Disgruntled Nicaraguan Peasants Leave to Join Contras : Town That Cradled Revolt Cool to Sandinistas

A former National Guardsman posted in this northern farm town during the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza tells of the day his commander ordered him to make a list of residents thought to sympathize with Sandinista guerrillas.

“But sir,” the young sergeant protested in 1978, “the whole town is Sandinista.”

Much has changed in Quilali since Sgt. Guillermo Pacheco spoke out nine years ago. The Sandinistas ousted the Somoza government in 1979 and replaced it. Pacheco fled to exile in Honduras, where he helped to start a Nicaraguan insurgency.

And the town that was such a Sandinista stronghold turned anti-Sandinista.

“There are a lot of counterrevolutionaries here,” said Father Joseph Smetana, an American priest who has lived in Quilali for more than 20 years.

While the contras were founded and backed by Somoza allies, and still number several former guardsmen among their leaders, their ranks are filled with rebellious farmers from towns such as Quilali.

Sound of Gunfire Familiar

Two hours from a paved road and about 30 miles from the Honduran border, the town sits amid hilly coffee and cattle land in Nueva Segovia, a rugged province where the sound of gunfire is as familiar as church bells.

Quilali still has its Sandinista supporters. Sandinistas run the government, and soldiers patrol the quiet central square, where printed graffiti figures prominently: “ No Pasaran “ (They Shall Not Pass), one slogan says of the contras.

But what the government propaganda does not say is that scores, and perhaps hundreds, of men and boys have left Quilali to join the contras in their fight to oust the Sandinistas, and at least three of them have become rebel regional commanders.

Unlike most Nicaraguans, residents of Quilali recognize the pseudonyms of contra fighters. They say that when the contras attacked Sandinista artillery positions on the edge of town last August, a few of the rebels shouted greetings to their families as they withdrew.

Some of the remaining residents are uncommonly open in their support for the insurgents.

“If it weren’t for my house and my kids, I’d be there myself,” one farmer said.

The reasons so much of the town has turned against the Marxist-led Sandinista government are varied, but most have to do with land. Residents say that Quilali had many farmers with medium-sized land holdings--a rural petite bourgeoisie. After coming to power, the Sandinistas confiscated the lands of many, forced others to relocate and controlled the sale of their crops.

The Sandinistas tried to push the independent farmers into cooperatives, residents say, and instead pushed them into the contras.

Others note that Quilali has a history of rebellion and suggest that its people have a stubborn rebel streak in them.

The town looks out on the cone-shaped mountain where Gen. Augusto Cesar Sandino ran “El Chipote,” headquarters of his guerrilla campaign against the presence of U.S. Marines in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Some say Sandino built a dirt airstrip in Quilali for supply flights before he made peace with the authorities in 1933, after the Marines were withdrawn. Sandino was assassinated by national guardsmen in 1934, and the Sandinistas claimed him as their hero after they were organized in 1960.

Town United Against Somoza

Residents agree with former guardsman Pacheco that nearly the whole town supported the Sandinistas against Somoza. Many farmers took up arms and joined the guerrillas’ Anti-Somocista Popular Militias, known by the Spanish acronym MILPAS, which also means “farmland.”

Pedro Joaquin Gonzalez, one of Quilali’s native sons who fought against Somoza, became a local Sandinista hero until he began to organize against the Sandinistas within a year of their coming to power.

Gonzalez, known as the contra commander Dimas, renamed the MILPAS the Anti-Sandinista Popular Militias and fought against the leftist government until he was killed by a Sandinista infiltrator from Quilali whom he believed to be his friend.

As the Sandinistas implemented their farm policies in the countryside, townsfolk who once had fought alongside them began to follow Dimas’ path into the contras.

“These were some of the people most affected by the revolution,” a Nicaraguan exile in Honduras said. “They have no ideology. They are fighting . . . because someone confiscated their land, robbed them, would not let them sell their crops or hurt their brother.”

