Legacy of Revolution : Nicaragua: War as Seen by One Town

Victor Gomez Talavera, once the tiller of a rich man’s land, stood beneath a drizzle in the hillside cemetery mourning his son and counting his blessings.

For 45 years, while Nicaragua was ruled by the Somoza family dynasty, Gomez lived as his father and grandfather had before him, in poverty and dependence.

“The future existed only for the rich. For the poor there was nothing,” said the 52-year-old peasant.

Life changed for Gomez, he says, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew President Anastasio Somoza eight years ago today and launched a revolution.

Gets Title to 7 Acres

The Sandinistas took over the plantation where Gomez had worked and gave him title to seven acres. With savings from his coffee crop and a small government loan, Gomez built a two-room house. His children are the first generation in his family to go to school.

“In Somoza’s time, I never dreamed I would have these things,” he reflected. “Today, I work just as hard, maybe harder, but I have a lot more. I am the owner of everything I lacked before.”

But, like thousands of Nicaraguans, Gomez has paid the price of revolution with his family’s blood. His eldest son, Jose Pastor, a Sandinista soldier, was killed a year ago by the contras in a war fought over land and power. As Gomez tended his son’s grave, he said, “It’s as if they cut off my right arm.”

His is a story of the social progress and the violent setbacks that have characterized the Sandinista revolution in this town, and indeed, in all of Nicaragua. The last eight years have brought Yali a disproportionate share of suffering, as well as something rare for the poor of Central America--hope for the future.

Nestled high in the mountains of Jinotega province, 125 miles north of Managua, Yali is a microcosm of Sandinista Nicaragua.

Support for Sandinistas

Most of the 4,652 townspeople and the 13,728 who live in the surrounding villages of the Yali municipality are subsistence farmers such as Gomez, the very people the Sandinistas promised their revolution would help. The ruling party received two-thirds of Yali’s votes in the 1984 national election and still enjoys a high degree of support here.

Yali, one of the first towns to fall to the Sandinistas and one of the first to feel the contra war, lies 33 miles from the border with Honduras, where the U.S.-backed rebels maintain base camps for their war to oust the Sandinistas. While the town itself has never been attacked, the municipality suffers one of the highest casualty rates in the country. Since July 18, 1980, when the rebels first struck here, 265 Sandinista soldiers and 48 civilians have been killed.

The only two public buildings erected by the Sandinistas in Yali reflect this pattern of advance and upheaval. One is the new high school, the Ernesto “Che” Guevara Institute. The other is a home for war orphans.

Today, in Yali, more people have access to schooling and health care than was the case under Somoza, but the quality of those services is deteriorating. Many have been given land, only to be uprooted by the war.

The town is tightly controlled by the Sandinistas, with no room for organized political opposition. But unlike before, when Somoza’s Liberal Party held a similar monopoly, people without political connections can get government jobs, scholarships and bank credits.

Townspeople say the corruption rampant under Somoza is gone, but they charge the Sandinistas jail many who are unfairly accused of aiding the contras.

Residents approached by two Times reporters during a weeklong visit discussed their political views with a mixture of vehemence and discretion. But no one refused to talk. Some said they felt freer to criticize authority now than when Somoza was in power.

Few say they are better off now than eight years ago, but most blame the war rather than the Sandinistas’ economic policies.

Indeed, the war effort takes precedence over all else. The town’s new water system cannot be installed until a construction crew finishes rebuilding 34 homes burned by the contras last month at the nearby Las Colinas farming cooperative. Four times this year, the Sandinista youth organization has canceled Saturday night dances to bury war victims.

“It is the war that keeps Yali from advancing,” said Father Miguel Angel Vasquez, the town’s only Roman Catholic priest for the past 12 years. “When peace comes, things are bound to get better because the revolution has a solid base.”

Like every town in Central America, Yali’s central square is dominated by the Catholic church. It is a cavernous building with a modern, pastel facade and a dirt floor. Next door is the crumbling headquarters of the 800-man Sandinista army battalion. Across the plaza is the hot pink office building that the Municipal Junta, the local government, shares with the town’s top Sandinista official and the Sandinista women’s association. Beside it is the small library set up by an American teacher with “The Complete Works of Lenin” among its 1,546 volumes. The library is closed for want of a librarian.

