Word: miskitos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Pastora Gomez, the swashbuckling ARDE leader who once commanded 2,500 men, has been reduced to door-to-door fund raising in San Jose, Costa Rica's capital. There have been reports of Pastora's followers selling their guns for food. On the Caribbean Coast, an estimated 1,000 Miskito Indian rebels are divided into two rival factions and poorly equipped...
...largest of the guerrilla groups, has about 6,000 troops, up from 4,500 a year ago, deep inside Nicaragua. FDN Leader Adolfo Calero Portocarrero says he is close to Unking forces with the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ARDE), another contra group operating in southern Nicaragua. The chiefs of two Miskito Indian rebel groups remain at odds, but disgruntled commanders in both camps are trying to forge an alliance on the battlefield. Though many divisions remain, the FDN is gradually exerting its control over the entire contra movement. "There is an awakening toward the necessity of a joint effort...
...first time since the Marxist-led Sandinista government came to power in 1979, prisoners were exchanged with one of the three major guerrilla groups that oppose the regime. In a village on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, Misurasata, an armed resistance movement of Miskito Indians, freed two Sandinistas and their bodyguard, who had been captured by the Miskitos in September. The next day, the Sandinistas released three Miskitos held as subversives. Said Brooklyn Rivera, a Misurasata leader who helped arrange the exchange: "The Sandinistas have learned that we are not counterrevolutionaries. Rather, we are Indians fighting for the just rights...
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...
Lately, the government has embarked on a new scheme to address the demand for a separate Indian identity. "We want the Miskitos to organize and elect representatives who can tell us their thoughts," explains William Ramirez, the Sandinista commander of the Miskito region. In June the Sandinistas for the first time named a Miskito, Myrna Cunningham, 36, as civilian governor of North Zelaya province, the Indian heartland...