Crippled Warrior Wants to Forget as War Dims Nicaragua’s Holiday

After two years at war, Isaias Guerrero was expected home for Christmas. But not this way.

When the 22-year-old Sandinista conscript joined his mother and 10 brothers, sisters and cousins for Christmas Eve dinner at the family’s yellow adobe house in Managua, he came to the table in a wheelchair.

On Sept. 17, with three months’ combat duty left, Guerrero lost both legs just below the knees when a mine placed by U.S.-backed rebels exploded under his truck in northern Nicaragua. Six soldiers in the truck died.

The crippled warrior’s homecoming from an army hospital last weekend is one of many private dramas in a Christmas season overshadowed by fighting that has claimed more than 34,000 lives in five years. It is a war without even a holiday truce.

An Emotional Drain

For Guerrero, who had a brother killed by the contras in a 1982 battle, it is a war to be forgotten. He says he thinks only of getting artificial legs, learning to walk and resuming his university studies in engineering. For many others in Managua, though, the conflict is a continuing emotional drain.

“Nobody with a loved one fighting in the mountains can be sure he will ever come back,” said Teofilo Guerrero, Isaias’ 26-year-old brother. “But we have to accept this as the price for keeping the enemy on the run, so that we in the capital can have Christmas in peace.”

Untouched directly by the fighting, which is just a few hours’ drive north or east, Managua is celebrating Christmas in both traditional and revolutionary ways.

The season lasts a month, starting with La Purisima, a street festival that honors the Virgin Mary, and ending with the Feast of Epiphany on Jan. 6. Children in many neighborhoods gather to smash a pinata . Elaborate Nativity scenes take over living rooms. Christmas Eve fills the churches for midnight Mass and joins families for a dinner of stuffed hen or turkey.

Nicaragua’s Sandinista rulers, divided between conventional Marxist-Leninists and those who are also Christian, decided upon taking power in 1979 that Christmas was so deeply rooted in this largely Roman Catholic country that it would be politically foolish to try to abolish it.

Infusing Own Ideals

Instead, the Sandinistas have tried to infuse the holiday spirit with their own ideals.

This year, for the first time, they have co-opted Santa Claus in a big way, by distributing 955,000 Christmas toys at subsidized prices to state workers who lined up for hours in the tropical heat.

Like other centralized economic plans in Nicaragua, this one fell short of its goal--to guarantee every child his “right to a toy.” Amid loud public complaints, officials insisted the plan provided toys to far more children than would have received them under the high prices of the free-market system.

For years, the Sandinistas have blamed the war for economic woes of all kinds. This season, they are trying to show that, in spite of it, things can be better managed.

Productive System

Indeed, six months after a period of some of the worst food shortages, the centralized market system seems to have produced enough fowl for just about everyone’s Christmas dinner.

But the perennial theme of the Sandinista Christmas is that Nicaragua is fighting not a civil war but a kind of biblical struggle against U.S. aggression and that God is on Nicaragua’s side.

Every night, the state television shows film of soldiers writing home from the front and of some of the 3,000 civilian volunteers from Managua who are spending the holidays up north in the coffee harvest, where field labor for the country’s chief export is scarce because of the fighting.

“The birth of Christ really means that God is with us, in the hearts of our boys in the mountains and the coffee fields,” the pro-government newspaper Nuevo Diario commented. Less noticeably, hundreds of Managuans crowded flights out of Augusto Sandino airport in recent days to spend Christmas abroad. Many went to visit sons who left Nicaragua to escape a military draft instituted in 1984.

End to Draft Urged

Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, who celebrated midnight Mass in a white hilltop parish church called Las Sierritas de Santo Domingo, wants the Sandinistas to stop the draft and the military buildup and to negotiate peace with the rebels instead of seeking to defeat them outright.

But his appeals for national reconciliation have been ignored by the government and banned from the Nicaraguan media all year in a clampdown on internal criticism.

The intransigence of Nicaraguans on both sides of the conflict deeply troubles many whose sons fight in the Sandinista army.

“I feel wounded, like they have ripped out part of my gut,” said Maria del Carmen Ramirez, whose oldest son, at age 16, is spending his first Christmas away, in a war she does not support.

Pardon Defended

But for every dissenter there seems to be someone genuinely willing to bear the sacrifices of the war. Such hawkish sentiment has obliged the government to make an unusually thorough defense of its Christmas pardon of Eugene Hasenfus, the American who had been sentenced to 30 years in prison after being shot down Oct. 5 on a flight carrying guns to the Nicaraguan rebels.

For several days after Hasenfus’ departure a week ago, the official Sandinista newspaper Barricada published random interviews showing the pardon to be highly controversial.

“Inside each Nicaraguan, there are two immediate reactions to the Hasenfus pardon,” a long editorial in Barricada said. “One is emotional, rightly considering Hasenfus a mercenary in the pay of the American government; and the other is political, filled with hope that the message of the Sandinista revolution will be understood and, moreover, that this could contribute to ending the war.”

Barricada said the pardon was “an audacious step” that sought “to place international and especially American public opinion on our side.”

Tempest Over Toys

But the fuss over Hasenfus was soon overwhelmed by a tempest over Christmas toys.

It started when the toys, mostly imports, went on sale at controlled prices last week at state-run People’s Supermarkets.

Among other things, there were battery-powered robots from Hong Kong for $1, life-sized Cuban dolls for $3 and Mexican-made flutes for 50 cents, as cheap as one-tenth the free-market prices that makes them inaccessible to most wage earners.

Despite promises of two or more toys for the family of each card-carrying government worker, lines stretching for blocks formed at once outside the supermarkets.

Isolated scuffles were reported, and by last weekend most of the toys were gone. Falsification of worker identity cards was alleged. Some toys turned up on sale at steep prices in the informal street market. By that time, many workers coming to the supermarkets were told their toy ration was down to one.

Deception Charged

“We’ve been deceived,” complained Gloria Navas, a shopper leaving Managua’s Plaza Espana supermarket Tuesday with a $1.50 paddleball set as her three children fought over it.

Luis Cabrera, a trouble-shooting columnist for Barricada, said he looked into the mess, “but there are no answers.”

As if to compensate, free-market forces have revived an old Nicaraguan toy, called traca-traca, into a new fad. For less than $1, you get two wooden spheres, the size of Ping-Pong balls, hanging from separate four-inch plastic cords that are tied together to form a handle.

While their older brothers fight the war, kids all over Managua, even in the poorest slums, have become adept at manipulating the cords so that the balls clack together in rapid-fire succession at the top and bottom of a 360-degree circle.