Rebel Leaders Seek to Win Hearts and Minds : Contra Recruits Get Political Talks

When 30 new recruits marched into the Nicaraguan contras’ main base camp late last month, rebel commander Enrique Bermudez welcomed them with an essential of guerrilla warfare: He held a political meeting.

“Tell us how the Sandinista revolution has benefited the poor farmers,” Bermudez challenged.

None of the men in ragged clothes spoke out.

“How many of you have received land from the Sandinistas? Raise your hands,” Bermudez asked.

None of the work-worn hands went up.

Bermudez then spoke to the recruits of the high prices that farmers were paid for their animals before the revolution, and of the higher prices that they pay now for a pair of work boots.

“The Sandinistas have impoverished you,” Bermudez declared.

Words and Weapons

Guerrilla wars are fought with words as well as weapons. Bermudez, the military commander of the rebels’ fight to unseat the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, fears that he is losing in this respect. His troops have failed to engage in political warfare and have failed to capitalize on popular dissatisfaction with the Sandinistas.

So, before issuing rifles to his new recruits, Bermudez was arming them with anti-Sandinista propaganda and trying to cement their own contra convictions.

It is not clear if other U.S.-trained commanders who recently infiltrated into Nicaragua are implementing Bermudez’s new attention to psychological operations. But most analysts agree that this area has been one of the contras’ chief shortcomings.

Bermudez is working hard to dispel the image that the U.S.-backed insurgency is a “mercenary force,” as the Sandinistas call it. He delivered his speech before a reporter, whom he invited to his base camp on the condition that its location not be identified.

Bermudez, 54, is a fervent anti-communist and a former colonel in the National Guard of dictator Anastasio Somoza, who was ousted by a Sandinista-led insurrection in 1979. He is known by the code name “380,” his old serial number in the National Guard.

The United States finances, supplies and helps direct the contra effort to oust the Sandinista government. Men of the U.S. Special Forces have trained the contras under a $100-million aid program. The CIA runs the contra aerial resupply operation.

Most Recruits Peasants

But the vast majority of the approximately 12,000 combatants in Bermudez’s force are much like the 30 new recruits who joined the contra ranks last month: poor and largely illiterate peasants who were not guardsmen and who did not want to be Sandinista soldiers.

Traditionally conservative, the peasants who make up the contra forces call themselves anti-communists, but it is clear that each has his own definition of communism, which generally translates into a specific complaint against the Sandinistas--food shortages, price controls, a run-in with Sandinista officials or military conscription.

A 22-year-old contra unit commander called Mapachin, who said he joined the rebels from his village in the northern province of Jinotega, seems typical of the contra combatants.

“I left for the mountains to fight against the Sandinistas in 1981 when they confiscated a farm from my father,” Mapachin said.

Mapachin was the leader of a 12-man unit responsible for the ambush in which American engineer Benjamin E. Linder was killed in April. Only a few of the men in the unit said they had ever been to school and none said he could read.

Youngest 13 Years Old

The new recruits were farmers with small land holdings of 12 to 125 acres in Jinotega. The youngest were 13, too shy even to say their names aloud, but ready to join fathers and brothers in the rebel forces. The older ones were past 40 and losing teeth.

Most, however, were in their teens and 20s and said they were choosing to take up arms now, after five years of war, to avoid a stepped-up Sandinista draft.

“I thought I would be able to just keep on working,” said a 34-year-old farmer who gave his name only as Jose Leonel. “But no, the Sandinistas called up the reserves in our area. We would have had to go May 4.”

“Because of the military service, I decided it was better to hit the road,” said a 17-year-old called Reynaldo.

Several of the men said they had been hiding in the mountains for months to avoid Sandinista recruiters. They said they worked in their fields by day, occasionally visited their villages, and slept in the hills.

“I’m bored with hiding,” said 18-year-old Domingo Pineda.

Because Bermudez and dozens of rebels were present at the meeting, it could not be determined if any of the recruits had been pressured into joining the contras. Human rights groups, including the U.S.-funded Nicaraguan Assn. for Human Rights, have documented numerous cases of forced recruitment.

Complaints on Sandinistas

But most of the recruits volunteered complaints about the Sandinistas, emphasizing their dislike of farming cooperatives, or alleging human rights abuses. And most of them said they had been secretly aiding the contras from their villages, providing food and information and guiding them through the countryside.

Bermudez conceded that the loss of this civilian infrastructure would be difficult for the rebels in northern Nicaragua, which has been greatly depopulated by the war and Sandinista relocation programs.

In the last three years, the Sandinistas have forcibly moved thousands of peasants out of the far north in a counterinsurgency measure designed to separate the contras from the conservative farmers like the recruits who had aided the rebels during the early years of the war.

But he said that drawing the men into the armed ranks also has its advantages.

“It produces instability in the villages where they come from and that hurts the Sandinistas. Now you have all their families thinking about their sons in the contras,” he said. “They will be sent back to the same area to take advantage of their knowledge of the terrain and their links with the civilian population.”

The robust commander insisted that the rebels have broad popular support inside Nicaragua, but that people are too fearful of the Sandinistas to speak out.

“The people support the contras, don’t they?” he asked the recruits.

“Some of them do,” was the timid reply.

It was not as enthusiastic an answer as Bermudez had wanted.

Urges Fighting Near Cities

“What do we have to do so the people will rise up? For the people to lose their fear, they have to hear gunfire close to the cities. That is what we have to do. If not, the Sandinistas will stay in power the rest of our lives,” Bermudez said.

Diplomats and opposition politicians in Nicaragua agree. The contras have shown little military success in the Pacific Coast region, where two-thirds of the country’s population lives and where the Sandinistas have built a core of party militants.

The Sandinista-controlled media has been successful at promoting the government’s military achievements and hiding their failures. The contras’ image, meanwhile, has been formed largely by the Sandinistas’ portrayal of them as CIA puppets and Somocista National Guardsmen, and has been further tarnished by the Iran-contra scandal.

In January, the contras launched their radio station, Radio Liberacion, but the Sandinistas have jammed its transmission to the capital. Bermudez said the Sandinistas also have been limiting the sale of batteries in the countryside, making it difficult for people to listen to the radio.

Call for Sabotage Teams

The rebels have been using their radio broadcast to urge Nicaraguans to create three-man sabotage teams or “triangles of resistance,” to paint slogans, distribute propaganda and carry out small-scale sabotage. There have been some reports of contra propaganda appearing in the cities of Leon and Chinandega, but none in the capital, where Sandinista slogans already cover the walls of crumbling buildings.

“We have been losing the propaganda war,” Bermudez said. He urged the new recruits to engage in political action.

The contra commander said the new recruits would receive six weeks of training before they are sent back to the mountains where they came from to fight the Sandinistas.

“The Sandinistas saw you as peaceful; they said these people are cowards,” Bermudez told the recruits as he sent them off to receive their camouflage fatigues. “You’re going to go back, but not as humble peasants. You’re going to go back with a rifle and demand your rights.”