East German-made army trucks lumber around the plaza and pause in front of the battalion, their engines idling loudly. The square is busy with men on horseback and girls carrying pails of milk. Shirtless and barefoot boys spin wooden tops.

Each morning, men and women gather to inquire whether fighting has closed the dirt roads to their farms or to market in Jinotega, the provincial capital 25 miles away. As often as twice a week, there is no exit. On street corners and beneath the eaves of stucco storefronts, the people of Yali wait for a shift in the fighting the way most people wait for a change in the weather.

They pass the time with news of the war, heard on the radio and rumor mill since erratic bus service stopped the delivery of newspapers. They gossip about their families, all of whom know each other and seem to be related through generations of men who took pleasure in more than one household.

For as long as anyone can remember, the rich and poor have shared but a few last names--Molina, Blandon, Rugama, Centeno, Rodriguez.

When Sandinista guerrillas ran the National Guard out of town on June 13, 1979, one of the rebels leading the assault was Nelson Rodriguez, a poor, 19-year-old high school student from Yali. He was mortally wounded in the final hours of the battle and did not live to join the Sandinistas’ triumphant march into Managua 36 days later.

But in death, the teen-ager continues to serve the revolution as an official martyr. Today, his life story is read to school children in Yali to teach them to be brave revolutionaries. The army battalion that defends the town is named for him. And the Nelson Rodriguez Cooperative here secures bank loans for once-landless peasants.

Before the revolution, another Rodriguez was prominent. Jose Angel Rodriguez, Nelson’s distant relative, was one of the biggest landholders in Yali. “He owned all of this land, as far as you can see, and then some,” said a peasant woman who once tilled these fertile, rolling hills for Jose Angel.

In the sweeping agrarian reform program, the Sandinistas confiscated Yali’s six largest estates. Jose Angel’s land was turned over to a collective of peasants who had worked for him. One of his sons, Indalecio Rodriguez, left Nicaragua and became a top political leader of the contras; Jose Angel died in exile.

The poorer branch of the clan is more typical. It includes a few Sandinista party militants and contra combatants, and a lot of cousins somewhere in between. Their lives reflect the complexities of war and revolution in a Nicaraguan town.

Ricardo Rodriguez, 42, is a rancher who collaborated in the Sandinista insurrection but now keeps his distance from the government. His younger brother, Ramon, is in jail, accused of aiding the contras.

Maria Elena Rodriguez, 36, is director of the only primary school in town. Though not active in any Sandinista organization, she and her husband, Catalino, are firm supporters of the government.

Rafael Rodriguez, 63, runs the Sandinista workers’ store in the neighborhood named for his martyred nephew, Nelson. Rafael is one of a handful of so-called Sandinista “militants,” or hard-core party activists, in Yali. He insists the Nicaraguan conflict is a political struggle, not a family feud.

“This is not a family fighting but two systems fighting. What the rich lost is their power,” Rafael said. “This Indalecio Rodriguez is a relative of mine, but maybe he doesn’t think so because he is from the rich branch of the family. They are fighting for their own interests, and we are fighting for the interests of the people.”

Ricardo Rodriguez rose at dawn and hiked through the mist from his house in Yali to his grain and cattle farm in a lush valley on the outskirts of town. With the help of one of his sons, he tied the back legs of a cow together and drew the family’s milk for the day.

In the Sandinista insurrection, Ricardo stood sentry with a 12-gauge shotgun whenever a guerrilla commander slept at his wealthy boss’s ranch. He frequently chauffeured a man he knew as Mauricio, who turned out to be Comandante Tomas Borge, a founder of the Sandinista front and now Nicaragua’s interior minister.

After the Sandinista takeover, Ricardo struggled as an independent trucker until he saw an opportunity for himself as wealthy landowners panicked and sold out. In 1980, he traded his Datsun pickup for 34 acres. It was the first land he had ever owned.

A gregarious, mustachioed six-footer who wears a cowboy hat as he rides about town on a horse, Ricardo projects the image of a self-made man. Although he bought his land, he depends on the state to make it work. By joining a credit cooperative organized by the Sandinista farmers’ union, Ricardo secured the cheap government loan needed to build a farmhouse and a corral, plant grass, build his herd and pipe drinking water from a reservoir.

