Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994

By Lynn Horton

Drawing on testimonies from contra collaborators and ex-combatants, as well as pro-Sandinista peasants, this book presents a dynamic account of the growing divisions between peasants from the area of Quilalí who took up arms in defense of revolutionary programs and ideals such as land reform and equality and those who opposed the FSLN.

Peasants in Arms details the role of local elites in organizing the first anti-Sandinista uprising in 1980 and their subsequent rise to positions of field command in the contras. Lynn Horton explores the internal factors that led a majority of peasants to turn against the revolution and the ways in which the military draft, and family and community pressures reinforced conflict and undermined mid-decade FSLN policy shifts that attempted to win back peasant support.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Aug 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9780896804128

Book preview

Chapter l

Introduction

THIS STUDY of armed peasant mobilization explores a series of interrelated political, military, and economic transformations that took place in the rural municipality of Quilalí from 1979 to 1994. Quilalí was selected as the subject of this book on the belief that important insights into Nicaraguan peasant response to revolutionary change can be gained by locating rural mobilization within a specific historical and community context. Peasants in Arms examines the ways in which policies and dislocations generated largely at the national and international level were concretely manifested, mediated, and perceived in a local setting.

Several key questions will be addressed in this study. What are the structural, historical, and cultural roots of the deep polarization of the municipality? Why did a majority of Quilalí peasants turn politically against the revolution in the early 1980s? What factors influenced anti-Sandinista peasants to channel their discontent into armed rebellion? How has over a decade of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary struggle transformed Quilalí peasant consciousness and fostered a continuation of violence in the 1990s?

Quilalí shares a number of characteristics with dozens of other rural municipalities in Nicaragua’s mountainous interior that were at the heart of the war zone in the 1980s. Like other interior zones, Quilalí formed part of Nicaragua’s agricultural frontier after World War II and received an influx of thousands of peasant migrants. A strong culture of rebellion also emerged in Quilalí and other zones of the Segovias dating from Augusto Sandino’s guerrilla war against U.S. Marines in the 1920s. Several decades later, on the eve of the revolution, Quilalí had developed into a relatively prosperous and economically heterogeneous municipality. The land in the mountains to the north and west of the town was the stronghold of wealthy and middle peasants—a pattern of landholding typical of many other interior zones—while in the river valley large cattle haciendas dominated. In the early 1980s conflict erupted in Quilalí, and like other north-central municipalities, Quilalí was the site of ongoing combat for most of the decade.

Yet while Quilalí shares these features with other interior zones, the municipality also presents several unique characteristics that make it a particularly interesting zone to study. First, as will be seen, Quilalí and several neighboring municipalities were an important internal cradle of the counterrevolution and entered into conflict with the new revolutionary regime at an unusually early stage. Well-off ranchers and coffee farmers from Quilalí and surrounding areas who had earlier collaborated or fought with FSLN guerrillas organized one of the first armed antigovernment movements and attacked the town of Quilalí on the first anniversary of the revolution in July 1980. These same sons of local elites later joined with ex-National Guardsmen and played an important field leadership role in the contra forces.

Quilalí is also unusual for the high number of peasants from the municipality who took up arms with the contras. As many as 800 Quilalí peasants fought with the contras in the 1980s, while thousands more civilians participated in contra collaborator networks. In the postwar period of the early 1990s as well, the mountains of Quilalí served as a base for one of Nicaragua’s most politically focused recontra bands (groups of rearmed ex-contras), the Frente Norte 3–80. A final important characteristic of Quilalí is that although, as the above facts suggest, the municipality was an unusually strong center of rural resistance to the revolution, a significant minority of peasants from Quilalí and recent migrants from other zones actively supported the revolution. Unlike other interior areas of contra influence, such as the south-central departments of Boaco and Chontales, where the presence of pro-Sandinista peasants was very limited, the FSLN was able to consolidate an important pro-revolutionary cooperative sector in Quilalí’s river valley and to maintain an economic and military foothold there throughout the war. The existence within the boundaries of the municipality of both a strong pro-Sandinista cooperative sector and extensive anti-Sandinista networks provides a unique opportunity to explore the factors that influenced the polarized mobilization of peasants who share a common local history.

