“Red Christmas” for Cannibal Contras? Exploring the Ethnic Dimension of Somocista Anarcho-Tyranny and the Counterrevolutionary War
While the Contras’ guerrilla war with Nicaragua’s Sandinista government during the 1980s has generally been framed and understood by Americans as a Cold War ideological struggle with, perhaps, entrepreneurial aspects by way of the drug trade, debate has additionally contested the degree to which this was also an ethnic conflict between Hispanic Nicaraguans and indios . The Miskito or Miskitu Indians of the country’s Atlantic coast “have always regarded with suspicion” the “Catholic, Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans to whom they refer as ‘Spaniards’,” notes Will Lehman, who observes that “it is not so much the ‘Indian’ part of the Miskito that distinguishes them from other Nicaraguans – the majority of whom have partial Native American ancestry – but rather the very ‘mixed’ Afro-Indian-Protestant identity” of the Miskitos [1]. Werner Herzog, in the narration of his 1984 anti-Sandinista propaganda documentary Ballad of the Little Soldier , states that the Miskitos initially allied themse