“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 themselves with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to overthrow Somoza, but that the FSLN was “also unable to deal with them and many Miskitos have taken up arms against the new rulers.” “Perhaps the biggest liberty that Herzog takes in his voice-over is his characterization of the relationship between the Miskito and the former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza,” Lehman indicates:

Herzog states categorically that “in the revolutionary struggle of the Sandinistas, the Miskitos sided with the Sandinistas.” In fact, the Miskito, and indeed the coastal population in general, were quite friendly toward the Somoza regime, and most did not participate in the liberation movement […] a fact which can be attributed not only to the persistent anti-communist rhetoric of the coastal Protestant churches, but also to Somoza’s fluency in English and his strongman image, which conformed well to traditional Miskito power structures […]

The Miskitos were “spared Somoza’s police terror and mass reprisals” and “while there was no practical reason for the Miskitos to take up arms against Somoza’s regime, there were reasons to distrust the Sandinistas, who during their struggle against the dictatorship had occasionally raided Miskito villages in order to confiscate cattle and other property,” Lehman reveals [2].

Robert J. Sierakowski, in Sandinistas: A Moral History, discusses the ways in which Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard “cunningly converted men from Nicaragua’s most dispossessed social groups into its own violently loyal enforcers,” characterizing “the essential elements of the National Guard’s internal culture” as “an exaggerated personal loyalty to the Somozas and the promise of social mobility, an aggressive masculine sociability patterned around hard drinking, vice, and interpersonal violence, and a visceral anticommunist ideology.” [3] “Some ladino (nonindigenous) town dwellers claimed the indigenous campesinos’ deep commitment to the regime was a product of their ethnicity, an extension of their traditional loyalty to their tribal chiefs or caciques,” Sierakowski continues:

This ethnic essentialism was interestingly embraced by the campesino soldiers themselves as a positive marker of distinction – the once marginalized now possessed a direct link to the most powerful men in the land. Under the traditional racist paradigm, Jeffrey Gould has explained, indigenous people or indios (in derogatory terms) had been viewed by Nicaraguan ladinos “as objects of pity, a degraded race.” Their ethnicity now empowered them through a symbolic inversion of racial […] hierarchies. [4]

“The vast majority of the officer corps were lighter skinned and far more likely to come from cities than the masses of lower-level ‘indio’ privates with darker skin and a more indigenous appearance,” Sierakowski explains:

Treatment of rasos [i.e., privates] by the oficiales was often harsh, disrespectful, and even violent toward their subordinates. Some enlisted men from poorer backgrounds, however, rose through the system to become oficiales de corbata negra (black tie officers) and owners of illegal brothels and gambling dens [which were tolerated by the Somoza regime]. These Guardias went from campesinos with little more than an adobe hut in their rural village to the owners of small businesses in various Managua neighborhoods. [5]

“Being a National Guard gave the men a sense of impunity, which fostered a rowdy, masculine culture of vice within the organization,” Sierakowski writes:

The machista behavior present in everyday life was celebrated and taken to extremes within the GN. Acts of reckless violence that left people injured or killed rarely led to a dishonorable discharge, let alone criminal prosecution. Indeed, one government opponent remarked, it was “absolutely impossible to get a member of the National Guard tried for anything he did against civilians. They were little gods.” [6]

“In the ten months that followed the [Sandinistas’ unsuccessful] September 1978 insurrection, Nicaragua lived through a watershed moment of violent upheaval and state terror” as the National Guard was unleashed on the populace, Sierakowski details:

Throughout 1979, the GN carried out numerous full-scale massacres of unarmed men, women, and children in rural Estelí with the apparent aim of draining the proverbial sea in which the guerrillas swam. Unable to best the FSLN on the field of battle, the soldiers turned toward “soft targets” among the civilian population, burning peasants alive in their homes after raping and torturing family members. Rather than focusing on specific targets, the GN attacked entire families, killing elderly men and women, children and babies, and subjecting young mothers to sexual violence in front of their husbands. The stark contrast between the modes of violence inflicted by the two sides of the conflict was apparent to most of the population. [7]

The savagery attributed to the largely indio GN during the last months of the Somoza dictatorship is particularly intriguing in view of Nicaragua’s racial dynamics:

In secondhand accounts, the GN’s actions take on a genuinely demonic form, with one man claiming that the murdered campesinos had “their throats slit, and the Guardias took their blood in bags to drink.” Others insist that the defeated GN killed the peasants to cannibalize their corpses, given their hunger after the long weeks of siege in Estelí. “The Guardias that were fleeing ate the campesinos,” one man asserted. “They ate them. They took off their flesh with knives and ate them after roasting it.” Another guerrillero recalled hearing that they had removed a man’s heart and eaten it. Such descriptions of GN actions are impossible to confirm, but such widespread oral accounts are powerful in that they elevate the metaphor of the “bloodthirsty Guardias” into a reality. Despite locals’ very limited prior interactions with the guerrillas and the fact that the battle in Estelí was over, the utter depravity of the GN in its final hours forever solidified an understanding of the GN as a diabolical force that killed “just for fun.” [8]

