Main Street, Managua : War and Fear in the City of the Sandinistas

To the architects of the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy, Managua is the heart of the Sandinista beast, the capital of a Marxist state that threatens to infect all of Central America with communism. More than a city, it is a symbol--one so powerful that it has prompted the bizarre series of clandestine dealings of the still-unfolding Iran- contra scandal.

But Managua is also a living city, the heart of a poor nation of polarized ideas and divided families; of tired, angry, determined and frightened people who are often overlooked in politicians’ polemics. It is a city of scarcity and fear, of grinding poverty and Sandinista fervor. It is a city best understood in scenes from the streets, where the wounds of a violent revolution and an unofficial war with the United States are painfully fresh.

THE POOR NEIGHBORHOOD

A Rumor of War

I FIRST HEARD THE RUMOR from a boy in the market. He seemed to be asking me rather than telling me, although he stated it as fact. He watched closely to see how I would react. Clearly, he wanted an outside opinion.

“There is a woman who is stealing children. She is sucking out their blood and selling the meat.”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“Everybody says so.”

The rumor spread like a virus through Managua’s markets and poor districts, frightening mothers into keeping their children at home, raising the suspicion of strangers and , finally, erupting into rock-throwing hysteria in the district called Jorge Dimitrov, where no children were even missing. In fact, there had been only one child reported stolen, in Tipitapa, about 10 miles to the north. But gossip and rumor are a way of life where telephones are a luxury; fear is a natural state in a country at war.

At dark that evening, just when the rumors had reached their peak, a dirty, half-crazed stranger wandered into Jorge Dimitrov. The woman had matted hair and wore three dresses, and a few of the residents decided that she must be the thief. She would steal a child, they surmised, then shed one of her layers so she could escape without being identified by her dress.

Eventually, about 300 men, women and children surrounded the confused woman and led her to the voluntary neighborhood police. As word spread, more people flocked to the wooden guard post where she was being held, until the crowd numbered more than 2,000. Suddenly, some of the angry neighbors decided they wanted her back from the police and began shouting for them to give her up. The people were going to take care of this bloodsucking baby killer on their own. “They wanted to lynch her,” said policeman Alberto Conrado Cruz.

The armed and uniformed volunteer police are Sandinista loyalists working for free in their spare time “to defend the revolution.” Usually they investigate burglaries, disputes or reports of counterrevolutionary activities. This was the first time Conrado and his colleagues had had a riot on their hands.

“We had to protect the physical integrity of this woman,” Conrado said. “There were eight of us and about 2,000 of them, and they wanted to take the law into their own hands.”

The mob began to throw rocks, gouging fist-sized holes in the flimsy walls of the guard post and bruising a few policemen. Conrado sent a colleague down the road to telephone for help. He tried to calm the crowd.

Sandinista police units arrived, dispersed the group and ushered the woman away. But the confrontation made front-page news. It was the first time a volunteer police post had been attacked, and in such a pro-Sandinista neighborhood it was baffling. These people had received free land from the government on which to build their houses; they had attended neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committee meetings. The revolution was made for them. What had happened?

Rumor. In their war to overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza the Sandinistas had spread countless rumors, in one case suggesting to highly Catholic Nicaraguans that a volcano eruption was the wrath of God against Somoza’s rule. Now the contras were doing the same to the Sandinistas. They reported on their clandestine radio station that children were being sold and that their blood was being used for transfusions for wounded Sandinista soldiers. In the fearful fantasy of the poor, the blood became meat--their children for sale as meat--and the rumor grew wildly in markets where there is a shortage of beef. After six years of the contra war, the pressure has rubbed Nicaraguan nerves raw. The contras’ broadcast sent a jolt through those exposed nerves.

The next day, Police Chief Doris Tijerino called a meeting to halt the rumors and calm the battered feelings of residents who felt that the police had been more protective of the crazy woman than of their children. Officials said the confrontation was proof that Nicaraguans were not afraid of the police.

Mothers, still smarting from the incident, remained wary. “They say they’re making sausage out of the children,” Miriam Torres said two days later. “Who knows? It could be true.”

