Rebels Jail Top Officer for Murder : Contra Hero’s Fall Is Paradox of War

Until a few weeks ago, the Nicaraguan rebel chieftain called Tigrillo--the little tiger--was the contras’ pre-eminent combat hero, a former Sandinista who switched sides to fight, as he once put it, “for democracy and for God.”

A short, almost boyish-looking peasant with quick, burning eyes and an auburn mustache, Tigrillo led his guerrilla force on daring monthlong raids across the rugged green hills of northern Nicaragua, attacking Sandinista road convoys and farms and military patrols, then slipping back into base camps in Honduras before the enemy could respond.

Reagan Administration officials cited him as proof that the contras’ ranks included disaffected ex-Sandinistas as well as veterans of Nicaragua’s old National Guard. Rebel leaders brought him to Washington to speak before members of Congress to promote their chances for U.S. military aid. “He was a legend,” a contra official said Friday. “A hero.”

Today, Tigrillo sits alone inside a bamboo and barbed-wire cage outside the contras’ jungle headquarters, the embodiment of the worst charges leveled against the contras by their critics. For although contra officials initially attempted to suppress information about the case, Tigrillo has been convicted of murdering one of his own soldiers on Christmas Day. He reportedly shot the man because he had left his base without permission. Worse, Tigrillo is suspected of killing about 16 more contras under his command in similar “disciplinary measures”--and of murdering a number, still unknown, of unarmed prisoners of war.

Earlier this month, Tigrillo was tried in secret by his fellow contra officers and sentenced to the rebels’ maximum penalty for murder: three years. Contra spokesmen insist that Tigrillo is an aberration in their ranks and say that the rebels deserve credit for prosecuting him at all.

But the story of Tigrillo may reveal more than the murderous brutality of one contra commander who came unglued; it may also reflect a central paradox of the U.S.-funded war against the Sandinistas. The Reagan Administration, under pressure from Congress, has labored to turn the contras into a regular army complete with human rights officers and well-defined lines of command. But in the wild hills of Nicaragua, success in combat more often depends on the prowess of fiercely independent guerrilla commanders who--by nature--can be difficult to control.

Success at Brutal Art

Many of his fellow officers still defend Tigrillo in these terms, not as a model of virtue--for Tigrillo, they admit, had been violent and erratic for years--but as a man who was successful at the brutal art of guerrilla war.

“He brought 5,000 men into our ranks,” said one contra official who refused to be quoted by name. “He killed 17, but he brought 5,000 in. Are we going to criticize him now?

“The higher virtue is to defeat the Sandinistas,” the official said angrily. “This is a guerrilla war, and it can’t be as neat and clean as you Americans would like.”

“Tigrillo is someone who should be treated clinically,” was the gentler judgment of Marta Patricia Baltodano, director of the contras’ Assn. for Human Rights. “He is one of those people who have spent several years in the mountains, suffering the trauma of war.”

Tigrillo’s real name is Encarnacion Valdivia Chavarria, and he was born a peasant’s son about 35 years ago in the coffee-growing hills of northern Nicaragua’s Jinotega province. Beyond those spare facts, it is difficult to know what parts of Tigrillo’s story are true and what are legend--for his exploits, both heroic and murderous, have been told and retold by enemies as well as friends.

Hope of Better Life

He told some of it himself in a 1985 interview with The Times. (Contra officials refused to allow reporters to visit him this week.) In 1977, Tigrillo said, the Sandinista guerrillas swept through his home village, promising a life better than one of poverty under the rightist dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.

“I became a Sandinista and I struggled two years against Somoza,” he said. “When I was with the Sandinistas, it seemed to me that their political ideas were all right. . . . But after the victory (of the 1979 revolution), they started to change. They set up communism, little by little.

“Our unit had a meeting, and the commander, Carlos Morales, asked us: Did we believe in God?” Tigrillo recounted. “We said yes. He said he didn’t believe in that son of a bitch . . . and that we were believers in a silly illusion that we had to lose. It was then that I decided to leave.”

Tigrillo went back to his hills and began to raise an army of devoutly Roman Catholic, anti-communist peasants like himself. In time, he linked up with the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), the military structure created by the CIA to fight the Sandinista regime, and became commander of one of its six “regional commands.”

Both Feared and Loved

Tigrillo’s men ranged through four provinces of northern Nicaragua, coming as close as 40 miles to Managua, the capital, contra officials said. In many villages and rural areas, Tigrillo became something of a cacique-- a tribal chieftain--who ruled by fiat and received both fear and love in return. One contra officer told of accompanying Tigrillo into a mountain village and seeing peasants line up respectfully for an audience, some with their hands pressed together as if in prayer.

“He was said to be a sort of Sandino of the region,” said Baltodano, referring to Augusto Cesar Sandino, the charismatic rebel of the 1930s who inspired today’s Sandinistas. “In the Segovias (region), he had power over the people.”

The stories of Tigrillo’s bravery were legion. A laudatory article in Reader’s Digest in 1985 said that the Sandinistas once offered him $250,000 to stop fighting but that Tigrillo radioed back: “I don’t fight for money; I fight to liberate Nicaragua.”

But allegations of brutality began to mount, too--charges, all unconfirmed, that Tigrillo had killed prisoners, or raped women or shot men under his own command.

