Along Honduran Border, Contras Dig In for Political War Over Latin Peace Plan

The contra combatant named Scorpion crossed a hilltop trench abandoned by Sandinista soldiers and stepped carefully along a narrow path that had been cleared of enemy land mines.

Five times in the last four years, the Sandinistas have routed the contras from this rain-soaked outpost on the Bocay River. Five times, the contras have returned.

“This position is ours,” Scorpion said as he surveyed the remains of a Sandinista command center.

The battle for El Cuartelon is more than stubbornness on the part of the U.S.-backed contras. The muddy Bocay connects to the Coco River, which marks the border with Honduras, and the Amaka River, which runs southeast into Nicaragua. Together the three rivers provide an important supply and infiltration route for the contras.

One of the rebels’ bamboo-thatched field hospitals is hidden in the thick foliage of the remote border area, as are their small base camps along the Coco River.

A Political Battlefield

The border region is likely to become a political battlefield in the coming months as the Central American governments implement a regional peace plan that prohibits Honduras from allowing its territory to be used by the rebels. The accord apparently allows for inspection of border zones and military installations by a commission of Latin American observers.

The political battles over a peace plan that the contras did not sign and future funding from the United States have the rebels most concerned these days. They do not believe the leftist Sandinista government will honor the provision calling for democratic reforms, and they fear the peace plan will lead to a cutoff of U.S. aid that could prove fatal to their seven-year war.

Contra commanders allowed two journalists to visit their camps and outposts for two days last week on the condition that their exact locations not be revealed. The contras want to show that they are back in an area the Sandinistas took from them so publicly last May--the Sandinistas carried journalists in by helicopter after the battle--and to declare their resolve to continue the war.

“We are not going to give up our weapons at any time,” said Scorpion, who at 24 has spent the last five years at war.

Other contra commanders were equally adamant that they would never accept an amnesty called for in the peace plan agreed to by the five Central American presidents in Guatemala on Aug. 7. Under the plan, the Sandinistas must restore civil liberties suspended by a wartime state-of-emergency law and allow opposition political parties and the press to function freely by Nov. 7. The plan calls for cease-fires in the region’s wars, amnesty programs and an end to outside aid to the rebels.

‘I Will Never Surrender’

“I prefer to die in combat than to live in exile or under the rule of the Sandinistas,” said Fernando, 28, who has been fighting for seven years. “I will never surrender.”

Contra commanders say that 12,000 of their fighters have infiltrated into Nicaragua in the last 10 months. Under a $100-million U.S. aid package, the contras have received U.S. training, intelligence, communications equipment and weapons, including sophisticated Redeye anti-aircraft missiles.

The contras have extended their fighting throughout northern and eastern Nicaragua and increased the frequency of combat. They have destroyed three Sandinista helicopters--hits that were confirmed by the Sandinistas--and may have knocked down or damaged a dozen more.

But the contras have yet to enter towns and cities or to claim a major military victory. Their focus has been on economic sabotage in a war of attrition that may last many years.

The contras have lost one of their own helicopters in recent months, and contra sources say they are having trouble recruiting new forces. The rebels say the primary reason is that the Sandinistas have relocated so many peasants from areas where the rebels used to recruit, but they acknowledge that the uncertain future of the war has added to their difficulties.

Urged to Step Up Pressure

The contras’ U.S. advisers are urging them to step up military pressure on the Sandinistas in the next two months, and they have nearly doubled the CIA-directed air supply drops to the rebels in Nicaragua from Swan Island in the Caribbean and Aguacate military base in central Honduras.

But contra commander Mike Lima--like all the combatants, he uses a nom de guerre-- says many units in the field are more concerned with conserving ammunition now than with mounting an offensive.

“Each unit is trying to save what they can for their own survival,” Mike Lima said. “How are we going to plan an offensive when we don’t know if we’ll have more aid?”

Mike Lima fought against the Sandinistas as a member of the National Guard under dictator Anastasio Somoza and joined the contras in 1981. He lost his right arm to a mortar in 1983, the year the U.S. Congress cut off covert aid to the rebels because the CIA helped to mine Nicaraguan harbors.

A year later, Congress approved $27 million in non-lethal aid and, last year, the $100-million package, including military aid, that expires on Sept. 30. Now aid may again be suspended.

‘Here Monkey, Stay Monkey’

“We have an ally that says yes, then no, then yes, then no,” Mike Lima said. “The American politicians wanted to create a monkey so they could say to (Nicaraguan President) Daniel Ortega, ‘If you misbehave, we’ll sic the monkey on you.’ But the monkey grew too big and dangerous and they tried to jerk him back by the leash: ‘Here, monkey. Stay, monkey.’

“(Former House Speaker Thomas P.) Tip O’Neill tried to take us to the grave, but President Reagan brought us back to life. . . . It is as if they are playing with us, but we are human beings and this is costing us lives.”

