Managua, Contras Blame Each Other : Nicaraguan Towns Mourn Invisible Killers’ Victims

When land mines killed 19 passengers on a bus bound for nearby Quilali last week, the news shocked 13-year-old Lesbia Moreno and many others here.

“She said we had to protest in the streets to stop the killing,” recalled Javier Barahona, Wiwili’s mayor and the girl’s grandfather. “She was an idealistic child.”

But a protest march led by the Sandinista Youth group turned the town’s outrage into its own tragedy when a hand grenade lobbed from the darkness exploded amid the marchers, killing Lesbia and nine others. Her parents and 16-year-old brother were among the 33 wounded.

As Wiwili buried the last of its dead Thursday, people in the two towns 25 miles apart wondered aloud who had triggered the explosions. They also asked what had become of peace hopes raised last October by a monthlong cease-fire in the hills between the two settlements in northern Nicaragua.

In street-corner conversations, most echoed the official Sandinista assertion that the Contras had attacked the bus and the marchers in a campaign of terror born of frustration over the U.S. Congress’ refusal last week to renew their assistance.

But in neither case were the killers visible, and some townspeople expressed doubt that they could be classified so easily. Contra spokesmen denied responsibility for both attacks.

“This kind of violence has nothing to do with being a Sandinista or a Contra,” said Father Joseph Smetana, an American priest in Quilali. “This is the product of sick minds, and there are sick minds and too many weapons on both sides.

“All the progress we made toward peace in the past few months has come to nothing,” he said. “After this, nobody is going to trust anybody.”

Quilali and Wiwili have suffered more than their share of losses in Nicaragua’s six-year conflict. Hundreds of farm boys from both towns have joined the U.S.-backed guerrilla movement to fight against other native sons in the Sandinista army.

Peace Councils

Last October, when the Managua government chose this mountainous area as one of three small cease-fire zones, religious leaders in both towns joined local non-Sandinista peace councils to supervise the unilateral truce. It was aimed at getting rebel soldiers to stop fighting and accept an amnesty.

Militarily, the government strategy failed. About 1,800 Contras gathered in the truce zone to rest and replenish themselves with boots and munitions dropped by parachute from CIA planes. No more than 24 rebels returned to civilian life before the truce was called off Nov. 7.

But in other ways, the truce helped ease war tensions, religious leaders said. A peace council asked the government to free 88 jailed Contra supporters, and 12 were pardoned. The council met in the hills with two rebel commanders, code-named Shrimp and the Indian; soon, rebel soldiers found it easier to make short visits to their families.

Waiting Recruiters

After two women villagers died in a Sandinista mortar attack in November, army officials accepted a peace council protest and agreed to direct their fire more cautiously. Forced recruiting on both sides eased for a time, until a year-end spate of Contra abductions occurred.

Roman Catholic leaders said the Sandinistas stopped seizing draft-age boys in church, but, they added, some recruiters now simply wait outside until Mass is over.

It was this backdrop of relative calm that was shattered a week ago when three explosions under the Quilali-bound bus killed 12 unarmed men, three women and four children. The Defense Ministry said they were hand-detonated Claymore mines, the kind dropped to the Contras from CIA planes.

Bosco Matamoros, a Contra spokesman, said rebel troops have orders not to target civilians with mines. He said the mines might have been triggered by Sandinistas, and he noted that five of the dead had been returning home from a meeting at the Honduran border with relatives in the rebel army.

Also among the dead, however, were a government land reform worker and an unarmed army draftee in uniform.

The Contras have set mines to hit army trucks that share the dirt roads around here with civilian traffic. Among the many civilians apparently killed by those mines were 12 adults and a child whose pickup truck was blown off the Quilali-Wiwili road in 1985. Their names are engraved in a stone beside the wreckage of the truck.

But the grenade attack here last Saturday night was more terrifying because it happened inside one of the best-organized Sandinista towns in the north, a stronghold never breached by uniformed rebel troops. Survivors said the explosion occurred just as the marchers, about 60 in number, were chanting “Wiwili will be the graveyard of the counterrevolution!”

Authorities said the grenade was apparently thrown from under a lemon tree in a vacant lot between two modest row houses along the darkened march route. They said the unseen killer left a trail of boot prints down a hill toward the Coco River and the road to Quilali.

Five of the dead were children 10 years and younger. The others were active young Sandinistas; one, Carlos Gonzalez, was the local army battalion’s chief political officer.

The incident presented townspeople and Sandinista officials with a disturbing probability: Because the march had little advance publicity, the killer either was someone from the town or had inside help.

A man and a woman from separate households near the scene were detained for questioning, but authorities said neither played any apparent part in it.

“Without seeing the killer’s face, it’s hard to imagine anyone here who doesn’t have feelings, doesn’t have a soul,” Rigoberto Mairena, 24, the wounded Sandinista Youth leader, said from his hospital bed.

But Julio Cesar Blandon, a Protestant minister on the local peace council, said: “There are total reactionaries here who support terrorist acts. We cannot close our eyes to reality.”

On Tuesday, more than 200 people walked to the riverside cemetery to bury Lesbia Moreno. As the procession passed the doorway of Reina Benavides, the 43-year-old woman said she was afraid to join it.

“We’ve never seen this kind of terrorism so close,” she said. “There’s a killer living among us, and we don’t know who it is. Here we know each other’s faces but not their hearts.”

Worried that Wiwili may be paralyzed by fear, Sandinista leaders later summoned townspeople to a meeting in a school classroom to “repudiate” the attack. About 60 showed up.

“This was a criminal act of imperialist aggression,” Erlinda Gonzalez, a Sandinista Youth leader, told them. “But instead of creating fear and hysteria, it has built a wall of hatred and outrage that will defend the revolution.”

Nobody voiced disagreement. But later, two members of the peace council sat in a living room debating her assertion.

“In Wiwili there’s war between God and the devil,” said Tomas Ibarra, the local judge. “It had to be a Contra who threw that grenade. Or a Contra infiltrator. But a Contra just the same.”

“Sure, the war has two sides,” said Antonio Talavera, a Roman Catholic catechist. “But it’s the same people in the middle. It is hard to believe any one of us would have the black heart to do something like this.”