Moving the Miskitos

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The Sandinista operation was the regime's first concerted military effort to neutralize the Miskito minority, which makes up some 4% of Nicaragua's population of 2.7 million and occupies most of the country's vulnerable northeast region. The Sandinistas fear that the porous Honduras border, and the 336-mile Caribbean coastline, might eventually be used as a staging area for an invasion led by anti-Sandinista units. The forcible resettlement of the Miskitos was designed to prevent them from providing food, shelter and intelligence to the anti-Sandinistas. Whatever the reason, the Sandinista action against the Indian minority was being sharply criticized last week as an indefensible abridgment of human rights.

Besides those killed or forced to abandon their homes, 160 Miskitos were jailed in the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas and 71 were found guilty of counterrevolutionary activity. Early in February the northern part of the department of Zelaya was declared a "military security zone." Even so, the Managua government still has cause for concern. A small but growing number of Miskito refugees who have escaped into Honduras are arming for revenge.

The tension between the Miskitos and the Sandinistas has been growing for some time. After the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, they initiated ambitious reform programs to improve conditions of health care and literacy among the Miskitos. Sandinista volunteers and Cuban cadres made some headway, but the Indians soon bridled at the accompanying ideology—and the fact that literacy classes were initially held only in Spanish. Disgruntled Miskito leaders quickly became a major nuisance for the Sandinistas. Suspecting growing separatist sentiments among them, Sandinista forces last year arrested 33 Indian leaders, and shortly thereafter four government soldiers and four Miskitos were killed during a Shootout at a Moravian church in Prinzapolka. One of those arrested was Steadman Fagoth Miiller, 27, a militant young Miskito leader feared by the Sandinistas. On his release in May, he quickly fled to Honduras, where he unambiguously declared himself in opposition to the Managua government.

According to Sandinista documents, Miskito leaders have been involved with anti-Sandinista exiles in at least 26 cross-border raids against Nicaraguan forces since November. During one of the antigovernment actions, insurgents are claimed to have driven a stake into the chest of a wounded soldier, disemboweled him and slit his throat. That grisly incident may be pure propaganda. But there is little doubt that the offensive it was intended to justify—an undeclared war on the mostly peaceful, independent Indians who only recently were among the Sandinistas' friends—marks a new, brutal and tragic phase in Nicaragua's revolution. —By Russ Hoyle