettled farmers began to arrive.

Major Grain-Producing Area

It is the fate of Jalapa to be blessed with some of Nicaragua’s best soil and to be cursed by its proximity to border camps set up by the rebels after the Sandinistas came to power in 1979.

The soil is enriched by year-round moisture from rain and the fog that rolls down the hills. Although just 20 miles long, the valley produced enough grain last year to feed the country for two months.

But the upper end of the valley juts into Honduras, and few parts of it are more than a gunshot away from the contras, often visible through binoculars in their camps across the border.

Throughout 1983, the contras cut the valley’s main road for days at a time, burning buses, raiding farms and killing unarmed civilians. Today oxcarts full of corn ply the same rutted dirt road under armed escort, and children sell ice cream to soldiers of the reinforced 314th Infantry Battalion.

Scattered Ambushes

There has not been a concerted attack in the valley since last March, when contras set fire one night to 11 tobacco barns and several homes in the adjacent cooperative. Scattered rebel ambushes have killed a few militiamen in the past two years, but the contras resort mostly to long-range harassing fire from Honduras.

“The most frightening thing here is the way the militiamen shoot off their weapons in town at night after a few drinks,” said a foreigner who came to live in Jalapa a few weeks ago, expecting to find a town under siege.

Leaders of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest anti-Sandinista army, say their troops have ignored recent harvests to avoid the negative publicity of past killings of civilians. They also say they were limited by arms supply shortages after the U.S. Congress voted in 1984 to cut off military aid, which was legally resumed two months ago.

But Sandinista officials say it is the army’s offensive and the spread of the farmer militia that keep the contras at bay. Of 3,000 farmers in the valley, 1,800 are in the militia, according to Kasto Zavala, the Agrarian Ministry’s production supervisor here.

“Jalapa is like a closed fist,” said Capt. Ortilio Martinez, chief of the 314th Infantry Battalion.

Peasants Trucked In

A border strip of more than 8,000 acres of abandoned farmland in the valley is under army control and has been mined. But officials say that another 530 acres, scattered among 45 small properties, have been swept clean and opened to cultivation this year.

To settle the reclaimed farmland and other idle fields here, the government has trucked in peasants from hill country to the east, where the contras had found a measure of support and a source of food in isolated, individually owned farms.

“They told us this was a war zone and we had to go,” recalls Jose Maria Herrera, 40, who left his chickens and freshly harvested coffee beans in a hamlet near Murra that had been beleaguered by fighting nearby.

Herrera also lost his status as a private farmer when he was resettled in March, 1985, on a hillside called New Awakening, one of six new cooperatives in the Jalapa Valley. He has a voice in its management but no share of any profits.

“These are really concentration camps,” said Pedro Joaquin Ponce, a Red Cross volunteer who visits the cooperatives. “The reason for all the weapons is to enforce collectivization.”

Cooperatives Favored

Sensitive to such criticism, the government revised agrarian reform policy last July and began handing out individual titles to some uprooted or previously landless peasants. But cooperatives remain the rule, and they account for three of every four acres farmed in the valley.

The Sandinistas say they prefer cooperatives over individual ownership because the cooperatives make it easier for government agencies to deliver support, from credits to schools to medical services.

The other day a group of farmers with little or no schooling gathered in the Escambray settlement to see their 23 children graduate from the sixth grade. It was the first such commencement in the valley’s new cooperatives.

“Three years ago, it was easy for the contras to kidnap and ambush here because people didn’t stick together and make decisions together,” Alcide Centeno, a Sandinista party official, told the parents.

Offers School, Clinic

Political control is also a fact of cooperative life. Peasants who spoke to a reporter at three cooperatives were frequently approached by a party official or military officer who listened in on the interviews.

Herrera said life at New Awakening offers schooling for his four younger children and a health clinic, both unavailable where he came from.

But even in the presence of officials, he and other resettled farmers bemoaned the loss of their independence and the fact that most have less land to farm than before.

“I am accustomed to saying, ‘This land is mine, and what I sell goes into my pocket,’ ” Herrera grumbled. “I feel bad here. I can’t really say I am better off here, but I’m just starting.”