Word: misurasata
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...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...
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...
MISURA represents the Miskito, Sumo and Rama Indians of Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. The coalition and a second Indian faction, known as MISURASATA, have opposed efforts by the Sandinistas to turn communal Indian property into state holdings and to relocate entire villages. Says MISURA Leader Steadman Fagoth Mullen "We want to be left alone." The group draws recruits from among the 13,500 Indians living across the border in Honduran refugee camps, but, according to Fagoth, his insurgents are so ill-equipped that they must go into battle with as little as 30 rounds of ammunition...
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