Attacks on Cooperatives

Lost land is one of the contras’ motivations for continuing to attack Sandinista farming cooperatives despite pressure by their American advisers to stop doing so. The cooperatives are guarded by armed militia and soldiers but also are inhabited by civilians.

The Nicaraguan exile criticized the contra leadership for being too elitist and insisted that if a contra government ever came to power, people like the farmers of Quilali eventually would fight against them, too.

“They fought against Somoza, fought against the Sandinistas and they would fight against the contras because they do not represent these people,” the exile said.

Within the contras, there are longstanding tensions between former national guardsmen and converts from the Sandinista cause. Pacheco said the internal divisions have lessened as fighting against the Sandinistas has picked up this year, but he blamed the tensions for a violent episode involving two commanders at a contra camp earlier this year.

After an argument with a former guardsman, a former Sandinista commander from Quilali called Coral was shot repeatedly. His left leg had to be amputated. Contra officials deny that the incident was politically motivated.

Town Deeply Divided

In any event, politics most certainly have divided the town of Quilali, residents say. Last month, when 74 young men were released after two years of compulsory service in the Sandinista Popular Army, several church musicians objected to playing at a Sandinista military event, according to the American priest.

Likewise, Father Smetana said, members of a Sandinista baking cooperative did not want to share scarce flour with the mothers of sons who are with the contras.

As has happened elsewhere in Nicaragua, the families of Quilali have been split by the war. Smetana said the wife of the Sandinista government leader in Quilali tunes in the contras’ Radio Liberacion to listen for the sermons of an exiled preacher--her father.

White-haired Miguel Bellorin is the 74-year-old patriarch of a large family, typical of those who straddle the war. Bellorin said he has five grandchildren in the Sandinista military and government and a sixth studying in the Soviet Union.

On the other side, Bellorin said, he has two sons and three grandsons with the contras.

Another of Bellorin’s sons was assassinated by the contras because he worked for the Sandinista local government, Bellorin said. Two grandsons died in the war--one killed by a colleague in the Sandinista army--and three others have been wounded on both sides of the war.

Thinks of His Children

“Whenever I hear combat,” Bellorin said, “I get nervous thinking that maybe one of my children or grandchildren could be there.”

While the Sandinistas prevented Bellorin from harvesting his coffee for three years because the area was “too dangerous,” the contras burned his farmhouse.

The Sandinistas have made attempts to win back some of the contras, principally by altering some of their agricultural policies. They also hold meetings in the town square to publicize a Sandinista amnesty.

“They say to talk to your kids and the contras, to raise their consciousness so they will come back. They say that nothing is going to happen to them if they come back,” Bellorin said.

Residents said two contras returned under the amnesty. One went to work for the Sandinista State Security in the city of Esteli, and another stayed in Quilali a year before going back to the contras.

Sandinistas Freed Prisoners

Last January, the Sandinistas held a public meeting in the central square to release six political prisoners accused of aiding the contras. They said the prisoners were freed as a gesture of revolutionary generosity.

Primitivo Siles, one of those released after 60 days in jail, said he was innocent of the Sandinista charges that he headed the August attack on artillery posts, in which several soldiers reportedly were killed.

Siles denied that he ever has aided the contras, but admitted that about 30 of his brothers, cousins and nephews are contras. Nor did he hide his own displeasure with the Sandinistas.

“If someone doesn’t like something, well, they just don’t like it,” the farmer said.

Siles said bitterly that the Sandinistas forced him to move from one of his family farms in a war zone. He said they tried to confiscate one of his family’s houses because his in-laws had been members of Somoza’s National Guard.

When the Sandinistas released Siles and the other prisoners, they read a list of 50 townspeople who they said were off with the contras. The officials said that if these and other sons and grandsons of Quilali would turn themselves in, they, too, would be released.

“It sounded like a list of all the people who ever lived in Quilali,” Smetana said.