THE AIRPORT HIGHWAY

Four-Lane Decay

WHAT IS MOST STRIKING about the eight miles of highway from Augusto Cesar Sandino International Airport to the center of Managua is not the revolutionary slogans scrawled in red and black on walls along the way, or even the East German-made trucks full of freshly trained army reserves. Rather, what you first see, feel and even smell on that potholed road is Nicaragua’s economic decay, the undisguised poverty in which so many of its people live.

Trucks spewing diesel smoke pass rows of wooden shanties built on dirt floors along side roads that turn to mud in the wet season and to wind-whipped dust when it is dry. These are the settlements of squatters, refugees from war and poverty in the countryside who have swollen Managua to a city of 1 million, a third of the country’s population. The four-lane North Highway is laced with the smells of cooking grease, coffee, exhaust and garbage. Like most of Managua’s main thoroughfares, it is lined with people tugging heavy loads, pulling carts or hitchhiking.

The first of many contradictions in revolutionary Nicaragua appears on that road, outside the elegant Camino Real Hotel, where side-by-side billboards advertise Soviet Aeroflot flights to Europe and the American Diners Club card. Farther along the highway, weedy lots are strewn with auto carcasses, scavenged for spare parts that have become scarce under an inflation rate of 600% and a U.S. trade embargo. The road runs past La Prensa, the opposition newspaper closed by the government last June, a day after the U.S. Congress approved $100 million in military aid to the contras; past El Nuevo Diario, the pro-Sandinista newspaper edited by members of the same family that edited La Prensa; and past the Coca-Cola factory, once managed by Adolfo Calero, now a leader of the contras. Recently, a Sandinista banner that hung on the Coke plant fence read: “Death to the Yankee Invader. More Discipline in Production. Zero Bureaucratization.”

At a bend in the highway, downtown suddenly unfolds in an expanse of overgrown lots scattered with clapboard shacks and the skeletons of office buildings left to crumble since the day almost 15 years ago when an earthquake destroyed the center of Managua. A hot wind blows over the city like a long sigh, and you can’t help but think, “This is it? This is what everyone is fighting over?” For no matter what brings you to Managua now, it is clear in the hollow ruins of downtown that if it weren’t for a war and a revolution, you probably never would have come.

DOWNTOWN

Ruins of Dictatorship

THE SHELLS OF DOWNTOWN BUILDINGS are home to some of Managua’s poorest residents. Eustaquio Alvarado lives with his wife and three small children on the cavernous first floor of what used to be a shoe factory. At 54, Alvarado sees a future in the filthy remains of a building with no electricity or running water. He says that one day he will whitewash the walls blackened by dirt and soot. In the meantime, he has decorated them with Picasso-esque figures in white chalk: witches, one-eyed clowns and life-size men smoking cigarettes.

The family sleeps on cots covered with soiled mattresses. Under one mattress Alvarado keeps his treasures--a booklet on hunger in the Third World and some newspaper photographs of Augusto Cesar Sandino, the Sandinistas’ martyred forefather who fought to oust U.S. Marines from Nicaragua and was assassinated in 1934, one year after Alvarado was born.

The Sandinistas say their revolution was fought on behalf of people like Alvarado, who grew poorer while Somoza enriched himself on international aid meant to rebuild Managua after the earthquake. Alvarado calls himself a socialist and says he is a member of the Sandinista militia, which was created to defend the country against a U.S. invasion--an event the government regularly announces is imminent.

“I am glad these people won,” says Alvarado, whose gray-whiskered face is deeply lined. He says that he is better off living in the building shell than in his old shanty, where the roof leaked and he had been robbed. He makes 5,000 cordobas a day (less than $2) picking up garbage in a wooden cart from the Mercado Oriental, or Eastern Market.

“Whoever is president, he’s not going to bring food to my house. If Pedro’s in charge, or Juan is, I still have to work,” Alvarado says. “I do not feel martyred in life. I am happy to have work, and with what I earn we can eat.”