The land around Yali is generous. Ricardo’s ranch produces enough corn, beans, milk, cheese, eggs and coffee for the 10 people at the Rodriguez dinner table, plus a little left over to sell. Ricardo also trades cattle, earning a comfortable income of $80 a month. That cash helps support his parents, who live in the four-room, dirt-floor house on the farm.

“The Sandinistas have been sent by God to run the country,” said his 75-year-old mother, Herminia, as she ground corn to make tortillas. “They have helped the peasants.”

Not every farmer agrees. The Sandinistas’ policies of confiscating the biggest estates for worker collectives, forcing some landowners to sell out and requiring the rest to trade their crops at state-controlled prices have driven thousands of farmers into the contra ranks.

In and around Yali, the Sandinistas say they have distributed land to at least 200 previously landless families. But most of these families have been uprooted by the fighting, then resettled on plots that in many cases are smaller than what they first received.

Hundreds more farmers have been forced from their plots in the war zone, leaving fallow at least 40% of the municipality’s 34,000 acres of arable land.

The Sandinistas first formed collectives on the six estates they had confiscated. But the strongly independent peasants rejected the idea of working common land. The farms produced poorly.

By 1985, the Sandinistas abandoned that form of socialist agriculture, divided the land into private parcels and organized the new owners into credit and marketing cooperatives like Ricardo’s.

This year, the 18 cooperatives in Yali learned of a new government concession. In a move to boost still-lagging food production, the state decided to allow farmers to sell at least half this year’s corn and bean harvest on the free market.

The farmers have responded by increasing their plantings by more than a third. But the rebels have stepped up their attacks, threatening the fall harvest.

School director Maria Elena Rodriguez lives in a four-room, cinder-block house with a cement-tile floor, a high zinc roof and indoor plumbing. She lives more comfortably than many in town, who make do with wooden shacks with dirt floors and outdoor latrines; she once lived in such a place herself.

A slender woman with curly hair and a heart-shaped face, Maria Elena manages a household of six, including her husband, three children and a niece. She is the first to rise. She bathes in the 5 a.m. darkness with buckets filled the night before, during the few hours when rationed water flows in her neighborhood.

Then she heads out back to begin her chores before work. She washes the children’s clothes and hangs them on a barbed wire fence beside the rose bush, where they will take two days to dry between tropical rains.

She wrings the neck of one of her 14 chickens and cleans the bird to be cooked for lunch. Her niece lights a wood fire to cook tortillas and warm the beans for breakfast.

Maria Elena also serves her family homemade cheese, sometimes eggs from her hens or fried bananas, and coffee rich with sugar. When there is rice, the children eat gallo pinto, a mixture of rice and red beans favored by many Nicaraguans.

Normally, rice, cooking oil, sugar and soap are distributed by the Internal Commerce Ministry at neighborhood dispensaries. Every two weeks, the women and a few men take their family’s yellow ration cards to a designated store to buy the goods at subsidized prices. Maria Elena’s household is entitled to nine pounds of rice, two quarts of oil, 12 pounds of sugar and three bars of soap.

Lately, there has been no rice at the government stores and no oil. The women in town can be heard complaining. “How can we cook without oil?” they ask. The children are bored with plain beans.

A store owner explains that the disruption of transportation to Yali is hampering rice deliveries. The rice that did arrive went on to the countryside to feed the peasants who suffer the effects of the war more directly. There will be no oil this month because of a mechanical failure at the plant in Managua.

Everything seems so expensive to Maria Elena these days. Her husband, Catalino, quit his job as a driver for the junta because it was too risky to travel the country roads once the contras began targeting state vehicles. Now, the family lives on Maria Elena’s salary of $24 a month, hardly enough when a pair of shoes costs half that at the store for government workers.

Rumor is that milk may double in price to 20 cents a liter. Onions are 30 cents a bunch, meat 30 cents a pound, tomatoes 10 cents a pound. “The merchants make a lot of money,” Maria Elena complains.

