CENTRAL AMERICA: Nicaragua's Bloody Holiday

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Anti-Somoza rebels resume their offensive

Practically every Nicaraguan, from Dictator Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza Debayle to his opponents in the Sandinista National Liberation Front, usually tries to go on vacation in Holy Week. The traditional holiday was shattered last week by a bloody eruption of the country's sputtering civil war. Discarding a truce they had announced for the week before Easter, 100 battle-hardened guerrillas took up positions in trenches and behind concrete barricades in the city of Esteli (pop. 25,000), where hundreds died in the bloodiest fighting of last September's Sandinista uprising. They were quickly joined by young protesters, who pledged to fight to the last man beside the guerrillas.

From Managua, a heavily armed column of Somoza's National Guardsmen, equipped with tanks and supported by rocket-firing airplanes, laid siege to the rebel positions. In the savage fighting that followed, hundreds died and more than 15,000 sought refuge in the surrounding villages. Predicted one guerrilla: "Only the dead will remain here. We will die, but we will take a lot of Guardsmen with us."

Somoza was vacationing in Florida with his children. The country he had left behind was in chaos: teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to secure loans from international banking organizations, bitterly estranged from its onetime supporters in Washington. Despite the ruthlessness with which Somoza's Guardsmen had suppressed last year's rebellion, in which at least 2,000 people were killed, he has been unable to contain the guerrillas. In the past few weeks, rebels have wiped out a small government garrison in El Jicaro and shot down an armed C-47. In response, the dictator beefed up the National Guard from 8,100 to more than 12,000, and imported an arsenal of new weapons, including Israeli assault rifles and machine pistols. The National Guard, which is commanded by the dictator's half brother, Colonel Jose Somoza, is now so preoccupied with battling the rebels that routine police work has been sacrificed and street crime is rampant. Complains the manager of a bottling company whose trucks were robbed 51 times in March alone: "The average citizen doesn't know who is going to hit him over the head or put a gun in his ribs and take the money from his pockets."

Somoza's critics now include a majority of the nation's businessmen; they claim that none of this would have happened if the Carter Administration had more forcefully pressed the dictator to step down. They point out that U.S. Marines were instrumental in installing the Somoza family in power 46 years ago. In light of that, they charge, Washington should have gone well beyond the cutoff of economic and military assistance that the Carter Administration ordered after Somoza last January rejected an American proposal for a plebiscite to determine his government's future. "Such sanctions have no impact on a ruler with a feudal mentality," charges Alfonso Robelo Callejas, leader of the moderate Broad Opposition Front, which has been losing members to more extremist organizations.