Several blocks from Alvarado, on the second floor of what used to be the Alcazar movie theater, lives Guadalupe Montoya, a 32-year-old housewife with dull eyes and an angry mouth pursed as if to spit. Today, Montoya remains as much on the margins of society as she did under Somoza.

Montoya lives amid concrete rubble with a man she says she cannot stand, who threatens to take her baby daughter if Montoya tries to leave him. “He brings other women here,” she says, and leaves Montoya to care for two small brothers of a woman with whom he used to live. One of the boys is an invalid with tiny feet turned inward on useless legs. He is 10 and sits naked on a wooden chair with holes in the seat that allow him to urinate on the floor. He is mute, grunting to himself as he eats from a metal plate with one hand while extending the other forward, snapping his arm from a double-jointed elbow. The other boy, 9, has bright eyes beneath long lashes and a baseball cap but refuses to speak. “He’s stubborn,” Montoya says, rocking her daughter in a hammock. “I don’t want to take care of them anymore.”

Rather than turn to the Sandinistas to solve her problems, Montoya looks to a solution that has barely sustained generations of Latin America’s poor: “I want to find myself a patrona , a boss, someone who will accept me with my baby to work in her house and get me out of here.”

THE MARKET PLACE

Militants in Aprons

POVERTY AND UNEMPLOYMENT HAVE always driven women into the sprawling Mercado Oriental, baskets of fruits and vegetables balanced on their heads. Today, many of these aproned women with muscular necks and meaty arms are Nicaragua’s free-market militants, hawking their goods in defiance of Sandinista price and licensing controls. To them, the Sandinistas are the Internal Commerce Ministry inspectors--enemies to be avoided.

The six-year-old contra war, combined with the U.S. trade embargo and government mismanagement, has brought chaos to Nicaragua’s agricultural economy. The most common complaint in the cities is about food. Housewives, rich and poor, say they must deal with shortages, provision cards, high prices and low salaries in order to put meals on the table.

At 6 o’clock one morning, as the sky turns from gray to blue, an angry vendor begins hurling insults at inspectors. “Are you going to fine me? You going to take my food away?” challenges Maria Sanchez, 33. Tears of rage stream down her fleshy face.

Inspector Jose Maltes says that the unlicensed women set up their baskets, boxes and stools in the street. The government limits vendors’ licenses to a few thousand, but the market is overflowing with illegal merchants. As he speaks, a defiant crowd closes in around him. A long-haired girl of 10 moves forward and barks, “We can’t sell anything inside, not one peso! These guys are just trying to take money from us! They’re bandits!”

“They take our produce from us,” adds a woman next to her.

“They won’t let us work,” says another.

Maltes shakes his head. “They always get like this when journalists are around,” he says.

“This is the free market,” another inspector says. “If they weren’t making money, they would leave.”

Maltes says that although Maria Sanchez had been working without a license, his inspector only tried to get her to move out of the street. He had not intended to take away her merchandise. Sanchez says she had not been selling, but had been talking to her friend when the inspector began bullying her. “He told me if I didn’t get out of there he was going to kick me in the butt. When he said that, I was so mad, I took out my knife.”

“That’s not how it was,” Maltes says. “First she pulled the knife. Then he threatened to kick her.”

THE HOTEL

Intercontinental Politicking

THE BOEING 707 LANDED AT Sandino Airport with its shiny black nose aimed like a missile at the terminal. It was an Air Force jet, with United States of Ame sprawled across its chest. Nine Republican congressmen stepped into the sun wearing blue suits and what may have been the only neckties worn in Managua that day.

The congressmen were on a fact-finding tour. They were preparing to vote on President Reagan’s $100-million military aid package to the contras. It was the final hurdle in turning a covert war into formal U.S. policy, and although most admitted that they had made up their minds to vote with the President, they had come for a quick look at the revolution.

