THE SAVAGERY OF SANDING

Richard West discovers

the true character of the Sandinista hero

MOST of us have an idea of the human beings who gave their names to Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Trotskyism, Titoism, Maoism and Castroism, but few of us know a thing of the man whose name is used by the Sandinistas, the present communist rulers of Nicaragua. Even his name is obscure; for Augusto Calderon Sandino, born in 1895, changed his second name, that of his mother, to Cesar, after the Roman emperor he admired. His mother, an Indian, had never married the Spanish farmer for whom she worked as a maid. Yet now Sandino appears in the name of the ruling party, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, the uniformed Sandinis- ta police and the plain-clothes Sandinista Defence Committees, charged with smell- ing out enemies of the revolution. His gaunt, Red Indian features, with a mouth suggesting his cruelty, appear on the one- cordoba coin, the 1,000-cordoba note, on hundreds of thousands of posters and red graffiti, on adobe walls. This likeness of him, wearing a stetson hat and a bow tie, does not convey Sandino's short- ness. He was under five foot high. Visitors to Nicaragua, who are most of them friendly to the regime, are told that Sandino was a guerrilla leader who fought against the Americans when they occupied the country, from 1926 until 1933. In the following year Sandino was shot by the first of the Somoza dictators. An Argentine Marxist, Gregorio Selser, has written an adulatory life of Sandino, painting him as a forerunner of Fidel Castro. I read Selser 'and anything else I could find on Sandino, including the well-researched biography by an American, Neil Macaulay. After about two months in Nicaragua, I set off in search of Sandino, into the central highlands, where he had so successfully fought and teased the Americans 60 years earlier. Nicaraguan politics, then as now, were conditioned by geography. Nine tenths of the population, those of mixed Spanish and Indian race, live in the narrow, fertile plain beside the Pacific, drained from the moun- tain range that runs down the western side of the country. Nine tenths of the land of Nicaragua is almost uninhabited forest stretching down to the steamy and pestilen- tial east coast. Most of the inhabitants of this region, Sandino's territory, are pure Indian forest dwellers, blacks from Jamaica or people of mixed race called meskito or mosquito. The eastern Nicara- guans were always at odds with the ruling Pacific coasters, quick to detect racial insults, prone to rebellion, often in league with the British.

From independence in 1821, the popu- lated Pacific strip was racked by a feud between the town of Leon in the north and Granada, on Lake Nicaragua, the two sides calling themselves respectively Liber- al and Conservative. The Liberals, during the 1850s, hired the Scottish American filibuster William Walker, who captured and burned Granada but meanwhile appointed himself president. After the Walker episode, the leading families of Leon and Granada attempted to settle their differences by building a neutral capital at Managua, unfortunately on the exact site of a geological fault, which has twice shaken the city to rubble by earth- quake.

The civil wars persisted into the 20th century, when the United States inter- vened as a combination of peacekeeper and bailiff. During one of these occupa- tions, in 1924, Nicaragua had its first honest general election, bringing in a Liberal. The Americans, feeling pleased With themselves, departed, whereupon the Conservatives mounted a coup d'etat, and the Liberals, in classic Nicaraguan fashion, started a counter-coup on the Caribbean coast. That was where Sandino made his first public appearance. Although Sandino commanded his rebel band in the mountains and down on the Caribbean coast, his father belonged to the Spanish landowning class by the Pacific. Although they lived near the clerical and Conservative town of Granada, where Augusto went to a commercial school, the family belonged to the Liberal faction, as did the Somozas, who murdered Sandino and went on to run the country till 1979 and the 'Sandinista' revolution. Sandino's father accepted his illegitimate eldest child and gave him a job as a factor on the estate. Then, in 1920, Sandino left Nicar- agua after a curious incident. His Marxist biographer, Selser, says that Sandino 'saw himself obliged to kill a man; some say because of an insult to his mother; accord- mg to others, for political reasons'. His good biographer, Macaulay, says the affair had nothing to do with politics. For some personal reason, Sandino 'shot and wound- ed in the leg one Dagoberto Rivas, in the Plaza at Niquinonomo and fled the town to avoid arrest'.