Among scholars of peasant rebellion there is an ongoing debate as to whether peasants are fundamentally rational and individualistic actors (Popkin 1979; Bates 1984; Lichbach 1994) or whether peasants’ common orientation toward subsistence production, shared history and culture, and subordinate status are the fundamental basis of collective action (Wolf 1969; Shanin 1972; Scott 1976). The most well known proponent of rational peasant theory, Popkin asserts that peasants strive continuously to improve their individual well-being and that of their immediate family and that peasant culture and social structures often serve not to unify peasants, but rather to divide them. According to this perspective, peasants choose to participate in rural uprisings not to defend shared values or broader ideological causes or to achieve collective rewards, but rather to obtain selective incentives and to avoid sanctions targeted at individuals who do not participate.

In contrast, Scott (1976) argues that, under what he terms moral economy, peasants are deeply attached to communal village structures.

They share a common subsistence ethic, which places a premium on reciprocity and mutual assistance, and a system of norms in which a just overlord limits the expropriation of surplus to a tolerable level. Under moral economy, peasant rebellion draws its strength, cohesion, and ideological content from relatively homogenous, closed communities bound together by common social values and norms.

In her 1994 study of three Nicaraguan villages, Anderson (1994b) attempts to bridge the gap between Popkin and Scott, arguing that peasants recognize it is in their long-term rational interests to actively participate in community support networks, which she terms political ecology. Anderson asserts that community-based political ecology is critical in understanding why certain villages chose to actively aid the FSLN in the late 1970s while others remained quiescent during the insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship.

Gould (1993; 1990b) also stresses the importance of community in the struggles of Matagalpan indigenous groups to resist forced labor, taxes, and loss of land in the late 1800s, as well as in more contemporary invasions of cotton haciendas in the department of Chinandega. The dynamics of peasant mobilization in Chinandega in the 1950s and 1960s documented by Gould also highlight some of the complexities and variations in the ways in which community and peasant identity are constructed. On the one hand, a shared peasant identity may be the product of long tradition passed on from one generation to the next in communities that are relatively autonomous and still sheltered from the full impact of market forces (Scott 1976; Wolf 1969).

In contrast, Gould (1990b) emphasizes that the Chinandegan communities that initiated land invasions were not long-established villages, but rather the more recent product of ongoing land conflicts and engagement with Somocista discourse by peasants who were the precipitates of capitalism. In the course of several decades of political struggle, these peasants moved from dependent to autonomous political consciousness and constructed a common peasant identity in relational terms, coming to define their interests as distinct from those of local large landowners. Kincaid (1987) also links stronger localized solidarity in El Salvador in the 1980s with a greater likelihood of peasant support for the leftist guerrillas. He emphasizes as well that these Salvadoran communities were not traditional villages, but rather deliberately re-created by activist Catholic church members and reinforced by the indiscriminate repression unleashed against peasants by the government.

In addition to distinguishing whether communities that may serve as the basis for peasant mobilization draw on precapitalist traditions or are re-created in some manner, it is also important to consider the class makeup of the communities that anchor rural identity. Scott suggests that members of peasant communities share not only a common culture, but also relative equality as subsistence smallholders. In this case the dynamics of community and class are mutually reinforcing, and peasants’ similar economic and social position of subordination enables them to respond in a unified manner to threats from predatory outside elites or the state. Additional subordinate rural sectors that scholars have identified as likely to rebel are middle peasants (Wolf 1969), sharecroppers and migrants (Paige 1975), and squatters (Wickham-Crowley 1992). The autonomous collective mobilization of poor peasants also implies the breakdown of any previous patron-client ties. Peasants must come to articulate political interests distinct from those of rural elites, who remain outside both the geographical and ideological boundaries of peasant community.

