Word: miskitos
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nicaraguan Democratic Front (F.D.N.), which claims to have 2,000 armed men who make regular incursions into Nicaragua from their sanctuaries in Honduras. Led by José Francisco Cardenal Telleria, a civil engineer, the F.D.N. has been especially active since March. Linked to the F.D.N. are many Miskito Indians who resent the Sandinistas for having forced thousands of them out of their homes along the Honduran border and into internment camps. The Miskitos are now in open revolt, and running battles with the Nacaraguan armed forces have been going on for the past three weeks. The Honduran government has mostly...
...including some avowed Communists) and forcefully moving against one of the country's minority groups, the Miskito Indians, whose loyalty to the new regime is suspect. Still, Nicaragua is not yet a totalitarian society. Outside the government, a limited pluralism is provided by such elements as the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement; the private sector, which accounts for over 60% of the country's G.N.P.; the Catholic bishops; and the independent daily La Prensa...
...government in Nicaragua. Testifying before Congress, he referred to a picture that had appeared in February in the weekend magazine of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, which showed bodies being burned in a city street. The caption described a massacre by the Nicaraguans of the country's native Miskito Indians...
...tension between the Miskitos and the Sandinistas has been growing for some time. After the Sandinistas came to power in 1979, they initiated ambitious reform programs to improve conditions of health care and literacy among the Miskitos. Sandinista volunteers and Cuban cadres made some headway, but the Indians soon bridled at the accompanying ideology-and the fact that literacy classes were initially held only in Spanish. Disgruntled Miskito leaders quickly became a major nuisance for the Sandinistas. Suspecting growing separatist sentiments among them, Sandinista forces last year arrested 33 Indian leaders, and shortly thereafter four government soldiers and four Miskitos...
According to Sandinista documents, Miskito leaders have been involved with anti-Sandinista exiles in at least 26 cross-border raids against Nicaraguan forces since November. During one of the antigovernment actions, insurgents are claimed to have driven a stake into the chest of a wounded soldier, disemboweled him and slit his throat. That grisly incident may be pure propaganda. But there is little doubt that the offensive it was intended to justify-an undeclared war on the mostly peaceful, independent Indians who only recently were among the Sandinistas' friends-marks a new, brutal and tragic phase in Nicaragua...