To cope with scarcity, Maria Elena has learned to conserve. She patches the children’s clothes and refills disposable pens. She feeds scraps to her chickens and is raising a pig in a pen out back. Some people in Yali raise animals, while others plant small gardens. They say you can’t have both on the small plots in town because, inevitably, the animals will find the garden.

Maria Elena was reared by an aunt who was a cook in the home of a wealthy landowner, Braulio Torres, and she struggled to get her teaching credential.

Maria Elena said the Sandinista commitment to education is the main reason why, despite her economic hardship, she supports the revolution.

“I had brilliant grades when I was in grammar school, but they (Somoza officials) wouldn’t give me a scholarship for high school because I was poor and didn’t have anyone to help me,” she said. “In 1976, I went to the mayor to look for a job as a teacher. He told me that if I would be his lover, he would help me.”

All that has changed under the Sandinistas. Maria Elena advanced from substitute teacher to director of Yali’s primary school. The Sandinistas added three years of preschool, two years of high school and an adult education program that did not exist in Yali before. Classrooms are fuller now and begging for teachers. Scholarships are more plentiful.

Fifty high school graduates from Yali have received scholarships to study abroad, most of them in socialist or Communist countries. This year, three graduates will study agriculture in Cuba.

“Before, scholarships were just for the son of the mayor or the son of the congressman, but today scholarships are for the poor,” said Maria Elena’s husband. “The son of a wash woman is in Russia.”

In eight years, the number of teachers in the town and its surrounding villages has increased from 40 to 98, the number of students from 800 to more than 3,000, including 200 adults. The number of schools rose from 18 in 1979 to 43 in 1986.

But the achievements in education are mixed. The war has closed 20 of those new schools, eight of them in the last two months. Some have been burned by the contras.

To handle the bigger student load, the Education Ministry relies on less-qualified teachers. More than half have no teaching degrees.

The contras’ tactic of targeting state workers has frightened qualified teachers away from the countryside. Two women teachers were abducted near Yali in May. The high school English teacher, a 20-year-old woman from a more peaceful part of the country, fled in fear last year after three weeks on the job and has not been replaced.

Maria Elena said teaching methods are much less “mechanical” than they used to be. “Before, the professor spoke and the students had no right to voice an opinion. Now we are teaching children to criticize, analyze, to be thinking people.”

But there is a scarcity of textbooks, and libraries are skimpy. Yali’s test results are 10 to 20 points below the national standard of 80%.

In the Sandinistas’ second-grade reader, “Los Carlitos,” about a quarter of the stories have a political message.

The book has traditional stories, such as “The Tortoise and the Hare,” but others that promote Sandinista organizations like the militia. The Sandinista front’s founders are celebrated in “A Group of Brave Men.”

Maria Elena said the Education Ministry has stopped some teaching practices that parents objected to in the revolution’s early years, such as physical education classes that resembled military training. She said pro-Sandinista rhetoric has been toned down in the classroom.

But Assembly of God Pastor Antonio Zeledon Centeno complained that the school still teaches his children hatred for the contras and worship of Sandinista heroes and martyrs.

Aida Blandon, a mother of seven, isn’t bothered at all. As a schoolgirl, she had to memorize the birthday of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, founder of the dynasty and the deposed dictator’s father.

“History is always the study of heroes,” she said. “It seems to me that since there has been a change in the government, it would be ridiculous to think that we would study Somoza Garcia. This is just a change in whom we talk about.”

For four years after Anastasio Somoza and his National Guard fled, it seemed to many in Yali that one corrupt system had given way to another.

Before the revolution, townspeople claim, a man could murder with impunity by paying off the Guard. “If a guardsman came up to you in a bar and asked you to order him a beer, you had to do it,” a truck driver recalled.

Marijuana and prostitution ceased to be serious problems here as soon as the Guard left town. But the Sandinistas brought their own problems.

The most powerful man in town from 1979 to 1983 was Herberto Nunez, then the Sandinista front’s delegate to Yali. He was also the most feared. “He sent a lot of innocent people to jail,” said a town official. “Nobody here likes to remember his name.”