In contrast, other scholars have criticized Scott in particular for failing to recognize the degree of stratification and conflict within many peasant villages (Brass 1991; Akram-Lodhi 1992; Haggis et al. 1986). Brass (1991) contends that many acts of collective rural mobilization are carried out not by relatively equal, subordinate peasants, but rather by economically and socially stratified rural coalitions, generally under the leadership of rich peasants. The class composition of rural rebellions in turn influences their choice of strategies, ideological content, and the outcomes of struggle. According to Brass (1991, 181) unifying appeals to precapitalist traditions, or religious, ethnic, or nationalist discourses are akin to false consciousness and may serve to disguise and simultaneously advance the class-specific objectives of rich peasants. Moore (1966) also distinguishes between egalitarian groupings of poor peasants, which may lead to radical solidarity, and communities in which the poor are dominated by the wealthy, which may manifest conservative solidarity.

The present study argues that while Quilalí peasants were ‘rational’ and concerned with their individual and family safety and well-being, they did not mobilize as individual, atomized actors. Rather Quilalí peasants’ collective efforts both in favor of and against the revolution were strongly influenced by participation in kinship and social networks that were utilized by both the FSLN guerrillas and later the contras to mobilize peasant support to their cause. It is also important to note that peasant community in Quilalí was not of the closed, traditional subsistence type, but rather was open, re-created, and by the mid-1970s relatively stratified.

As will be seen, the nature and boundaries of peasant community and identity in Quilalí were deeply contested in the 1980s. On the one hand, the FSLN attempted to mobilize peasants politically and militarily through a nationalist and broad class-based discourse, which emphasized the common interests of poor peasants in alliance with the urban poor and middle sectors. The contras, on the other hand, built a multiclass coalition of supporters, reinforcing and reshaping a common peasant identity in relational opposition to outside Sandinista ideology and programs. It will be shown that in this intense competition for peasant support, Quilalí peasants responded both to selective incentives—land, material benefits, and protection from violence—as well as to ideological appeals.

Scholars generally agree that the dislocations associated with the penetration of capitalism into rural communities are a key causal factor in contemporary peasant rebellion (Moore 1966; Wolf 1969; Migdal 1974; Paige 1975; Scott 1976; Walton 1984). Wolf (1969) argues that the expansion of capitalism increases exploitation and insecurity of peasants by replacing personalistic ties with more distant, uncertain market relations, and by transforming land from an object of customary rights and obligations into a commodity. Most of these scholars suggest that peasant reaction will be strongest in the early phases of market encroachment, particularly if capitalist dislocation proceeds rapidly and there are few mitigating factors or subsistence alternatives.¹

In his study of contemporary Central America, Williams (1986) links the post-World War II growth of export products such as cotton and cattle to increased insecurity of land tenure, loss of traditional access to land, and worsening standards of living for the rural poor. Such discontent, Williams argues, laid the groundwork for peasant rebellion in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Wheelock (1978), Gould (1990b), and Wickham-Crowley (1992) have also posited a direct link between the growth of export products in Nicaragua and prerevolutionary rural conflict and peasant support for the FSLN in the 1970s.²

Other scholars expand upon the structuralist approach to Central American peasant rebellion and argue that political contingencies and human agency, particularly the political strategies of national governments and guerrilla forces, also played an important role in the formation of revolutionary movements (Selbin 1993; Booth 1990; Brockett 1991). Booth (1990), for example, identifies regime response—the failure of the Nicaraguan state to address worsening rural conditions—as an important element in pre-1979 peasant mobilization in favor of the FSLN.

The present study will argue that in interior zones such as Quilalí the potentially negative impact of capitalist penetration was mitigated by several factors: the relative availability of good land; opportunities for upward economic mobility; the presence of the agricultural frontier nearby, which served as a political safety valve; and the continuation of paternalistic ties, which partially buffered poor peasants from the erosion of subsistence security. As will be seen, Quilalí’s rural population remained relatively quiescent in the 1960s and 1970s as the municipality became more deeply integrated into national and international markets. Only later, in the 1980s, did Quilalí peasants mobilize on a large scale. They reacted both in favor of and against a series of dramatic transformations and dislocations, brought not by capitalism, but by a revolutionary government and war. It will also be argued that this peasant mobilization in Quilalí can best be viewed as a complex interaction of structural preconditions and local political strategies employed by both pro- and anti-Sandinista forces, set in a larger geopolitical context of U.S. low-intensity warfare against the Sandinista regime.