At the head of the pack were Rep. Robert K. Dornan of Buena Park and William Walker, the deputy assistant secretary of state with the same name as the American adventurer who landed in Nicaragua in 1855 and had himself elected president. The group spent most of its day with opposition newspapermen, opposition politicians and opposition human-rights activists on a U.S. Embassy-arranged itinerary that included 45 minutes with Vice President Sergio Ramirez, the only high-ranking Sandinista willing to see them on short notice.

To no one’s surprise, the congressmen still supported Reagan’s proposal at the end of the day, when Rep. David Dreier of La Verne and Dornan held an impromptu press conference in the doorway of the Intercontinental Hotel. The hotel is one of two high-rises still standing in downtown Managua. At any given time, it may be jammed with delegations of sociologists, doctors, priests, congressmen or communists, as well as an an occasional Hollywood star. That week, the guests included Gary Merrill, an aging actor who paraded from lobby to bar and back in a Panama hat, loudly ordering Scotch and soda “for the digestion.”

Dreier, neatly coifed and tailored in the humid afternoon, found himself going head-to-head with an aggressive, pro-Sandinista free-lance journalist from the United States. Sure, the embassy had arranged the schedule, Dreier said defensively, “but I don’t believe they designed these meetings based on giving us a one-sided view.”

Dreier said the tour convinced him that he should vote for aid to the contras. The reporter noted that Dreier had supported aid on a previous vote.

“Do you believe you have a balanced view of the country?” the reporter pushed.

“From my perspective, based on a one-day trip, I feel that I have.”

Tourists gathered around the television lights and cameras, further obstructing the entrance while a stream of cars pulled into the driveway, delivering guests to a wedding party that was about to begin on the ninth floor. From one of the cars emerged the ebullient bride in her long, white gown and veil. She lifted her train to squeeze through the huddle of journalists and congressmen, who failed to notice her or her gleeful guests.

Dornan didn’t miss a beat. “I would supply (the contras) with Stingers in an instant to blow these Soviet-made, Cuban-flown helicopters right out of the air and come down to a more man-against-man arrangement out there in the bush,” he said.

The arriving party seemed equally oblivious to the Americans gravely holding forth on Nicaragua’s future. Suddenly, amid the noisy crowd in the lobby, Dornan spotted a familiar face. “Hey,” he said excitedly. “That’s Gary Merrill.” He moved forward to shake the actor’s hand, finally clearing the doorway.

THE FACTORY

American Dreams and Nightmares

PRACTICALLY SINCE THE FIRST WILLIAM WALKER arrived in Central America 132 years ago, Nicaragua’s history has been determined to a degree by Americans and American governments. U.S. Marines intervened in Nicaragua in 1909, 1912 and 1926, the last time staying to protect U.S. investments until January, 1933. So it is not unusual that the political climate in Managua often revolves around events in Washington. In the spring of 1985, for example, when Congress voted on $14 million in aid to the contras, tension in Managua was palpable. Likewise, news of the Iran-contras scandal was greeted as a cool breeze of relief.

Ronald Reagan is the Sandinistas’ archenemy. President Daniel Ortega refers to Reagan as a new Hitler planning to conquer Nicaragua. To many Nicaraguans Reagan personifies the war that has taken their sons, and they speak of him with a visceral hatred. But at the same time, Nicaraguans are friendly to Americans, and the influence of American culture remains strong. The army’s radio station, Cachorro, plays American hits, and Sandinista television airs “The Incredible Hulk.” Baseball is Nicaragua’s national pastime, thanks to the years of influence of U.S. Marines.

Miguel Angel Ramirez, a 30-year-old welder, is typical of the Sandinista supporters who hate President Reagan but love to listen to Michael Jackson or Donna Summer. “I don’t think all North Americans are bad, just the ones making the war. The government. If I see an American visiting or working here, I know he’s not doing me any harm,” Ramirez says.

Ramirez has dark eyes, curly hair and a broad smile. He says he spent six months in jail under Somoza for backing a labor strike, and during the insurrection, he helped build neighborhood barricades against the National Guard. Ramirez is a member of a Sandinista labor union and works in a small, privately owned factory molding metal reinforcement rods into table-and-chair sets, for which he is paid a salary plus commission.