Daniel Kovalik, whose book Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance presents a sympathetic account of the Sandinistas’ insurrection and subsequent governance, cites a US State Department source in observing that the Contra forces organized to harass the new revolutionary regime “were primarily former members of Somoza’s National Guard – an inconvenient truth that apologists of the Contras would try to deny,” also quoting a Brown University report in relating that the primary Contra component, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), “grew out of the Fifteenth of September Legion, which was established by Somoza’s National Guardsmen who had fled into neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala as the Sandinistas took power in July 1979.” [9]

“On the country’s Atlantic coast, the Contras took advantage of ethnic divisions between the Miskito Indians and the Nicaraguan state to help catalyze another front in their counterrevolutionary war,” writes Sierakowski [10]. The Reagan administration was eager to exploit Sandinista-Miskito tensions for propaganda purposes, as well, in presenting the FSLN as a totalitarian communist regime with genocidal intentions. “Even sources sympathetic to the Managua government feel that the Sandinistas’ chief error was to rush in with a Spanish literacy campaign, often taught by Cubans, which was taken by the Miskitos as an effort to obliterate their traditional language and culture,” Loren Jenkins reported for the Washington Post [11] – “a claim belied by the fact that the Sandinistas’ literacy crusade in the Atlantic Coast actually focused on maintaining and promoting the spoken and written indigenous languages there,” Kovalik insists [12]. “Troubles between the Miskitos and Sandinistas began in September 1980 when 50 Indians were arrested after a general strike,” the Washington Post account continues. “Sitting on rough pews under the thatch roof of a makeshift Evangelical church [in 1982], Siegfried Williams and a group of fellow Miskito Indian leaders poured out a tale of horror and death to explain their presence in this grim, overcrowded refugee camp, 20 miles north of the Coco River border with Nicaragua from where they fled,” Jenkins wrote with some skepticism:

“The Sandinistas have assassinated our men, raped our women and even buried our people alive,” charged Williams, a gaunt, mustached Indian in his late thirties, as the other Miskitos nodded in agreement. “We are here because to have stayed home would be to have died.”

Pressed for precise details about their charge of Sandinista repression of their people, Williams and his friends invariably talk of the Dec. 23 [1981] “massacre” of 105 Miskitos in the Coco River town of Leimus.

Theirs is a harrowing tale and the basis of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr.’s charges before a House subcommittee on March 4 that Nicaragua was pursuing a “genocidal” policy against its unfortunate Miskito Indian minority.

The account Williams calmly gives a visitor is also the story of a massacre that some well-informed people here and elsewhere in Honduras say may never have happened – at least not in the way the Miskito refugees have now enshrined it in their oral history nor in the manner that Haig described it for Congress in testimony based on refugee interviews by officials from the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. […]

In Leimus there are two versions of what went on – the much publicized and narrated official version alleging an unprovoked Sandinista massacre and another, given credence by many sources interviewed in a visit in the area, alleging the shooting was not unprovoked but triggered by a night raid across the river on Leimus by dissident Miskitos armed and trained in Honduras. […]

According to these sources, who included an officer in the Honduran armed forces who was sent later to investigate the events, the Miskito-led anti-Sandinista raiding party was ambushed on the river as it beached its canoes on a sandbar outside of Leimus. The shooting that was heard through the night, according to this account, was a result of a fire fight between the two armed groups and the bodies that later floated down the river were those of dead raiders who were killed as they sought to escape from their canoes.

The fierceness of the battle, coming as it did after months of similar raids against Sandinista outposts along the river from armed Miskitos in Honduras, sent panic among residents of Leimus and other communities along the river. [13]

“Quite notably, the allegations center around events which allegedly took place in December of 1981 – coinciding with Reagan’s December 19, 1981, authorization of monies for the CIA’s backing of the Contras as well as the bombing of a Nicaraguan airline at the Mexico City airport,” Kovalik continues:

The most infamous allegation surrounds the events along the Rio Coco River in the Northern Atlantic Coast region, which quickly came to be known as “Red Christmas”. The claim was that the Sandinistas had engaged in attacks on Miskitus living in this region around Christmas time, and that this was part of a planned “ethnocide” by the FSLN. But in actuality, it was members of the Miskitu community aligned with the CIA and Contra leader Steadman Fagoth Muller – a Miskitu Indian and former Somoza collaborator – who had carried out attacks with the goal of provoking a wider conflict. [14]