Under the Nunez regime, the head of a prominent family was jailed as a suspected contra and his property was seized, leaving a teen-aged daughter homeless. Coffee farmer Braulio Torres donated two acres of his plantation for the new Che Guevara high school, only to have 12 adjacent acres seized as well for an agrarian institute that was never built.

Yali lost its only movie theater when a Sandinista mob supporting its takeover by the state smashed the projector, which has yet to be repaired. Another mob threw rocks and nails to break up an outdoor Assembly of God service, branding the pastor a contra.

“They confiscated without orders from Managua,” said Antonio Zeledon Centeno, who since has become the church’s pastor. “Their behavior drove many people to the contras.”

In 1983, Managua realized how bad things were in Yali. One of the nine top comandantes, Jaime Wheelock, was dispatched to hear out the townspeople at a public assembly. Wheelock told them that those abusing their powers didn’t realize there had been a change in Nicaragua. He returned some of the confiscated property.

Nunez was removed from his post.

“We call it the second liberation of Yali,” said Maria Elena Rodriguez.

At 26, Leonides Centeno is now the highest authority in Yali, but most people say they don’t know what exactly he does. A lean and cocky militant of the Sandinista front, he is the party’s top local official, or delegate.

As such, he says, his job is to ensure that central government policies are carried out here in accordance with party doctrine. Leaders of the Sandinista women’s association, farmers union, teachers federation and youth organizations report to him.

Centeno also oversees the work of the local offices of the government ministries of agrarian reform, internal commerce, state security and defense, as well as the two-person junta, which collects a 2% sales tax and oversees the $13,400 municipal budget.

His superiors in the Sandinista front would hold Centeno responsible for anything in Yali from a government scandal to a contra attack.

Wearing army fatigues and aviator glasses, Centeno moves around town in a Toyota pickup truck, often leaving the motor running as he jogs into his office. He sits down with a stream of residents seeking solutions to their myriad problems. That he seldom has the money to help them may explain why his first response to most requests is “no.”

“We have nothing, and people are always asking us for materials,” he said.

Centeno does, however, have final say over who gets scholarships, loans and even bus routes.

Centeno is the son of a farmer, a native of Yali, and rose in the Sandinista front through the party’s youth organization, the Juventud Sandinista. He joined the party in 1981 as an “aspiring militant,” and, while still in high school, helped form a student reserve battalion. He said it went north to fight the contras near the Honduran border.

In addition to real combat, Centeno said he fought “ideological diversionism in the schools.”

In 1983, the party accepted him as a militant, one of about 20 hard-core activists in Yali and perhaps 30,000 in the country. The next year, the party named him its delegate here.

Most residents have more direct contact with the junta than with Centeno, for it is at the junta office that they pay sales taxes, secure a license to kill a cow or run a restaurant, and register newborn children.

But people recognize the predominance of the Sandinista party, just as they once recognized the power of Somoza’s Liberals.

“In Somoza’s time,” said Sandinista militant Rafael Rodriguez, “any organizations in the country that were not linked to the Liberal Party were considered Communist. Even the Social Christian Party was seen as bad. They called it the red fish.”

Bartolome Chavarria, director of the Che Guevara Institute, said that some families in Yali are sympathetic to the Conservative and Liberal parties, but that there is no possibility for them to organize.

“This is a war zone,” Chavarria said. “The political situation is very delicate. Nobody but the Sandinistas can practice politics. Everything has to be under their control.”

Maria Elena’s two sons snored softly as a light rain fell on the roof. Her 4-year-old daughter, Katia, hidden beneath a pink blanket, slept soundly by her side.

The house was black and still when, suddenly, explosions of gunfire ripped through the night. Church bells rang wildly.

“Mama! Mama!” Katia cried.

“It’s all right,” her mother said soothingly. The bursts of automatic gunfire were nearby.

The boys stirred, but their deep breathing resumed even before the shooting stopped.

The gunfire was just an alarm.

The boys, older than Katia, are used to the nighttime alarms that summon the town to take up arms. This was the sixth drill so far this year, the eighth year of war.

About 120 men and women are organized into the town’s civil defense units. The militiamen are farmers and housewives, shopkeepers and students, who keep their rifles at home. When the contras strike close to town or when officials feel a drill is needed, the battalion headquarters sounds the alarm.

