NICARAGUA: End of a Beginning Battle

For once Novedades, the Managua daily controlled by President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza's family, had it right: MOVEMENT SMASHED. After eleven days of bloody fighting, Sandinista rebels who had sought to overthrow Somoza by seizing key towns had been defeated by his powerful national guard. In an impressive strategy, the guard attacked Sandinista-held towns one at a time, cut off water and electricity, then supported an infantry assault with overwhelming firepower and air support.

The real question was whether Somoza had won the civil war, or merely the first battle in a campaign to oust his dictatorial regime. Although the Sandinistas slipped over into their wilderness hiding places, they had won something of a moral victory. They had shown that most of Nicaragua's 2.6 million people are bitterly anti-Somoza. In town after town, armed only with pistols and hunting rifles, ordinary people ignored danger and risked reprisal to support the guerrillas. In León, an elderly doctor, patching up the wounded, paused long enough to offer this defiant assessment: "Our wounds will never heal, not as long as that murderer of his people remains."

Somoza's political opponents include not only the Marxist-oriented Sandinistas but the majority of Nicaragua's business, intellectual and religious leaders as well. They remain convinced that the fighting had exposed both economic and moral lesions that in time will destroy Tacho's nine-year-old regime.

The brief civil war had worsened Nicaragua's troubled economic situation. Washington has cut off military aid and late last week the Senate chopped $8 million in economic assistance to Nicaragua from the $9.2 billion aid bill. The war triggered a panicky outflow of capital, at least $30 million, no small sum in a country with a G.N.P. of $2.1 billion.

The national guard's brutality in suppressing the rebellion incensed leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, who until recent years had backed Somoza's regime. Church authorities in a letter to Jimmy Carter asked the President to halt all aid to Somoza's "death-dealing regime" and pleaded for U.S. support of the "just demands of the Nicaraguan people, who seek a democratic route to their destiny." To Father Miguel d'Escoto, 45, an activist Maryknoll priest, the guard's barbaric tactics in destroying resistance reflected Somoza's own megalomania: "When the Sandinistas marched into León, they were applauded. That is when Somoza decided to burn the city. There was absolutely no concern for human life."

In Esteli, the last town to fall, tales of mindless brutality were recounted by bitter survivors. A young mother carrying her baby in a search for milk was machine-gunned without warning; the woman and her child died instantly. A ten-year-old boy, witnesses testified, was dragged from his house and shot, and half a dozen teen-agers were lined up against a wall and gunned down. One 14-year-old boy was tortured by guardsmen, who cut open his chest with a knife.