By one account, the “Navidad Roja began on Christmas Day when a band of Miskitos mostly armed with clubs and bows, attacked a Sandinista garrison at San Carlos on the Rio Coco” and “killed everyone there besides the radio operator, who[m] they used to lure the area commander to the town and laid in ambush for his arrival.” The commander was later discovered “tied to a tree, disemboweled. His heart had been removed.” [15] Tellingly, accounts of Contra atrocities during the 1980s are not out of keeping with the primitive practices stereotypically associated with uncivilized Native Americans. “Rightist guerrillas from Honduras beheaded and mutilated a Sandinista army reservist and his six sons with knives to save bullets and kidnapped five other peasants,” related an October 1982 Associated Press report, for another example:

Juan Angel Blandon, a Sandinista army reservist and his six sons were found mutilated in a heap about 100 yards from their homes by Nicaraguan officials.

Christian Pichard, regional military commander, said the seven men were found with their heads, hands and ears cut off and knife wounds in various parts of their bodies.

“It was Dantesque,” said Pichard. [16]

The Atlantic Coast was hardly the only source of Contra recruits, however. “When the Contras demobilized in 1990, more than 80 percent identified their place of origin as eight northern and central mountain departments,” writes David Stoll [17]. “Timothy Brown, a retired US Marine and foreign service officer, believes that Nicaragua is far less mestizo than it appears and that this is the key to understanding [supposedly] popular support for the Contras,” Stoll relates. Brown “argues that many of the Spanish-speaking highland peasants who joined the Contras saw themselves as indios, or Indians, in contradistinction to Nicaraguans on the Pacific Coast. Of the 44 ex-Contra fighters with whom Brown did formal interviews, 43 identified themselves as indios,” Stoll further reveals [18].

“The sad case of the Miskito is really that they simply got caught up in something much bigger than they were,” a relief worker told the Washington Post: “There is no doubt the Sandinistas made enormous blunders in trying to bring the revolution to them […]” [19] “Demonstrating the Sandinistas’ good faith in regard to the Miskitu peoples,” however, Kovalik contends, “they were able to even make peace with the Miskitus who had joined” the counterrevolution “well before the overall Contra War ended in 1990, and this was because the Miskitus quickly recognized that the Sandinistas had their interests at heart much more than did the Contras and their CIA masters.” [20] Notwithstanding the Sandinistas’ laudable ambitions and small victories, however, the Contra war succeeded in sowing chaos and terror and doing irreparably crippling damage to the FSLN’s experiments in revolutionary social reform – damage that was facilitated by the inherent weakness of Nicaragua’s racial incoherency.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Lehman, Will. “A March into Nothingness: The Changing Course of Herzog’s Indian Images” in Prager, Brad, Ed. A Companion to Werner Herzog. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012, p. 381.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sierakowski, Robert J. Sandinistas: A Moral History. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, pp. 128-129.

[4] Ibid., pp. 136-137.

[5] Ibid., p. 138.

[6] Ibid., p. 139.

[7] Ibid., pp. 194-195.

[8] Ibid., p. 221.

[9] Kovalik, Daniel. Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2023, p. 106.

[10] Sierakowski, Robert J. Sandinistas: A Moral History. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, p. 230.

[11] Jenkins, Loren. “Accounts by Indians Differ on Miskito-Sandinista Clash”. Washington Post (April 30, 1982): https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/04/30/accounts-by-indians-differ-on-miskito-sandinista-clash/c804d6ec-f54b-4227-b7fd-29c48d56e944/

[12] Kovalik, Daniel. Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2023, p. 109.

[13] Jenkins, Loren. “Accounts by Indians Differ on Miskito-Sandinista Clash”. Washington Post (April 30, 1982): https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/04/30/accounts-by-indians-differ-on-miskito-sandinista-clash/c804d6ec-f54b-4227-b7fd-29c48d56e944/

[14] Kovalik, Daniel. Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2023, p. 110.

[15] Ibid., p. 111.

[16] “Father, Six Sons Beheaded in Nicaragua”. [Columbia, SC] The State (October 31, 1982), p. 7-A.

[17] Stoll, David. “The Nicaraguan Contras: Were They Indios?”. Latin American Politics and Society vol. 47, no. 3 (Autumn 2005), p. 146.

[18] Ibid., p. 148.

[19] Jenkins, Loren. “Accounts by Indians Differ on Miskito-Sandinista Clash”. Washington Post (April 30, 1982): https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/04/30/accounts-by-indians-differ-on-miskito-sandinista-clash/c804d6ec-f54b-4227-b7fd-29c48d56e944/

[20] Kovalik, Daniel. Nicaragua: A History of US Intervention and Resistance. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2023, p. 113.