He went to Honduras and took a job at a factory of the United Fruit Company, the pet object of hate to the Central American left. After another quarrel involving the threat of shooting, Sandino went up to Mexico and a job with a US oil company. Mexico at that time was in the throes of an anti-clerical revolution, with overtones of Communist and anarchist agitation. His left-wing admirers today say that the bitter experience of a lock-out fuelled Sandino's hatred of US imperialism and capitalism. Nevertheless he got an executive job as head of gasoline sales with the Huahtaca Petroleum Company, and though he may have imbibed Marxist ideas, Sandino was more inclined to spiritualist and theosophical meetings, the study of yoga, the Freemasons and Seventh Day Advent- ism. His anti-Americanism was racial more than political. He gloried in his mother's Indian blood, and he admired Mexico, which rejected the European side of its heritage.

When the Liberals revolted against the Conservative usurpers, in May 1926, San- dino decided to venture back to Nicaragua. However, he did not go to his home but took a job at a gold mine, owned by Americans, in the mountainous jungle near to Honduras. He told his credulous employers that he had gone to Mexico as a child to work as an acrobat with a circus, and later had served 11 years in the revolutionary army of Pancho Villa. Like many fantasists, Sandino started to live out his dream roles. Although he had not served in Villa's or anyone else's army, Sandino decided to be a guerrilla chief. He spent his Mexican savings of $5,000 on smuggled guns with which he equipped a band of 32 men, most of them from the gold mine where he was working as a pay- clerk. He led them in an assault on the garrison of the small town of Jicaro, and then down to the east coast to offer his services to the Liberal army. The Liberal leaders were not impressed by Sandino but took him on to the pay-roll.

By the end of 1926, the United States had once more sent in Marines to try to restore the peace in Nicaragua. As usual, both Liberals and Conservatives welcomed the peacekeepers. The Liberals on the east coast recognised a neutral zone, to be monitored by the US Marines, and early in 1927 agreed to hand over all the weapons stored in the armoury of Puerto Cabezas. Only Sandino would not comply with the order. On the evening before the day agreed for the handing-over of weapons, he broke into the armoury and passed out guns and ammunition to his supporters. Then, as one of them afterwards told an American journalist:

We retired into the mosquito-infested mar- shes, where every drop of alkaline drinking water had to be secured by digging wells and draining out the mud. To him, here, the women of the town, even down to the prostitutes, smuggled out rifles. He secured some 25 Mosquito Indians to carry what he had salvaged down to Prinzalpoca through the most terrible marshes. From there he made his way to Cabo de Gracias, and suffering untold hardships, with a small group, he ascended the Rio Coco into the mountains of Nueva Segovia.

While the main Liberal army headed towards Managua and the centres of population, Sandino installed himself in the mountainous jungle of Nueva Segovia, from which he would venture into the fertile coffee plantations round Matagalpa, Jinotega and his occasional headquarters, the town of San Rafael del Norte. When the Liberal politicians regained power in Managua, with the support of the United States, Sandino was their only commander who would not lay down his arms. Within 18 months of raising his little guerrilla band and appointing himself a general, his fan- tasy was becoming reality. His men ex- changed fire with the US Marines, they inflicted casualties, and began to learn the guerrilla skills of mobility and concealment in the forest.

The US Marines and their Nicaraguan allies spent six years in a vain endeavour to kill or capture Sandino. It was here for the first time that an army employed planes with bombs and machine guns to hit at guerrilla forces. The helicopter was first used here in war. But the Marines could never follow Sandino into the natural fortress of El Chipote, his favourite moun- tain. He supplied his army and probably grew rich by pillaging mines and lumber companies all over eastern Nicaragua, and by making forays against the coffee plan- ters around Matagalpa. He was hailed as a Robin Hood by world revolutionary lead- ers like Nehru and Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek named a division after him. Cecil B. de Mille wanted to make a film about him until he was warned off by Washing- ton.

A young American journalist, Carleton Beals, made the adventurous journey to find Sandino, whom he described in a subsequent book, Banana Gold. Perhaps Beals, like many American journalists since, was over-ready to discredit his own country. Even before leaving Honduras, he met a Sandinista officer 'bursting with stories of Marine atrocities — looting the hacienda El Hule, pillaging, brutalities to women and an old grandmother dragged with a rope round her neck'. His mounted guide, Captain Herrero, had got his cap- taincy 'for an attack singlehanded on a patrol of four Marines. He had fallen on them with machetes, no gun, and had cut them to pieces.' As Beals got nearer to El Chipote — 'magical word. . . its cloudy retreat, its crest, was the symbol of a people dreaming of freedom' — he met a dozen Juanas, or Janes, the girl camp followers. His vivid account is oddly like Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, concerning the civil war in Spain, ten years later:

In a free wall space, the camp Juanas had set up a little shrine presided over by St Anthony, decorated with coloured tissue paper, before which burned a carbide lamp. From the smoking rafters, dangled great loops of fresh and dried meat. Hung down, two gourds with corn-cob plugs, terra cotta jars, pieces of harness and home-made fibre ropes, long strips of rawhide. A baby squealed from a sisal hammock with multi- coloured tassels.