It is also important to distinguish analytically the reasons why peasants rebel, the factors that influence the manner in which peasant discontent will be expressed, and the often unintended outcomes of peasant rebellion. In later works, Scott (1985; 1989; 1990) suggests that too much attention has been paid to more overt and dramatic forms of peasant resistance. He argues that peasants as a subordinate class are generally unable to express complaints openly because of the dull compulsion of economic relations and the realities of power and instead opt to carry out everyday resistance, which may take such forms as pilfering, lying, gossip, and work slowdowns. Along similar lines, Colburn (1986; 1989a) argues that Nicaraguan peasants, who were nearly defenseless under the revolutionary government and essentially rational actors concerned with their individual well-being, not abstract ideologies, expressed their discontent with Sandinista policies by employing the weapons of the weak described above. In so doing, Colburn asserts, they undermined the overall economic goals of the FSLN.

This study suggests that Quilalí anti-Sandinista poor peasants in particular recognized their own vulnerability and many preferred everyday resistance as their first option. As will be seen, anti-Sandinista women and older men were partly successful in maintaining an outward appearance of neutrality, often while secretly collaborating with the contras. However, the dynamics of militarization in war zones like Quilalí made it extremely difficult for young men to avoid taking up arms with either the Sandinista Army or the contras.

It is also important to note that much of the literature on contemporary peasant mobilization has focused on actual and potential peasant support for progressive social movements and leftist guerrillas, while less attention has been paid to systematically addressing the question of why peasants in Latin America may resist leftist guerrillas or revolutionary governments and support counterrevolutionary movements. Studies from Peru suggest that the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas were most successful in zones where there was a political vacuum, while communities that retained traditional authority structures were the least receptive to Sendero’s revolutionary appeals (Coronel 1996). In addition, peasants opposed Sendero authoritarian efforts to impose controls and increased demands upon the rural population, as well as specific guerrilla measures such as limiting access to markets, the prohibition of fiestas and drinking, and the targeting of Pentecostal churches (Del Pino 1996; Palmer 1992; Isbell 1992).

It also appears that in Peru and Guatemala a shift by the national armed forces from indiscriminate terror against rural communities to more selective repression combined with civic action campaigns was successful in weakening peasant support for leftist guerrillas and facilitated the development of counterinsurgency rondas campesinas (peasant patrols) and civil patrols (Degregori 1996; Starn 1995; Stoll 1993).³ While Wilson (1991) argues that Guatemalan peasant participation in government counterinsurgency efforts was primarily a product of deep fear, Stoll asserts that in addition to repression, military forces were also able on an ideological level to convince some peasants that the guerrillas were to blame for provoking army violence that destroyed numerous indigenous communities in the early 1980s.

In Quilalí, as will be seen, contras used selective repression as a means of military recruitment and to control the civilian population, while at the same time convincing many of their supporters that the FSLN was to blame for bringing war to the municipality. The Sandinista government employed more moderate coercive measures against civilian contra collaborators, which were partly successful from a military standpoint, but appear to have often increased anti-Sandinista moral outrage against the FSLN.

Turning specifically to studies of the Nicaraguan contras, a number of excellent works explore in detail revolutionary transformation in rural Nicaragua in the 1980s, including the process of agrarian reform, FSLN policy debates and shifts over the decade, and the development of rural organizations.⁴ A number of these authors also briefly address the issue of peasant support for the contras. Additional studies focus on U.S. government funding and organizational support for the contra forces (Kornbluh 1987; Robinson and Norsworthy 1987; Gutman 1988; Kagan 1996), and examine in detail the origins, internal organization, and military and political activities of the contra forces during this period (Morales Carazo 1989; Bendaña 1991; Dillon 1991; Garvin 1992).

In this literature on contemporary Nicaraguan rural history, analysts have identified a series of factors that may account for both relatively low peasant support for the FSLN as well as the participation of interior peasants in the contra forces. These explanatory factors of peasant opposition to the revolution, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, may be grouped into three broad categories: (1) larger geopolitical struggles and external agents, specifically U.S. government policies in support of the contras; (2) the unique structural and cultural features of Nicaragua’s interior peasantry that made this rural population particularly receptive to contra appeals; (3) a series of FSLN biases and policy errors toward the rural sector.

