Moving the Miskitos

Nicaragua uses brutal force on its proud, once friendly Indians

For weeks, Honduran soldiers stationed across the Coco River from the Nicaraguan village of Leimus watched with mounting concern as Sandinista troops began moving into the bustling town, a stronghold of the country's independent-minded Miskito Indians. Then, on a moonlit night just before Christmas, the Hondurans began hearing bursts of automatic rifle fire. An Indian mineworker, Roberto Vidal Poveda, 18, recounted his ordeal to TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, who talked to a number of Miskito refugees: "During the night, the Sandinistas took us out and started to kill us, one by one. They made me stand by the river, but I jumped when they started to shoot. Two bullets hit me in my arm. They shot at me as I swam. I finally reached the other side and lay on the beach until morning."

A local farmer, Orvino Gonzales, 37, was coming down the Coco River in a boat the night the shooting in Leimus started. Said he: "It was dark, but I saw maybe 15 people taken out of a building and lined up in a launch on the water. The Sandinistas shot them with automatic rifles. The bodies fell into the water." Two days later the Sandinistas burned houses in Wiwinak, where Gonzales lived. Several miles upstream, the village of San Jeronimo was reduced to ashes.

The reported bloodbath in Leimus, in which as many as 50 Miskito Indians were shot or drowned, was part of an operation ordered by the Sandinista high command in Managua to evacuate a zone some 50 miles deep on the Nicaragua-Honduras border from Santa Isabel eastward along the Coco River to the coast. Beginning in mid-December, Sandinista forces evacuated or burned between 25 and 40 Miskito villages, allegedly killed an estimated 200 inhabitants and resettled 8,500 to 10,000 more at internment camps in the Nicaraguan interior near Rosita and Siuna. Reason for the Sandinista campaign: the Miskitos, some of whom fought alongside the Sandinistas to overthrow Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, had begun to chafe under Sandinista rule. Some were even known to have joined forces with anti-Sandinista exiles across the Honduran border.

"Everybody has the same story," said Tom Hawk, the director of the overflowing United Nations-sponsored refugee camp at Mocoron, Honduras. "You hear it again and again." The camp is in a muddy meadow of thatched lean-tos surrounded by jungle. It has become home for 5,100 Miskito Indians who fled across the border into Honduras. Another 3,000 to 5,000 are expected in coming weeks. Food shipments are infrequent, and many of the refugees had not eaten in three days when Willwerth visited.