One Juana, a lively girl called Teresa, with a boy of five, asked Beals boldly. `How long since you have smoked?'

`Days on end.' `How does this strike you?' and she offered me two packs of Camels.

'How on earth!' I exclaimed.

'I took them off a dead Marine,' she replied nonchalantly.

Teresa had been Sandino's mistress while Blanca, his wife, tended the tele- graph office in San Rafael del Norte. During an air-raid, Teresa was hit in the head by a fragment of bomb that did little damage but broke off a bit of her skull. Sandino mounted the bone in a ring of local gold, which he afterwards wore as a token of their romance. This did not please Sandino's termagant wife. 'My little Blan- ca,' he said a few years later, 'has her .32 pistol and her .44 Winchester rifle and I cannot stop her from shooting up much ammunition daily; she is manly, like Mary the wife of Joseph. . .

When Beals reached San Rafael del Norte in January 1928, he called for an interview with Sandino at four o'clock in the morning, starting with a breakfast prepared by Blanca. The General was dressed in a uniform of dark, almost black khaki, with puttees, brightly polished.

A silk black-and-red handkerchief was knot- ted, about his throat. His broad-brimmed stetson, low over his forehead, was pinched into a shovel-like shape. Occasionally as we conversed, he shoved his sombrero far back on his head and hitched his chair forward. His gesture revealed his straight black hair and full forehead. His face is straight-lined from temple to sharp-angled jawbone, which slants to an even firmer jaw. His regular curved eyebrows are high above liquid black eyes without visible pupils, eyes of remark- able mobility and refraction to light — quick intense eyes.

In four and a half hours' conversation, Beals reported, Sandino showed no hesita- tion, nor dodged any contentious issue. He spoke in epigrams such as: 'Death is but one little moment of discomfort; it is not to be taken seriously.' He frequently spoke of religion, saying, 'God and our mountains fight for us.' At ten o'clock in the morning, two American warplanes flew low over San Rafael del Norte but did not open fire. General Sandino gave Beals permission to speak and write about everything he had seen with the guerrillas: 'If you wish, ride straight to Jinotega, six leagues from here, and tell the first Marine Commandant you meet everything you have seen and heard. In fact that would suit my plans admirably.'

Beals rode away entranced by the General: 'a man utterly without vices, with an unequivocal sense of justice, a keen eye for the welfare of the humble soldier. . . he had lighted fierce affection, blind loyalty.' Beals did not report and probably did not know the methods by which Sandino kept the loyalty of his men.

Sandino ruled through cortes, the Span- ish word that can mean either courts of justice or cuts. The first of these was the corte de chaleco, or waistcoat court, in which the culprit's head was lopped with a machete, after which his arms were cut off and a sign slashed on his chest. One of Sandino's executioners later devised the corte de cumbo, or gourd court, in which he skilfully sliced off part of the victim's skull, exposing his brain and leaving him to endure hours of agony and convulsion till death. There was also the corte de bloom- ers, in which the victim's legs were cut off at the knee. Although Sandino often had people shot as well, he made the epigram in 1931: 'Liberty is not conquered with flowers and for this reason we must resort to the cortes of waistcoat, gourd and bloomers.' The Sandinistas mutilated the corpses of enemies, shoving the penis into the mouth.

There is now a tolerable road to Mata- galpa and Jinotega, a passable road to San Rafael del Norte; however, this region is more disturbed than it was in Sandino's time. The whole of central and eastern Nicaragua, the mountainous jungle down to the eastern coast, is more or less occupied by the Contras, the anti- Communist guerrillas, subsidised by the United States. The pure-blooded Indians, the blacks and the Mosquito people who once owed loyalty to Sandino, are now sworn enemies of the Sandinistas. The Contras, like Sandino's men before them, come from the forests to attack the coffee plantations round Matagalpa, Jinotega and San Rafael del Norte. The Nicaraguan army, like the US Marines 60 years earlier, wages war against the guerrillas. Instead of Americans, they now have Russians and Cubans to help them fight.

