Our Own Backyard by William M. LeoGrande

Author:William M. LeoGrande
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

While the Reagan administration tried to focus attention on Nicaragua’s military buildup and its ties to various U.S. enemies, opponents of contra aid were more interested in the character of the political movement that Reagan wanted to fund. The issue of contra human rights abuses came to the fore in early 1985 when several human rights groups issued reports on the subject just as the debate over contra aid went into full swing.

Stories of contra atrocities were not new; gruesome accounts of rape, torture, and murder had been filtering out of Nicaragua for well over a year. But because most contra attacks occurred in the remote, rugged regions along the Honduran border, journalists and human rights groups found it difficult to confirm the anecdotes.

The administration, however, knew from the start that the contras were murdering civilians. Just a few months after the contras’ first major operation in 1982, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that “insurgent incidents” over the preceding months included “the assassination of minor government officials.”19 In early 1984, CIA division chief for operations in Latin America Dewey Clarridge admitted to the House Intelligence Committee staff that the contras had killed “civilians and Sandinista officials in the provinces, as well as heads of cooperatives, nurses, doctors, and judges.”20

Edgar Chamorro, a former member of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force’s (FDN) directorate, was candid about it. “It was premeditated policy to terrorize noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the government,” he acknowledged. “Hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures, and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy, of which the contra leaders and their CIA superiors were well aware.” Arturo Cruz, Washington’s favorite contra leader, also admitted that contra forces in the field had committed “damnable atrocities.”21

Some contra field commanders were unashamed of their behavior. Comandante Suicida (Commander Suicide, formerly National Guard sergeant Pedro Pablo Ortiz Centeno) bragged about leading assassination teams into Nicaragua in 1980 to murder Nicaraguan and Cuban teachers in the government’s literacy campaign. After a bloody rampage in 1983, Suicide was arrested and executed by the contras’ Argentine military advisers.22

In December 1984, a top contra field commander, José Efrén Mondragón Martínez, quit in part because the high command was unwilling to do anything to halt atrocities. “They are kidnapping and killing people who just want to work,” said Mondragón in disgust. Interviewed in the field, rank-and-file contra troops readily admitted routinely executing captured Sandinista civilian officials, soldiers, and militia members.23

But contra commander Colonel Enrique Bermúdez and his civilian ally Adolfo Calero adamantly denied all the atrocity stories. Calero denounced such reports as an “orchestrated campaign to make resistance fighters appear as atrocious terrorists.” Bermúdez insisted that the reports had been concocted by a “Sandinista propaganda machine.”24

Three major reports dealing with contra human rights abuses were released in 1985. The most extensive, by Americas Watch, concluded that both the Sandinistas and the contras had been guilty of abuses against civilians, but noted “a sharp decline” in violations by the government after 1982. Contra violations, however, had continued unabated. Contra forces had “attacked civilians indiscriminately; .

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