Word: miskitos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
Nicaragua's Sandinista government suffered another critical blast last week, but not from the Reagan Administration. After a two-year study, the Organization of American States (OAS) released a report charging that the Sandinistas had abused their country's Miskito Indians. Since they came to power in 1979, the Sandinistas have tried to exert control over the Miskitos, who live in isolated hamlets on the Caribbean coast. The OAS investigation, which was requested by the Sandinistas themselves, concluded that the worst violations occurred between 1981 and 1983 and included torture and the killing of about 35 Miskitos...
Politicians have often sought votes with good-will trips to such places as Ireland, Italy and Israel, and they rarely hesitate to meddle in foreign affairs for political purposes. (A fortnight ago, for example, Senator Edward Kennedy used his own political funds to bring a Miskito Indian mother from Nicaragua to Washington to testify about the death of her child at the hands of the CIA-backed contra rebels.) But it is unusual and inappropriate for political candidates to malign the U.S. on foreign soil. Either of Jackson's opponents would likely have been pilloried for such...
More specifically, the government granted amnesty to 307 Miskito Indians who had been jailed for counterrevolutionary activities and invited some 70,000 Indians who had been driven by the government from their long-held tribal lands to return. "We recognize that we've committed arbitrary acts against Nicaraguans of Miskito origin," said Minister of the Interior Tdmas Borge Martinez in a rare apology. Sandinista officials have for months privately confessed their gross mishandling of the Miskito issue. Borge also met with editors of the daily La Prensa and promised that its criticism of the Sandinista government would...