“I would like to go to the United States to see how the working class is there, to see if the worker there is like us,” Ramirez says. “I have always dreamed of visiting factories there. Really, all boys dream of going to the United States. Everyone believes it’s a paradise.”

He is a member of the reserves and donates money to a union fund to pay for toothpaste and other luxuries for combatants. He believes that the war will increase in intensity this year and that direct U.S. military intervention is possible.

“If there is an invasion, we have the right to defend our country,” he says.

THE UPPER CLASS

Well-Tended Bitterness

DESPITE THE ANXIETY FESTERING close to the surface, in many ways life proceeds normally in Managua, punctuated by ordinary rituals such as birthday parties, graduations and first Communion celebrations. But war and revolution have taken their toll. Countless couples have divorced and families have split over their ideological differences. Capt. Rosa Pasos, spokeswoman for the Popular Sandinista Army, is the sister of Marta Sacasa, the Miami-based spokeswoman for the largest contra force. Carlos Fernando Chamorro is editor of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada, while his brother, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, is a contra leader and editor of the rebel weekly Nicaragua Hoy. Pedro Joaquin lives in Costa Rica, where his sister, Claudia Chamorro, is the Sandinistas’ ambassador.

Many of those who find themselves on opposite sides of the war grew up together and still ask about one another.

“So, which contras did you see in Miami?” a Sandinista supporter asks.

“Oh, you know, Adolfo Calero, Leonardo Somarriba,” a visitor answers, naming two contra officials.

“Somarriba, he was never interested in politics. Why is he mixed up with those people?” the woman says, shaking her head. She pulls out a dogeared photograph album. “You know, he was my date when I was a debutante. He was so good-looking then. Is he fat now?”

Much of the middle and upper classes have left Nicaragua since the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, and many of those who remain oppose the revolution. At a first Communion party in the gardens of the Camino Real Hotel, children in party clothes gaily eat hamburgers and French fries while their parents sip rum. After a few drinks the adults grow loose-tongued among strangers.

“You know, 75% of Nicaraguans are rightists, not leftists,” says a well-dressed woman.

“Ninety percent,” pipes up another.

“I would give up my Nicaraguan citizenship in a day if I could be an American,” a young mother says.

“Not me,” says a mother of four. She prefers to maintain her social standing in Nicaragua than to move to Miami, where it is expensive to live. “What is there for us in Miami? Menial jobs.”

Do they think the U.S. government will send American troops to Nicaragua?

“I hope so,” the young mother says bitterly.

“No,” says the other mother, who has reason to be bitter. Her husband had a run-in with Sandinista police and is under house arrest. “A lot of people would die needlessly. This revolution is irreversible.”

THE HOME

Son of the Revolution

THIS IS A REVOLUTION OF young people, Nicaraguans say. A revolution for young people. Half the population of the country is under 20. Many leaders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front are in their 30s. President Ortega is 41.

In the revolution, everything is new. The government is new; the heroes are new. The Sandinistas want to create a New Society, and to live in it, a New Man with revolutionary values. The New Man, according to a Ministry of Education teachers manual, is patriotic, committed to the interests of workers and peasants, anti-imperialist and opposed to exploitation.

Francisco Quinonez, a 23-year-old engineering student, aspires to fulfill that ideal, although it has meant a rift with his American-born mother, two brothers and sister, who all live in Houston. Quinonez says he began to understand the revolution as a student in 1980, when he spent five months teaching peasants to read and to write. “I had never done anything for people before. I lived with the campesinos and felt what a total change they needed. I saw the injustice in the way we lived,” he says.

He returned from his teaching enamored of the revolution, just as his mother was preparing to leave the country and take him with her. “We had terrible fights. She complained about the lines (for food) and said this was communism. She said the education was terrible and there was no future. I wanted to live this change. I am Nicaraguan.”

Quinonez’s father moved to Panama to be the Sandinista ambassador there. His mother left for Texas. Quinonez joined the army reserves and became a militant member of the Juventud Sandinista, the party’s organization for teen-agers and young adults. He put in his two years of Popular Military Service in an army supply unit and, when released last July, returned to school.

