Working With Mothers : Nicaragua Tames Draft Resistance

As 70 fresh conscripts languished in an army induction center the other day, waiting to go to war, Nicaragua’s ruling party ordered up movies, soft drinks and a mariachi band to relieve the boredom.

Suddenly, in the street outside, a middle-aged woman stepped deliberately into the path of an oncoming car and cried: “Let me die! Let me die! They’re taking my son away!”

Other women quickly pushed her back onto the sidewalk.

“I want somebody to destroy this government!” she screamed. “Oh my God! How can you let them sacrifice our sons?”

Once Provoked Riots

Three years ago, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front instituted the draft, the rage of such women set off riots. So militant and widespread was the resistance that it seemed to threaten the Sandinistas’ ability to fight a U.S.-backed insurgency and keep control of the country.

But in Managua’s latest induction scene, the band played on. The conscripts took no notice of the commotion, and their mothers moved to calm the anguished woman rather than take up her cry. An hour later, the boys were off to basic training, whooping it up aboard two East German-made army trucks.

The festive send-off was part of a government shift away from harsh recruiting methods and toward more sophisticated management of the draft. Through a combination of persuasion, social benefits and selective coercion, it has brought explosive unrest against conscription under control.

Since late last year, the Sandinista front has taken a leading role in this shift, using the eyes, ears and energies of neighborhood party militants to track draft evaders and deserters, recruit volunteers and allay the fears of mothers.

Reliable Weapon

As a result, conscription is proving to be a reliable Sandinista weapon as the war drags into its sixth year. Sandinista officials say the army, 70,000 strong, will replenish a third of its ranks with new fighters this year and even expand slightly as the guerrillas, the contras, throw their last reserves into a major offensive.

“The draft was a traumatic social problem at first, partly because of the way the law was applied,” Vice President Sergio Ramirez said in an interview. “This has been overcome with time. Today, the recruitment of young people is no longer on our agenda of problems.”

In scores of conversations over the last month, city youths expressed a wide range of attitudes toward the draft, from patriotic acceptance to determination to evade it. Most viewed the draft as an unwelcome but unavoidable obligation.

“They say we are being attacked by imperialism, but I don’t know much about that,” Julio Ernesto Sanchez, 17, said as he lined up for a pre-induction physical in Managua. “Where I’m sent, I have to go. To violate the law here is very dangerous.”

Escape From Buses

The lingering unpopularity of the draft was underscored last month when 200 conscripts escaped from three buses refueling in the city of Matagalpa en route to basic training. Army officials admit that desertion rates in the war zones, though reduced in recent years, still run 8% to 10%.

But the draft itself has disappeared as a contentious public issue and become a grudgingly accepted institution. Some opposition leaders call the process a case study of how the Sandinistas, in general, have tightened their grip on the country after nearly eight years of rule.

“Without appearing to be totally repressive, they have brought the situation under control,” said Mauricio Diaz of the Popular Social Christian Party. “Psychologically, we have learned to live with the draft, just as we have learned to live with press censorship and food shortages.”

The draft law requires all males from age 17 to 22 to register for two years of military service. They can be exempted for medical disability but not for conscientious objection. There is no alternative service.

Criticized by Church

As it took effect in early 1984, the law came under attack from Roman Catholic bishops and from opposition politicians campaigning in that year’s national election. They charged that young men were being conscripted to fight for a single political party, the Sandinistas.

Other complaints centered on violence or deceit by recruiters, whose methods included organizing neighborhood dances and then surrounding the dance halls with troops to round up any males without draft cards. Draft dodgers were also swept up in Saturday night raids on movie theaters and discotheques.

While making house-to-house searches in some areas, soldiers often ran into street barricades manned by rock-throwing mothers of draft-age youths. Thousands fled Nicaragua to avoid military service, and many more went into hiding.

Army officials now admit that they erred by using such methods and by reacting so harshly to protests.

“We misinterpreted the mothers’ attitude,” Maj. Victor Moreno said. “It wasn’t really a protest against military service. It was a communications problem. We cut them off from their sons and gave them no information about what was going on.”

Cult of the Mother

Today, according to Maj. Victor Chamorro of the army’s Political Directorate, the Sandinistas have accepted a “political vision” of what was first seen as only a military problem. Mothers, rather than sons, are the primary targets of the new approach.

“The cult of the mother is strong in Nicaragua,” said Reynaldo Antonio Tefel, the minister of social security. “The mother and the family had to be made aware that the draft is a sorrowful necessity imposed by outside aggression against our revolution.”

A government-run Combatants Support Center, founded by Tefel and now run by Maj. Moreno, has instituted mail service and regular visits by parents to their sons at army outposts. It also works to ensure that former soldiers get jobs or scholarships to resume their studies.

