Central America: Indians Caught in the Middle

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A jungle war flourishes over the right to land and autonomy

Of all the territory caught up in Central America's diverse wars, none is less hospitable than the steaming jungles, malarial swamps and sluggish rivers that make up Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. There, bands of Miskito Indians, their uniformed shoulders draped with bandoliers, travel on foot, by leaky dugout canoe and on horseback. Using modern, U.S.-made M-16 automatic rifles and M-60 machine guns, they are carrying out a hit-and-run campaign of harassment and sabotage against the government. Their mission: to regain the ancestral lands and autonomy that they feel were taken from them by the Sandinistas who have ruled Nicaragua for the past five years.

Some 65 miles south of Nicaragua's border with Honduras, at a cluster of settlements known as Tasba Pri (Free Land), Sandinista officials hail what they describe as a model of revolutionary Indian development. Everything is new, from the tin-roofed wooden houses to the local schools and clinics. Equally new are the residents, some 8,500 Miskitos who were forcibly moved to the settlement two years ago from 42 villages near the Honduran border. A blanket of benign restrictions governs Tasba Pri; the residents are free to travel, for example, only after they apply for permission. Above all, the newly domesticated Indians are forbidden to enjoy the kind of free-roaming, communal existence that was the Miskito heritage for centuries before the Sandinistas took power.

The problem is as old as the European conquest of the New World. Between 86,000 and 110,000 Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indians, members of tribes that had lived for centuries in relative isolation from the rest of Nicaragua, are now locked in a battle for the survival of their culture and lifestyle. Since the Sandinistas took power, escalating clashes between the natives and the revolutionary government have slowly developed into something approaching a full-scale Indian war. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Miskitos have taken up arms against the Sandinistas, operating from Honduran and Costa Rican bases with covert U.S. support. Hundreds of Indians have died in the conflict, while an unknown number have been imprisoned, often without charges. Some 20,000 Indians have been forced by the Sandinistas into relocation camps such as Tasba Pri; another 21,000 have fled to Honduras and Costa Rica.

The size and bitterness of Nicaragua's Indian war have long been obscured by the broader hostilities between the Reagan Administration and the revolutionaries in Nicaragua. The Sandinista government has painted the native rebels as mere pawns of the CIA. Similarly, Washington has lumped the Miskito guerrillas together with the entire fractious spectrum of 15,000 active anti-Sandinista rebels known as the contras. As a result, the Miskitos have been tarred with conventional political labels, even though the Indians have jealously guarded their own goals within the loose contra alliance. Says Tom Hawk, Central American director of World Relief, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals: "The Miskitos are being used by everybody. They are caught in the middle."