‘Whatever Is Necessary’

“You cross the river with him and he becomes a tiger,” said a contra official quoted in Christopher Dickey’s 1985 book “With the Contras,” referring to the Rio Poco, the border between Honduras and Nicaragua . “He hangs people. He rapes. He shoots people who don’t obey him. Whatever is necessary in the jungle. I once saw one of his soldiers challenge him and he pulled out his pistol and shot him. He doesn’t have any doubts about killing. But he is also tender with his troops, caring for them and watching over them.”

Two contra officials said that Tigrillo was believed to have killed--according to different versions--either 15 or 17 men under his command. “But they included some who were sent by the Sandinistas to assassinate him,” said one.

And they acknowledged that he may have killed some Sandinista prisoners during his years in the field--just as, they said, other commanders had done. “If he captures 50 Sandinistas, do you think he has the men to spare to guard them?” one said.

Asked about those charges, contra official Baltodano, who is in charge of investigating allegations of human rights abuses, said simply: “ No tengo certeza “--”I have no proof.”

Remained in Command

In 1984, Tigrillo was wounded in the knee, reportedly during a battle 50 miles inside Nicaragua. His men carried him out in a hammock, then in a dugout canoe. He was eventually flown to New Orleans for surgery.

That was the end of Tigrillo’s combat career; today, he often walks with a cane. But because of the fierce loyalty of many of the men he trained, he remained in command of a unit stationed around the contras’ main headquarters in southern Honduras until his arrest, a rebel official said.

A headquarters job was clearly not right for Tigrillo, several contra officers said. Although quick to demand obedience from his men, he disputed his superiors’ orders and quarreled with other officers. One such quarrel almost turned into a tribal battle between Tigrillo’s men and those of another commander, according to one unconfirmed account.

“He has had conflicts with other commanders,” Baltodano said. “Some people said he was haughty, that he looked on some of the other commanders with disdain.”

On Christmas Day, according to Baltodano and other contra sources, Tigrillo’s men were in a state of alert. Sandinista troops had been spotted infiltrating the hills around their base, and there were fears of a surprise attack. The unit’s orders were that no one was to enter or leave without written permission, they said.

Swift, Secret Trial

One of Tigrillo’s men, a guerrilla who used the nom de guerre Paul, had gone drinking for the holiday with two nephews and had returned to camp drunk. His nephews, who belonged to another contra unit, reeled in a few hours later, equally drunk and demanding that Paul return a pistol he had borrowed.

“Tigrillo asked what they wanted and told them to leave,” Baltodano said. “Paul, who was drunk, answered: ‘Who do you think you are? They are combatants, too. They have a right to be here.’ ”

At that point, Baltodano and other sources said, one of Paul’s nephews took the pistol from him. Tigrillo, enraged, shot Paul three times, although he was unarmed. “The nephew went running,” Baltodano said.

Tigrillo was arrested by another commander. His trial was swift and secret. “We weren’t sure what his men would do,” explained a contra official.

FDN officials say there was a prosecutor, a defense attorney and three judges--all contra officers. The trial, which began the day after the murder, was conducted under the FDN’s code of justice, although the crime occurred on the soil of Honduras.

Appealed Sentence

On Jan. 3, the officials said, the court handed down its sentence: three years. Tigrillo has appealed, as the code provides, to the top leadership of the FDN. Some contra officials said the sentence may be reduced to a year.

“This is a case with special characteristics due to the fact that the dead man had a degree of responsibility in the incident,” Baltodano said. “Drinking is not permitted. And he had a revolver before he was shot.”

Contra officials have done their best to play down the case. They announced neither the arrest, the trial nor the sentence. When The Times asked about reports that Tigrillo had been tried, two top FDN leaders, Aristides Sanchez and Indalecio Rodriguez, initially said that they knew nothing about the case; they later acknowledged that they did.

Carlos Icaza, the FDN’s chief legal officer, refused to discuss any of the details of Tigrillo’s crime. “I don’t want this case to become publicized as a special case,” he said. “People are going to want to manipulate it, saying either that this was the normal behavior of the commanders or that, because it is a commander, we’re trying to get a propaganda advantage (for enforcing the law). It is not one or the other.”

Violated Contras’ Code

“Tigrillo’s case is just one more case among those we investigate when our troops commit a violation of the laws of the war or human rights,” Icaza said. “In this case, it was a violation of our code of conduct, not the laws of war.”

As a test of the contras’ new human rights machinery, which was mandated by Congress last year when it provided $100 million in aid for the rebels, the case of Tigrillo seems to have an ambiguous message.

Tigrillo was tried and convicted, but only when he killed an unarmed soldier under his command in a base camp, and only after he had quarreled repeatedly with other commanders. The charges of earlier misconduct remain unexamined. The FDN leadership moved quickly to enforce the law, but according to some contra officials, they moved equally quickly to suppress news of the case--even from other contra groups.

“This shows that the law is the law,” said Jose Antonio Tijerino, the Washington representative of the Assn. for Human Rights. He said that the association had been given full access to the trial record--after the trial was completed. “The case showed that we can do our job,” he said.

Asked whether the association would investigate the charges of earlier abuses, however, Tijerino looked doubtful. “We have only been in existence since October,” he said. “Our job is to monitor what is going on now, not to go back into the past.”

Marjorie Miller reported from Tegucigalpa and Doyle McManus from Washington.