Why Money Won’t Win Nicaragua for Contras

As the debate in Washington over continued U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries heats up, people pay little attention to the reasons why earlier support has not transformed the contras into an effective political and military organization threatening Sandinista rule. Contra links to dictator Anastasio Somoza’s old National Guard are rightly mentioned as a cause; similarly, references to “totalitarian” control imposed by Nicaragua’s leaders are invoked, though the prevailing disorganization argues against this explanation.

A different picture of why the contras have made such little headway in unseating Nicaragua’s commandantes emerged over the course of several week-long stays in Managua since 1985. How the Sandinistas gained the upper hand as of mid-1985 also sheds light on why new money for the contras is unlikely to alter current trends. If anything, the three most important reasons behind the Sandinistas’ success may well be irreversible.

First, the Nicaraguan government rectified a mistake that, given its members’ guerrilla warfare past, it should never have made. Until late 1983, and perhaps not before mid-1984, the Sandinistas refused to acknowledge that the contras had a real following--or “mass base” in Marxist jargon--within Nicaragua. The fact that this small following was localized in the sparsely inhabited and isolated northern part of the country and the Atlantic coast led the governments’ political and military strategists to commit the cardinal sin of war: underestimating the enemy. More important, it rendered impossible the only policy that could defeat the contras : political reconquest of the disaffected “mass base.”

In private, many Sandinistas recognized that their revolution had done little, if anything, for the poor and backward peasantry of the northern reaches. This neglect, when linked with ties the Somoza National Guard had in remote, poverty-stricken areas--traditional recruiting grounds for most Latin American armies--made this sector of the population ideal for contra enrollment. But it was also relatively easy to neutralize once they decided to acknowledge and solve the political problems.

In 1984, the Sandinista Directorate took the step that most Latin American analysts believe marked a turning point. Instead of insisting on agrarian reform based on claiming, for state control, existing large agricultural units, or piecing together cooperatives with small peasant holdings, the government took a 180-degree turn. It began parceling out land, individually, to Nicaragua’s peasants. Not always good land, not even necessarily useful--if not accompanied by seeds, fertilizer and tools to cultivate it--but land nonetheless. As all Latin America revolutions have shown, this is more than enough to win peasant support.

From 1979 until early 1983, the National Institute for Agrarian Reform had distributed 125,000 hectares in individual plots benefitting fewer than 5,000 families. But during the following three years, 1.2 million hectares were parceled out to nearly 50,000 families. More important, of the 21,000 families favored by land reform in 1986, 18,000 received individual plots, deeds and a rifle to defend them with. They had never expected more, and their motivation for supporting the contras, or even for remaining neutral, diminished overnight. Furthermore, as the Sandinistas evacuated peasants living in war zones, giving them land along with resettlement, the contras’ limited popular following shrank considerably. As one Sandinista military commander said to me recently, referring to Mao Tse-tung’s dictum that a guerrilla force should be like a fish in water, “We dried up the sea in which the contras were swimming.” In addition, the government recently began delivering part of the value of agricultural exports to the producer in dollars, thus undermining support for the contras among medium-size coffee, cotton and cattle exporters.

But this policy was made possible largely by the second explanation for the contras’ current and future weakness. President Reagan’s accusations notwithstanding, until late 1984 the Nicaraguan government had no real army. It had commandantes , militias and some Soviet weaponry (tanks, AK-47s and artillery), but no army. During 1983 and 1984, the few trained and combat-ready Sandinista troops were not used against the contras ; through early 1985, they were held in reserve, awaiting a U.S. invasion (viewed as possible after the 1983 Grenada episode) or the opening of a southern front along the Costa Rican border. Mainly, they were not used because the Sandinistas thought their untrained, irregular militias would be sufficient. They weren’t.

Once this became clear, another far-reaching decision was made. The nine-member Directorate discarded the militias and imposed military conscription on a population that had never known what a draft was, much less gone from home to the front after eight weeks of insufficient training. The outcry, particularly among the middle class, was deafening. Desertion was high, young men fled the country, pressgangs rounded up draft-dodgers. But militarily, the policy worked.

By mid-1985 the Sandinistas had the beginnings of a real army. The recruits received one or two months’ training and then joined counterinsurgency units that roamed the northern mountains for weeks at a time.

Once the first conscripts began entering combat, the Nicaraguan government realized what others have known for centuries: The best way to wage a real war is with a real army. The availability of troop strength enabled the Sandinistas to concentrate greater force in the war against the contras, as they did at La Trinidad in mid-1985, without weakening their flanks either in the south or for the defense of Managua. With time, desertion rates dropped, the political uproar over the draft died down and the “new” army began to serve its function. A sign of the impact from both land reform and the professional army is that 25% of the 1987 coffee harvest--a traditional contra objective--has already been collected without military disruptions or “voluntary” labor from the Managua bureaucracy.

By combining the new army with larger, more advanced weaponry, including helicopters from the Soviet Union, the Sandinistas have become militarily effective. Yet the arms would have been useless without the military structure. That some sectors of the Sandinista Front now criticize the army’s excessive professionalism, with its recently instituted traditional ranks and perks, simply corroborates the importance of the process.

While the Sandinistas strengthened their position, the contras’ strategy made their own struggle essentially unwinnable. From early on, the contras adopted a classic Maoist model of insurgency, concentrating available resources in the countryside, to circle and strangle the cities. Given the importance of the Honduran sanctuary, together with the ex-National Guards’ ties and the government’s weakness in the Nicaraguan campo as well as its strength in the cities, this approach made sense. But once the situation inverted itself, and the Sandinistas began losing support in the cities because of widespread food shortages while regaining popularity in the rural areas, it led to a dead end. And there was no alternate strategy.

During 1983 and 1984, the contras and the civilian opposition to the Sandinistas merged into a unified front, culminating in mid-1985 with the creation of the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO). In one way, this strengthened Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters”: by winning over previously independent politicians such as Alfonso Robelo and Arturo Cruz, it gave their cause a faint but badly needed anti-Somocista flavor. But ultimately, the unification process weakened the contras because, combined with the government’s improved intelligence and security capability, it forced people like Cruz and Robelo, and their supporters, to leave Nicaragua, virtually eliminating any organized opposition within the cities. Even allowing for of a small number of second-rank figures, there is no organized group now able to translate urban discontent into conscious political opposition. The Catholic Church attempted to fill the void but soon realized that while it could support existing internal opposition, it could not create it.

Other factors define Nicaragua’s current balance of forces. The contras’ U.S. connection, while feeding, arming and training them, has become a “kiss of death” among sectors of Nicaraguan society unhappy with the Sandinistas yet unwilling to side with the United States against their own country. The contras’ increasing internal divisions, their inability to shake the Somoza label, the uncertainty of their future support in Washington and the total absence of any Latin American backing are all important. But these elements, as well as all the current infighting, resignations and reforms within the contra leadership, stem from the same underlying cause: The contras are divided because they are losing, not the other way round.

This explains why, while the United States debates what to do with its Central American surrogates, most people and governments in Latin America have made up their minds about the contras. For reasons of principle--that the President of the United States dislikes a Latin American government is not a good enough reason to overthrow it--and power--if the contras could not win during the years of Reagan’s greatest strength, they will not win in the twilight of his presidency--no one south of Harlingen, Tex., is betting on the anti-Sandinista cause. Wherever one’s sympathies may lie, that seems like a wise and realistic decision.