Yali’s civil defense is divided into five zones, each with a leader to alert block captains, who in turn notify the militia to take up positions on strategic hilltops around town.

The rebels have yet to attack Yali, and officials attribute that to the town’s civil defense forces, filled with dedicated Sandinistas and honed through practice.

Some residents, however, believe the battalion calls drills too often, like crying wolf, and that if the contras do attack someday, nobody will respond. One zone leader stayed home during the latest drill, thinking the Sunday night shooting was a false alarm set off by a drunken militiaman toying with his rifle. Others slept through the noise.

But Katia was awake and whimpering long after the gunfire died down.

Rosario Ruiz walked five hours in the rain carrying her 13-month-old son from the farming settlement of Las Colinas to the doctor in Yali. The boy was dehydrated because of intestinal disease, which killed 10 children in Yali last year.

An early achievement of the revolution was delivering health care to nearly every small village in Nicaragua, even places where doctors rarely had been seen before. But the growing war has erased many of the gains.

The contras clearly target government health clinics, including one they burned at Las Colinas last month.

A national vaccination campaign against polio, measles, whooping cough and other diseases reached 85% of the children under the age of 5 in all 17 villages around Yali last year, according to medical officials.

But this year, seven of those villages were cut off by the fighting and missed the annual vaccinations. Then refugees from one hamlet, El Bijagual, brought with them to Yali a new outbreak of measles.

“After years of improvement, we’re seeing more and more malnourished children here,” said Dr. Felix Pedro Molina, one of Yali’s two physicians. “The war has taken food from their mouths.”

While many professionals leave Nicaragua, Molina, the 26-year-old grandson of the wealthy farmer who founded Yali, has stayed to support the revolution. He earns the equivalent of $21 a month and sees as many as 115 patients a day.

When the roads are cut, his clinic often runs out of aspirin and medicine for diarrhea.

Dr. Molina is frustrated by deteriorating environmental conditions in the town. War refugees have contaminated the town’s water source with their cattle and their waste. Last year, when the local authorities gave out materials to build outhouses, some people used them to expand their homes instead. Garbage has piled up since the only collection truck broke down two months ago.

Dr. Molina urged the woman from Las Colinas to boil her drinking water, then insisted. “It’s their culture,” he said later. “They cannot believe that water causes disease.”

One Sunday each month, if the bus is running, Ricardo Rodriguez visits his brother, Ramon, on a prison farm near Managua.

Ramon Rodriguez, 38, is one of a handful of townspeople accused of aiding the contras. Arrested in September, 1985, he is still awaiting trial by a people’s court.

In a small town where everybody knows everybody, there is surprising confusion about his alleged crime. The conflicting rumors reflect deep suspicions. After all, contra troops have come within two miles of town, an impossible feat without somebody’s clandestine help.

“You never know,” said Rosa Blandon, a Sandinista militant. “Your best friend could be one of them. There’s a tremendous lack of trust. Maybe that’s good. If we confided too much in each other, the contras might have burned down Yali by now.”

Everyone agrees that shortly after Ramon Rodriguez left his job as a driver for the junta, armed rebels visited his farm, asked for food and got it.

Early in the war, such collaboration, even when coerced, was a common cause for arrest. Today, the authorities admit that their initial police roundups were indiscriminate but insist that Ramon’s case is serious.

Leonides Centeno, the Sandinista delegate, calls Ramon an unarmed contra messenger. But Abel Estrada, Yali’s police chief, says Ramon carried a rifle and helped set a rural ambush that killed four people. Ulda Rodriguez claims her cousin Ramon exploded a bomb near the Che Guevara Institute.

According to different stories told by relatives, Ramon was turned in by either his estranged wife or a Sandinista official who thought Ramon was deliberately passing misleading intelligence about the contras.

Ricardo Rodriguez insists his brother is innocent.

Ramon’s arrest has added to Ricardo’s disillusionment with Sandinista rule and deepened his instinct to avoid taking sides in the war.

“You know, it’s very dangerous living here,” he said, after closing his front door. “One false step and you can end up in jail or taken away by the contras.”

Farmers who have met up with contra patrols say the rebels never offer much explanation of why they are fighting, only that they’re in favor of God and against communism.

