Word: pantasma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...food and ambience at Mirano's restaurant are spartan, they mirror life in Pantasma, a garrison and farming town in Nicaragua's Jinotega province that has been as close to the center of the brutal six-year war as any other town in the country. Pantasma's 4,000 inhabitants should be happy: after signing a 60-day cease-fire last month, Sandinista and contra leaders met in Managua last week to negotiate details of the final accord. The talks bogged down on both technical and substantive issues, but the two sides predicted that progress would be made when they...
Such skepticism is understandable in Pantasma. The golden patchwork of maize and tobacco fields that spreads outward across the valley is halted halfway up the surrounding mountains by a wavy line of thick rain forest. It is ideal guerrilla cover, and the contras have used it to put Pantasma under a siege that has lifted only as the truce has taken hold, and then just partly. A dusk-to-dawn curfew continues, and government troops still patrol the winding mountain roads leading into Pantasma...
While peace means different things to different people, no one in Pantasma seems to feel that the conflict should continue until victory is claimed by either side. "We want peace because we want to be free," says Omar Cruz, a farmer. "In a war, no one is free...
...truth of that observation is apparent to Noel Rodriguez Sanchez, 19, a conscript in the Sandinista army who has spent nearly two years based in and around Pantasma. During that time, he says, he has been involved in more than 50 skirmishes or battles with the contras and seen more than a dozen friends die. "In Managua they don't know what the real war is like," he says. "It is tough and it is dirty, and people get killed every day." As Rodriguez sits in the shade of a store's veranda, his AK-47 gripped between his knees...
...rate of some 1,500%, few people believe it is capable of extracting Nicaragua from the economic mire in which the country finds itself. "We all want peace more than anything else," says Julio Duarte, a salesman from Managua who sells cheap cosmetics and novelties to the stores in Pantasma. "But peace and prosperity don't necessarily go hand in hand...