Contra commanders say that 5,000 of their combatants have died in the war and that 700 others have been maimed. The Sandinistas claim that the contra death toll is more than twice that and say that more than 20,000 Nicaraguans--Sandinistas, contras and civilians--have been killed in the war.

Lima, 28, is one of the commanders at the base of the San Jacinto Regional Task Force on the Coco River. The rustic logistical base sits at the edge of a mountainous jungle so dense that contra chief Enrique Bermudez, looking out the window of his Huey helicopter, mused, “If we crashed down here, no one would ever find us.”

There are no roads in the remote region that is a rugged 12-day walk away from populated areas of Nicaragua. For six months a year, clouds lay over the mountains like tropical snow. Daily rains turn the vine-covered river banks into loose clay, where the imprints of jungle boots leave stagnant pools of water that become breeding grounds for mosquitoes and malaria.

Mist and Rain

The contras’ U.S. camouflage fatigues are perpetually damp from the mist and rain. Their arms are sunburned a reddish brown and roughened by insect bites; their bodies bear scars from shrapnel and bullet wounds. Even so, boys like 8-year-old Jose Gomez, who live in the camp, say they want to join the combatants “as soon as they raise me.”

Luz Marina, 17, pregnant with her second child, has given her 1-year-old son a nom de guerre, too. His contra father was killed in the war, and the father of her second child is on patrol deep inside Nicaragua.

Vilma, 22, a Creole from the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, is a cook at the base camp who joined the contras five years ago rather than sign up for the Sandinista militia. Next to her cooking fire, she recounts in lilting, coastal English how she and the Creole unit she had belonged to once knifed to death 24 Sandinista prisoners for trying to escape.

“We eat out of the same plate with them and they want to run away, so we kill them. We treat them like brothers and sisters in the base, but them going to kill us,” Vilma said. “We kill the enemy with knife because sometimes we have little bit of bullet.”

The bulk of the contra army is made up of peasants like 23-year-old Noel, the youngest of 10 children, who never went to school in his home province of Zelaya. Noel turned against the Sandinistas, he said, because of military conscription.

‘Revolutionary Night-Watch’

Others joined the contras because the Sandinistas wanted them to participate in coffee- and cotton-picking brigades or to sit on “revolutionary night-watch” in their neighborhoods. Many opposed the Sandinista farm policies that forced farmers to relocate or to work in cooperatives and controlled the sale of their crops. Pitufo, 22, a movie projectionist in Managua, joined the contras after his father’s farm was confiscated.

“I had to come here to see just how hard this was,” said Pitufo. “I had seen movies about war, so I knew they weren’t over in days or months. I knew when I took up a gun that I could grow old here.”

Some combatants grow old quickly, fighting mountain leprosy, arthritis and high blood pressure while still in their 20s. Others die young.

The rivers that are the rebels’ lifeline also prove a death trap each year when they swell with rainwater. The contras travel by wooden motorboats and bamboo rafts, guided through the rapids by Miskito Indians native to the northern jungle.

But even the skilled Miskitos have capsized boats in the rocky waters, and when there are no boats, the rebels try to cross on foot in their combat fatigues. With heavy packs and AK-47 assault rifles, some of them are easily swept away.

Lost 40 Men

“I have lost 40 men in this river,” Lima said as he led a unit up the Coco.

Thousands of Nicaraguan peasants, most of them families of the combatants, live along the river banks, growing corn and beans which they share with the combatants, sometimes in exchange for U.S. rations the rebels receive.

Lima said the civilians are armed and organized into self-defense units to protect the crops--just as the Sandinistas use militia at the farming cooperatives that the contras target.

“These people become soldiers when under attack,” Lima said. “The women and children withdraw, behind us, and the men become soldiers.”

That is what happened in May, when the Sandinistas attacked El Cuartelon.

In their biggest offensive of the war, the Sandinistas initially moved about 3,000 troops into the Bocay River Valley beginning May 10 and pushed about 800 contras back into Honduras. The Sandinistas took El Cuartelon and a contra airstrip, losing at least one and possibly two of their Soviet-made helicopters to the contras’ Redeye missiles.

A Mortar Attack

Finding it difficult to resupply in the remote region of northern Jinotega province, the Sandinistas withdrew about half of their forces within weeks, and they had only a few hundred left on July 5 when the contras struck back with a mortar attack from both sides of the Bocay River to retake El Cuartelon.

“They don’t want us here, but they didn’t put up any resistance,” said Scorpion.

Now, once again, El Cuartelon is a contra position, protecting the contras’ access to the rivers and overland supply route. The waterways are particularly important to the rebels since the Sandinistas mined the river banks.

The rebels showed reporters nearly 200 Soviet- and Czechoslovak-made mines they have unearthed since July and said they still cannot return to the airstrip along the river because of heavy mining. Lima said 10 of his men have been killed and at least 20 wounded by mines that the Sandinistas left behind.

Both sides claimed victory in El Cuartelon, but, as in the war itself, the battles proved costly to each. The contras have suffered at least 50 casualties, and estimates of Sandinista casualties range from 70 to 300.