Limiting Rebels’ Popular Support : New Militias Keeping Contras Off Balance

In October, 1983, people here recall, the contras walked into town unchallenged. They set fire to the coffee warehouse, gathered the 400 townsfolk for an anti-Sandinista lecture and left with several teen-age recruits.

But when U.S.-backed Nicaraguan rebels returned to the farming community twice this month, they had to wage firefights with the 15 men of its newly created self-defense force.

“They came down that hill yelling at us, ‘Surrender, you mad dogs! Turn in your weapons!’ ” recalled Jose Maria Hernandez, a 20-year-old militiaman. “We yelled back from the other hill, ‘Nobody surrenders here!’ ”

The midnight attacks on this mile-high settlement in northern Nicaragua were part of an offensive by thousands of contras who have slipped across the rugged border from camps in Honduras since December to try to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Managua.

Aiming for Supply Lines

With $100 million in new U.S. aid committed last year, the contras hope to mass enough forces along Nicaragua’s central mountainous spine to cut government supply lines from Managua to the Atlantic coast, according to Western officials and rebel leaders.

Since the contras’ last big offensive in 1983, however, the Sandinistas have created militias in scores of rural communities like Monterrey to keep the rebels at arm’s length and limit popular support for a sustained insurgency.

President Daniel Ortega said recently that the effort has involved moving 110,000 peasants from small, isolated farms that once fed the contras and resettling them as farmer-militiamen in private cooperatives or state-run collectives.

In doing so, the 70,000-man Sandinista Popular Army has expanded its reserves and militia forces to 230,000 men, according to Defense Minister Humberto Ortega.

One reaction has been fiercer rebel attacks against some of the newly militarized settlements. During a 2 1/2-hour battle here March 10, several witnesses said, the contras burned down a house, blew up a tractor and hurled a dozen grenades, one of which killed a 13-year-old boy fleeing his home. The child’s stepfather and one combatant on each side were wounded.

That week, in the same area around Lake Apanas, the contras also killed four soldiers in a roadside ambush, burned a silo full of grain and set a land mine that destroyed a highway repair truck and wounded its driver, the army reported.

Last Thursday, about 60 rebels returned to Monterrey. Witnesses said they killed the head of the militia and a civilian, while burning down 12 more houses and two warehouses full of coffee.

The government reported three other rebel attacks in northern Nicaragua on Thursday. Ten contras, four Sandinista militiamen and a 16-month-old boy were killed, it said, and six civilians were wounded as the rebels destroyed a coffee warehouse, a clinic and several grain silos.

War Has Intensified

Government soldiers and travelers in the region say the war has intensified in recent weeks. Tim Takaro and Susan Cookson, a husband-and-wife medical team from North Carolina, say they have been unable to reach tuberculosis patients in three villages north of their clinic in Jinotega since January because the roads have been closed by fighting or land mines.

Despite the attacks, Sandinista army officials say the rebels are more isolated from the civilian population than at any time in the five-year-old war and are being slowly exhausted by the pursuit of special Irregular Warfare Battalions.

“Perhaps our greatest achievement in the past year was taking away the social base of the contras,” Capt. Ricardo Wheelock, the army’s chief of intelligence, told reporters recently. “The contras are no longer a strategic threat to the revolution.”

4,200 to 12,000 contras

Rebel commanders say 12,000 of their fighters have entered Nicaragua since December. Western officials say the number is closer to 7,000. Wheelock contends that no more than 4,200 contras are inside the country.

By any measure, the rebel infiltration is a major challenge to the Sandinista army.

Each day, wounded Sandinista soldiers arrive for treatment at the German Pomares Ordonez Hospital in Apanas. Next door, an army training school by the same name is running hundreds of fresh conscripts through a 45-day crash course to refill the counterinsurgency battalions.

In separate interviews at the hospital, six wounded members of these units said the contras have marched from Honduras in groups of several hundred, then broken into bands of as few as 20, trying to avoid face-to-face combat as they trek deeper into Nicaragua.

‘They Keep Fleeing’

“We follow them, but they never stand and fight,” said Evin Ines, 22. “They just keep fleeing.”

Even so, most of the soldiers, who were wounded in hit-and-run ambushes, said they had seen more fighting this year than in all of 1986.

The rebel offensive followed months of Sandinista incursions into Honduras last year to try to keep the contras pinned inside their base camps in that country.

Rolando Jose Pabon, 17, said eight members of his Ramon Raudales Battalion died in “almost daily combat” with contras inside Honduras between October and December, when he was wounded.

Honduran Retaliation

The Sandinistas pulled out of Honduras in December after their incursions led to three days of heavy fighting with the Honduran army and provoked Honduran air strikes inside Nicaragua.

Since then, Sandinista commanders say they have switched tactics, letting the contras filter into Nicaragua and pursuing them more aggressively through the thickly forested mountains.

But while each side claims to have killed hundreds of enemy soldiers this year, the Sandinistas have failed in their aim to trap the contras in high-casualty engagements. At the same time, the contras have been unable to seize and hold any town.

Instead, the war has fragmented into hundreds of small skirmishes all over the countryside. In the deadliest clash reported by either side this year, the government said it had killed 35 rebels.

Seeking Civilian Support

“The contras are running around in circles looking for support, but the civilian population has turned its back on them,” said First Lt. Roberto Talavera, commander of the 364th Infantry Battalion in this region. “They are being defeated.”

The view is not so optimistic in Monterrey, a scattering of dirt-floor shacks whose occupants are still shaken by the rebel raids.

The 80 families of the town’s coffee cooperative are not, by and large, committed Sandinistas, even though they gained individual land titles after the revolutionary government, which came to power in 1979, confiscated a 486-acre plantation from their landlord.

Mario Valle, 46, the cooperative’s president, said its members earn more from a good harvest than when they were farm laborers but do not live as well. There is dissatisfaction, he said, with meager food rations imposed by the government, the lack of a promised medical clinic and a housing shortage.

Farmers’ Complaints

“We know the Sandinistas are fighting, but we don’t know if the lack of food here is the fault of the war or the system,” he said.

Although such complaints would seem to make Monterrey fertile ground for the contras, Valle and other farmers said the rebels have never established an enduring presence in the area.

“The contras have no future here,” Valle told a visitor two days after the March 10 attack. Then he thought awhile and added, “If the contras come back, the cooperative may not have much of a future either.”

The contras traditionally threaten coffee growers on the basis that their crop earns the government export dollars needed to finance the war effort.

Many Homeless

The second attack here left more than 100 people homeless and much of the coffee crop destroyed. Another 20 families had fled after the first attack, leaving unpicked coffee beans in the surrounding dark green hills.

One militiaman turned in his rifle, telling the army that unless everyone in town is armed, he would feel safer without it.

Julio Blandon Garcia, a 25-year-old conscript whose counterinsurgency unit was passing through the area, said many peasant farmers either fear or support the contras and won’t give information to the army.

“They see the contras pass and never tell us a thing,” he said. “We have to do our own intelligence work.”