It has been five years since Quinonez saw his brothers. His mother comes to visit once a year, but they continue to argue fiercely about the revolution. When his sister returned for a couple of weeks last year, Quinonez was desperate to show her a good time and the good work the government has done. He wanted her to move back and to love the thing that he loves. She said she would think about it, but that was a year ago.

“They see Nicaragua as a place where there is nothing,” Quinonez says. “I see Nicaragua as a country confronting an unjust war that is causing enormous scarcity. I see a government that represents the interests of the people. This is something I am building, but they think I am brainwashed.”

Quinonez hopes one day to become a member of the Sandinista party, to be part of the vanguard of the revolution. “I have given myself to this cause, and the party is where the best Sandinistas are. I try to be one of the best Sandinistas.”

THE MEMORIAL

Signs of Progress

ON JUNE 20, 1979, IN THE Riguero neighborhood, one of Anastasio Somoza’s National Guardsmen ordered an American TV reporter to lay on the ground and shot him point-blank in the head. Bill Stewart’s cameraman filmed the execution, which was broadcast around the world and was considered a key to the Carter Administration’s decision to withdraw U.S. support from a 43-year-old family dynasty. Today, Bill Stewart Park is not unlike the hundreds of street-corner memorials that pay tribute to neighborhood martyrs of the insurrection.

Since the 1979 war, the government has made modest improvements in many of these poor and working-class neighborhoods. In Riguero, public workers have paved many of the streets. In Morazan neighborhood, residents were given land on which to build houses. In Larreynaga, the government is helping workers buy their apartments. And in Jorge Dimitrov, the government runs a lunch-and-tutorial program for children.

Residents in these neighborhoods say the main improvement in their lives since the revolution has been the elimination of the feared National Guard that jailed so many Managuans and killed others. In its place, the Sandinistas have created the voluntary police and the defense committees, composed of neighborhood volunteers who handle the distribution of food provision cards, job recommendations, political education and surveillance of contra activities.

Many residents of Riguero and other neighborhoods say they do not fear the police or defense committees, and some say they like the biweekly committee meetings because they serve as forums for news about the neighborhood and for discussion of problems. But some people say that ill-willed neighbors have been known to accuse their enemies of being contras.

“Some people are capable of calling others a contra just to harm them,” says Jose Luis Lopez of the Cuba neighborhood. “That is a delicate word that no one takes as a joke.”

Others maintain that the defense committees and those responsible for distributing government food are corrupt. Some say that the defense committees create bad feelings among neighbors. “People don’t like to be told what to do,” says Luis Picado, a security guard in the downtown train station. “The defense committees make bosses out of neighbors.”

THE FRONT YARD

A City Fatigued

NIGHT FALLS QUICKLY IN Managua, with yellow-orange sunsets turning to navy-blue sky. During the short dusk, Managuans move their high-backed rockers and wood-slat armchairs outdoors, extending their houses into the street. They rock and watch their children play, and the smoke-scented air loses some of its daytime heat.

For 43-year-old Dominga Castaneda, these evenings in her front yard are the only way to bear the uncertainty of having three sons in an army at war. “If I am inside, I remember and I begin to cry,” she says. “So I stay here, outside.”

As it grows dark, Castaneda talks softly with her daughters gathered around her. She breathes deeply, and for moments she lets go of the fear. But then the unwanted images return.

“I worry they will come up the walk and tell me one of them is dead or hurt and in the hospital, like they did with my other son three years ago. An official came to say he was in the hospital in Matagalpa. He ended up having 11 operations,” Castaneda says.

Managua’s collective fatigue is most visible at the end of the day. Fifty thousand Nicaraguans died in the insurrection against Somoza. Thousands more have died in the contra war. Men and women like Castaneda are tired of war, and the sound of inertia is in their voices. It is resonant not of surrender but of fading hope.

“All we want is for the contras to leave us in peace,” Castaneda says, “and in place of shortages for there to be plenty of food.”