The rebels do reach Yali with Radio Liberacion, their clandestine station. Aida Blandon is a regular listener. She tunes in hoping to hear word of her sister, a teacher kidnaped by the contras a month ago. Aida also listens to the contras’ version of life in Nicaragua and compares their stories with the reality she knows.

“It seems they say one thing and do another, because they talk a lot about human rights, but then they took my sister who was armed only with books,” Aida said. “We never saw this sort of thing before, kidnaping women, when the Sandinistas were fighting (against Somoza).”

If anyone in Yali supports the contras, no one says so publicly. “There are people in town who have parted with the Sandinistas, who want a change,” said Father Vasquez. “They just keep quiet.”

Most people say they fear the contras. Yali has lived so close to the war for so long that there is hardly a resident who has not lost a piece of land, a job or a loved one in a rebel attack. Many townspeople work for government agencies targeted by the contras.

“We are people who have suffered since the war started,” said Jose Mercedes Centeno, the 62-year-old night watchman at the orphanage. The contras have killed four of his sons in combat. “Here, no one supports the contras because they ache for their children who have died.”

As a child, Manuel Ruiz Rodriguez used to play the Nicaraguan version of cowboys and Indians--Sandinistas and National Guardsmen.

“Manuel was always a Sandinista,” his mother said.

At 13, Manuel has grown up to become the soldier he used to play. He is a volunteer in the Sandinista militia.

Every Sunday, the boy puts on an army uniform and takes two hours of target practice with the AK-47 assault rifle he keeps in his bedroom. Recently he spent a month of guard duty camped on a hilltop near his home, coming down every morning for seventh-grade classes.

“It’s the best way to defend the revolution,” Manuel said solemnly.

The Sandinistas were young when they fought their way to power, and it is through the youth that they hope to transform Nicaragua. Half the country’s population is under 15.

In Yali, the party has recruited about 200 youngsters into its youth organizations, including a Sandinista Children’s Assn. for 7-to-14-year-olds.

Like the Boy Scouts, the youth organizations encourage community service. They mobilize trash pickups, assist in vaccination campaigns, collect donations for the Red Cross.

Above all, a young Sandinista is expected to volunteer for work brigades and to defend the revolution against aggression. In Yali, that means picking coffee at harvest time and serving in the militia.

For inspiration, the party invokes its cult of official heroes who died fighting for the revolution.

At school, Manuel joins each year in observing Nelson Rodriguez’s birthday and the anniversary of his death. Manuel is a distant cousin of Nelson--and a legacy of Yali’s Sandinista hero.

“My ideal is all the combatants who have fallen in battle,” he said.

On a blackboard in the second-grade classroom at the Las Colinas rural school were the names of seven militiamen. They were killed last month in a contra attack against the cooperative of farmers who own the land that once belonged to Jose Angel Rodriguez.

Below the names was this message: “For these martyrs, we swear to defend our victories. Free fatherland or death!”

What the blackboard does not say is that one of the school’s seven teachers left the cooperative after finding her father among the dead. Or that five other families abandoned the settlement in fear.

Work crews have rebuilt half the 34 wooden houses burned in the June 3 attack, but the smell of damp ashes lingers in the mountain air and scraps of charred wood are spread like fertilizer around the blackened earth.

After eight years, this is what the Sandinista revolution has come to mean for many poor farmers. Targeted by the contras, they face a painful choice: leave for the safety of town, or stay and defend the land the government has given them.

Fifty-four families remain at Las Colinas, growing coffee, corn and bananas on hillsides that are luminescent after a tropical rain. All have been uprooted at least once before, from other besieged lands.

The contras say cooperatives are a legitimate target because they maintain armed militias and grow food for the Sandinista army. Retreating from Las Colinas, the rebels warned they would return to destroy anything that was rebuilt.

“Some settlements have been burned three times,” said Placida Pineda, 28, whose house was destroyed. “If they didn’t kill us this time, they could the next.”

Francisca Rugama Centeno, 57, abandoned another cooperative threatened by the contras last year and now lives in town.

“You can’t be in peace when you leave your land,” she said, “but we can’t live in peace on our land.”