Word: miskito
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...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...
...Miskitos and the much less numerous Sumos and Ramas make up at most 4% of Nicaragua's 2.9 million people. Their traditional lands include most of the country's northeast region, which to the Sandinistas has strategic value as a buffer against Honduras. The underpopulated and economically neglected Miskito territory is a trove of timber and gold. Less than a year after they took power, the Sandinistas began to seize control of the area by transferring authority over land ownership to the state. Eventually they launched a direct assault on the Miskitos by proclaiming an agrarian reform...
Privately contemptuous of the Miskitos as "politically and culturally backward," in the words of a Sandinista commandante, government officials shunted aside the Indians' "councils of elders" in favor of tightly controlled Sandinista defense committees operating on orders from the capital. When a native association known as misurasata tried to raise the issue of Indian autonomy, the organization was disbanded. The misurasata leadership, headed by a young Miskito named Steadman Fagoth Müller, fled into exile and began to organize an armed resistance. Meanwhile, the Sandinistas turned on the other major pillar of Miskito society, the Moravian Church...
...cautiously worded report issued in May, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States reviewed a shower of accumulated charges against the Sandinistas. The accusations have ranged from illegal killings, disappearances and torture to indiscriminate air attacks on Miskito settlements, unlawful expropriation and cultural genocide. The commission recommended that the Sandinistas hold a conference of reconciliation with the Miskitos to improve the situation. The Nicaraguans accepted the idea in principle, but balked at calling such a meeting, the commission reported, under "prevailing circumstances...
TIME'S Jon Lee Anderson recently joined a squad of 20 Miskito rebels on a foray by boat that ended some 80 miles inside Nicaraguan territory; the guerrillas eventually camped in a mangrove swamp near a Miskito settlement south of the coastal town of Puerto Cabezas. At dusk, several of the rebels approached the village. The residents were friendly: women prepared food for the guerrillas, while a young instructor at a local Sandinista center for popular education complained about the pressures for political conformity from the revolutionary regime. Commented Leonard Zuñiga, 46, the Miskito rebel commander...