The Sandinista women’s organization holds monthly assemblies of draftees’ parents to answer questions and hear complaints.

Critics of the draft admit that these steps have effectively channeled parental dissent inside the system. At the same time, they say, the return of the first conscripts after two years’ service has reassured mothers of new draftees that their duty will not be prolonged.

Law Strictly Enforced

Meanwhile, draft evasion has been discouraged by strict enforcement of a law requiring young men to show draft cards to register for school, hold a salaried job, get a passport or sign a legal document to own a house or a car.

Sandinista Defense Committees, which monitor residents’ activities in most urban neighborhoods, have taken censuses to identify evaders, making heavy-handed dragnet searches unnecessary.

“The Sandinistas have learned to avoid massive confrontations over the draft,” said Lino Hernandez, head of the Permanent Commission on Human Rights. “They know who the evaders are, so arrests are quieter and more selective.”

While the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy continues to argue for conscientious objection, public discussion of the issue ended last year after the government closed the church radio station and expelled a leading bishop. In subsequent private talks on a range of church-state issues, the Sandinistas have refused to modify the draft law.

Some conscripts say the draft became less daunting during a period of declining contra activity in 1985 and 1986, when the rebels’ U.S. aid was formally cut off.

Hasenfus Case Publicized

The downing of a rebel supply flight last October and the capture of its surviving American crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, by a teen-age Sandinista conscript has been skillfully exploited by recruiters to counter the image of the draftee as cannon fodder in an endless war.

A billboard depicting the capture greets commuters on Managua’s Southern Highway, reinforcing government television images of spirited soldiers and proud mothers as well as official claims that the newly active contras are doomed to defeat.

Behind the propaganda, the draft has left quiet but deep divisions in a country that has lost 20,000 war dead. Two women recently told of how the deaths of their oldest sons in rebel attacks spurred them to act for opposite causes.

Esperanza Perez became a model of revolutionary zeal in Managua’s poor Villa Venezuela. She founded a Mother’s Patriotic Movement bearing the name of her son, who died in 1985.

The neighborhood movement, a branch of the national Sandinista organization called Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs, raises money to pay for funerals and medical treatment of other local men wounded in battle. They also sell the war effort to reluctant families.

‘All Have to Pay Price’

Esperanza Perez said she persuaded seven of 10 deserters recently found hiding in her neighborhood to return to the army.

“We tell them this revolution is for all of us and we all have to pay the price of defending it,” she said.

In the town of Nagarote, 25 miles northwest of Managua, Elena Garcia said she helped organize anti-war sentiment after her 20-year-old became the first native son killed by the contras, in 1984.

In December of that year, residents of the town of 15,000 set up barricades and battled recruiters at houses where draft dodgers were believed to be hiding. Fifty people were injured in the clashes.

The revolt ended, residents say, because the army has since left draft dodgers in Nagarote pretty much alone. Even so, 30 youths answered the latest draft call.

A woman involved in the Nagarote uprising, Audeli Montoya, said her older son joined the army this year so that he could study medicine later. Her younger son, 17, refused to register for the draft, dropped out of school and has little hope of getting a job.

‘Like an Outlaw’

“If you don’t sign up, you have to wander around like an outlaw in your own country,” she said. “You can’t work. You can’t study. All you can do is run like a fugitive.”

Like many in Nagarote, Elena Garcia and Audeli Montoya have nothing good to say about the Sandinista revolution.

“It isn’t worth defending,” Montoya said.

The government appears willing to overlook anti-Sandinista strongholds such as Nagarote and concentrate its recruiting in neighborhoods more in tune with the revolution.

Last year, the Sandinista Youth movement and the Sandinista Defense Committees began a drive, aided by soldiers just back from their two years of duty, to get teen-agers to volunteer for service before they are drafted.

15% Are Volunteers

Sandinista militants staged fake fistfights in public squares to draw crowds, then extolled the virtues of volunteering. Several thousand youths, about 15% of all inductees, volunteered last year, party officials said.

At a recent ceremony in a Managua factory neighborhood, 16 young volunteers stood up to parental applause and received backpacks filled with cigarettes, powdered milk and other provisions.

But the Sandinista official in charge, Cesar Garcia, was not satisfied. Another neighborhood in the zone, he said, had twice as many volunteers.

“We have to do better,” he said, “so that the United States doesn’t dare set foot on Nicaraguan soil.”

Pedro Hurtado, national director of the Sandinista Youth, said the idea is to upgrade the quality of the army with soldiers more committed to Sandinista principles and thus cut down desertion.

Army officials say the party’s efforts are crucial.

“Without a popular political base, this war would be a lost cause,” Maj. Moreno said. “The army needs this solid link to the community. We cannot afford a professional army. It must be sustained by political conviction.”