Most of the coffee plantations are now nationalised, and the pickers are mainly foreign volunteers, schoolchildren dragooned from the cities, or soldiers, who carry their guns to work for fear of attack from the Contras. A Matagalpa man, who once had a smallholding, told me: 'The coffee plantations are short of pesticide, fertiliser and labour. There are few private estates left, and the government doesn't know how to run a plantation. The people they bring from towns don't know how to pick. They damage the trees by picking the wrong way. There are a lot of German volunteers who are good at drinking beer, but that's all.' One of these German `internationalists', a cynical and agreeable Berliner, said that coffee-picking was hel- lish work because you had to stoop all the time. However, he said he could get through the day's stint by the simple expedient of hiring three or four local children to do the work for him.

The hotel in the mountains was full of soldiers as well as some Yugoslav forestry experts, Canadian engineers and a quarrel- some Welsh communist. Brilliant gold birds flitted out of the forest on the other side of the pond. The geese by the pond were almost as quarrelsome as the Welsh- man. The officers and their girl friends who had the cabins next to mine went every- where with sub-machine guns. The Cana- dians who work round here say they have put the word out to the Contras not to confuse them with East Germans or Czechs, who might be liable to attack; but they added that the Contras were not so dangerous as the drunk Sandinista troops who sometimes bung hand grenades at a vehicle if it does not give them a lift. At Matagalpa I found a taxi-driver who said he would take me as far as Jinotega, but not all the way to San Rafael del Norte. It was cool and refreshing up in the mountains, reminding me of the highlands of Vietnam, except that here the hidden guerrillas were anti-communists. At Jinotega I paid off the taxi and went to the bus station to find someone to take me on to San Rafael del Norte, the holy place of the Sandinistas. There were dozens of troops around but they took no notice of a conspicuous foreigner, even though I had heard there were operations locally. They do not care if you blunder into a battle.

The driver who said he would take me to San Rafael was one of those sinister-comic characters from a Hollywood film about Mexico. He did not actually call me `gringo' but he was unshaven, moustached, red-eyed and he cackled a lot, baring gold teeth. On his dashboard there was a statuette of the Virgin, as well as a curious plastic sculpture, in bright orange, showing two galloping horses pulling a wagon on which were seated a woman holding the reins, and a man at the back with an old-fashioned machine gun, firing at his pursuers — Red Indians presumably. I had just been staring at this work, when there came towards us, moving at a far greater speed than our car, a galloping bullock, closely pursued by a cowboy waving a lariat. It was the first time I had witnessed this outside the cinema. I had seen dude cowboys back in Managua, with stetson hats and horses that did little dancing steps; but here in the highlands, the driver assured me, the cowboys were real.

San Rafael del Norte turned out to be one long street of adobe houses, with one dingy church. I got out of the car and asked the first man which was Sandino's house. He frowned, and pointed along the street. I tried again and received a scowl of hatred. A third man pointed and said coldly: 'That's his house. It's now a museum.' The museum was shut. When would it open again? Maybe next year. An old man came up and actually smiled. Did he remember Sandino? I asked him. Yes, he remembered Sandino as a child. What did he remember ? The old man pointed to his feet and said a word that I did not know and could not find in a pocket dictionary. Probably puttees. The old man said that Sandino's wife had lived in the house next to Sandino's. It appeared to be a billiard saloon and a soft drink shop, but they would not sell me a bottle. The unfriendli- ness did not surprise me. As I had learned in two months, most Nicaraguans now fear and detest foreigners, who they assume are friends of the revolution. Anyone asking about Sandino must be a Sandinista.

At the only café in San Rafael del Norte, they served me an orangeade but refused to talk. The wall decorations told the landlord's political views. There was a photograph of the Pope, three paintings of Christ and four of the infant Samuel at prayer. I left the café and was heading towards the church when an army truck, crammed with soldiers in combat gear, came roaring along the street, followed by six more, a total of nearly 200 men, apparently bound for action to the north. The citizens of San Rafael del Norte, once the headquarters of General Sandino, gave the troops of the Sandinista army no greeting. Sandino's mantle has fallen upon the Contras, and with it, I guess, his habits of murder, torture and pillage.