Nicaragua Faces a Dilemma in Quest for Truth

The young police officer slowly read aloud the dozen names etched on a stone tomb marking their common grave.

“There are cemeteries like this all over Pantasmas, where state security killed hundreds of peasants and dumped their bodies,” he said angrily.

He spoke softly, changing the subject any time a passerby wandered along the rutted, muddy road past the graveyard. Such caution goes beyond the natural wariness of someone who spent his adolescence as a guerrilla, fighting the Marxist government that ruled Nicaragua during the 1980s.

He is afraid of being overheard because the same former state security agents he accuses of killing his neighbors now serve with him here on the police force of Jinotega--a remote, mountainous state in northern Nicaragua where, human rights activists believe, widespread abuse of civilians occurred during Nicaragua’s war against U.S.-backed rebels.

No one will ever be prosecuted for the killings because of three general amnesties declared early in this decade when President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was newly elected and desperately trying to bring peace to Nicaragua. But even if the killers are never punished, the rebel-turned-policeman said, “it is time the truth was told.”

Arnoldo Aleman, the conservative president-elect, agrees. He has promised that on taking office in January, he will create a “truth commission” similar to the panels that investigated atrocities in El Salvador and Argentina.

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Controversy over the Nicaraguan proposal echoes similar debates in Guatemala and Haiti, where periods of brutal repression recently ended. The three nations face the dilemma of new democracies that succeed regimes guilty of human rights abuse: Is it better to forgive and forget--particularly if a strong military makes that a condition for giving up control? Or is forgiveness tantamount to impunity that leaves violators in positions to continue their abuses?

“There is an assumption that a process of national reconciliation will come out of a truth commission,” said Georges Fauriol, who directs the Americas Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. But, he said, it doesn’t always work that way.

In fact, the process is more likely to occur in reverse, he said. In El Salvador, after the civil war ended in 1992, reconciliation and a national consensus that a new era had begun were the foundation that made the country’s truth commission successful, Fauriol said. The commission’s report assigned responsibility for dozens of high-profile political killings and kidnappings, showing that abuses were committed by both sides during the war and clearing the way for acceptance of a general amnesty.

Without such a consensus, he predicted, efforts to find out the truth will founder in Nicaragua and Guatemala, as they have in Haiti.

Moreover, Fauriol added, revelations of killings and torture may put a strain on nascent democratic institutions too fragile to punish the guilty.

Anne Manuel of Human Rights Watch noted: “In Guatemala, like in Haiti, you have a judicial system that doesn’t work in terms of human rights violations. Judges and the police are afraid to confront the military in a criminal trial.”

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Nevertheless, she agrees with her organization’s strong opposition to general amnesty in either of those countries.

“Haiti’s experience illustrates the dangers of ignoring accountability for past violent abuse in the haste to secure a transition to democracy,” stated a recent Human Rights Watch report. “Each time a supposedly reformist regime took power, Haitians were asked to forget the past, to look forward to a new era. But rather than build the rule of law, sooner or later this impunity emboldened reactionary forces to resume political killing.”

Far from encouraging democracy in the Caribbean nation, the report said, the pattern has spurred personal revenge and the simmering resentment expressed in the Haitian saying: “The one who delivers the blow forgets; the one who bears its mark remembers.”

Ironically, the penchant for personal vengeance that has developed in the absence of justice has itself become an argument for hiding information about human rights violations in Haiti. For fear of retaliation against individuals, U.S. officials say, they have not returned to Haitians the 160,000 pages of documents seized from their military during the 1994 U.S. military action to restore democracy.

While demanding that the U.S. government give back those documents, the Haitian government has also sat for eight months on a 1,200-page report about violations under the three-year military regime that killed an estimated 4,000 Haitians. While some experts suspect that the report is being withheld because it was poorly done, the more-common belief is that it might spark revenge killings.

“The current circumstances in Haiti are sufficiently fragile that the last thing they need to do is add a report that would inflame spirits,” Fauriol said.

The distinction between revenge and justice also has become an issue in Nicaragua. Opponents of Aleman’s plans for a truth commission charge that he is merely looking to sully the image of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front, which ruled Nicaragua during the 1980s.

“The purpose of the truth commission is to place blame,” said Alfredo Cesar, who was part of the armed opposition to the Sandinistas but voted for amnesty as a member of the National Assembly in 1990. He warned that such a panel would make war veterans on both sides insecure and destabilize a country that remains deeply divided more than six years after the civil war ended.

“The amnesty was approved to put behind us everything that happened in the war,” he said. “A truth commission could have worked in Nicaragua in 1990. Now it is too late.”

But Bernard Aronson, then-U.S. assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs, pointed out that the Sandinistas controlled the army and the police in 1990. At the time, no one was sure the Sandinistas would give up power after losing the presidential election, much less tolerate an investigation into how their troops had treated civilians.

Aleman argues that, late or not, the truth should be told. “Why is it good to know the truth only when there was a right-wing dictatorship and not when the dictators were leftists?” he asked in a recent interview.

In Pantasmas, which takes its name from the nearby swamps where farmers try to eke out a living, finding out the truth is more of a pragmatic concern. Here, former state security agents with records of mistreating civilians are now on provincial police forces, where they continue their abuse, human rights activists claim.

The activists hope that learning the truth about how state security agents acted during the war will build pressure to remove the officers from the police force. “These people have been contaminated,” said one activist who, like many of those interviewed, asked not to be named for fear of repercussions. “They should not be police.”

Leaders of the state security units that operated in Pantasmas have been killed or jailed. But the lower-level agents who carried out most of the killings have been protected by the amnesties, human rights activists here said.

“State security was secret,” the police officer said. “They murdered peasants, and no one noticed who did the killing.”

He listed two dozen fellow officers who used to be state security agents. A dozen of those names were confirmed by three human rights activists in the state capital, also called Jinotega. The police department would not comment on whether officers with those names work there.

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The experiences with amnesty in Nicaragua and failure to prosecute human rights abuses in Haiti have troubled human rights workers in Guatemala. Negotiations to end that country’s 36-year civil war have already produced an agreement for a remarkably weak truth commission that will not name names or have judicial powers, said Human Rights Watch’s Manuel.

Now, as peace talks enter their final phase, human rights activists worry that pressure will build for a blanket amnesty.