Some analysts and policy makers in Nicaragua and abroad have characterized the contra forces as primarily a product of external aggression by the United States, and in fact until the late 1980s many FSLN leaders did not recognize the conflict as even partially a civil war (CIPRES 1991, 21). According to this perspective, the origins of Nicaragua’s conflict were less internal than a reflection of the greater geopolitical interests of the United States and its attempt to roll back the advance of communism in a region considered vital to U.S. national interests. This argument, while generally recognizing that other factors are involved, asserts that without the funding, large amounts of weaponry, and the technical, intelligence, and logistical support provided by the U.S. government, the contras would have remained a local, easily-defeated rural uprising. In the postwar period, several analysts have also suggested that the war can best be understood as a convergence of interests between the U.S. government, the Nicaraguan rural bourgeoisie, and Nicaragua’s mountain peasantry (CIPRES 1991; Bendaña 1991).

Underlying this argument is often an implicit assumption that the true interests of peasants he in revolutionary change. Peasants who supported the counterrevolution are seen less as historical subjects than as victims unwillingly caught up in larger global and national political struggles they did not necessarily even comprehend. Bendaña (1991) and CIPRES (1991) argue, for example, that peasants were little more than an instrument of the contra leadership and of their U.S. sponsors, whose objectives had little to offer poor and middle peasants, who made up the bulk of the combatants. Along similar lines, many pro-Sandinista peasants in Quilalí tend to stress the importance of contra repression, propaganda, and manipulation in recruiting peasant support for their cause.

Another approach to peasant opposition to the revolutionary process argues that the unique historical, cultural, and economic structures of Nicaragua’s agricultural frontier forged a peasantry that resisted modernizing change, be it capitalist or socialist, and that was susceptible to counterrevolutionary appeals (Bendaña 1991). According to this perspective, the expansion of cotton and other export crops on Nicaragua’s Pacific zone largely replaced paternalistic ties with impersonal market relations and created a substantial displaced rural population that in the 1970s provided important support for the FSLN.

In contrast, land was relatively abundant in much of Nicaragua’s mountainous interior, particularly along the agricultural frontier, which received a steady flow of peasant migrants after World War II. In these interior zones extensive cattle ranches, a strong middle-peasant sector, patron-client ties, and a traditional campesino culture continued to predominate into the late 1970s (CIPRES 1990a, 1991; Castro 1990b; CIERA 1989). This view point argues that interior peasants’ conservative values—precapitalist relations of production, intense religiosity, family loyalties, respect for private property—led them to oppose revolutionary change in the 1980s. Several studies also highlight the role of local rural elites, who served as ideological intermediaries between poorer peasants and the outside world in forging the anti-Sandinista alliance (CIERA 1989, 6; Castro 1990; Bendaña 1991; Serra 1993).

In most of these studies, interior middle peasants are identified as the core rural sector that supported the contras. Enriquez (1997) also links varied degrees of rural support for the FSLN to peasant class origins as well as to the organizational form of their agricultural production. She identifies poor peasants as potentially the most revolutionary subjects and indicates that peasants most closely tied to the land as individual farmers were the least likely to support the FSLN. Although Enriquez’s study focuses on political opposition in Nicaragua’s Pacific zone, it lends weight to the argument that the pre-1979 consolidation of a relatively strong small- and medium-landholding peasant sector in Nicaragua’s interior was an important factor in low levels of support for the revolution in those zones.

A number of studies, from contrasting political perspectives, have also asserted that a series of FSLN biases and errors were an important element in interior peasant opposition to the FSLN and support for the contras.⁵ It is argued that Sandinista urban and technocratic biases against a peasantry considered to be socially and technologically backward, led FSLN policy makers to implement policies that at best neglected, and in many cases harmed, the interests of the rural population, and in particular middle peasants.

One specific Sandinista policy that has been criticized from several different angles is land reform. On the one hand, some analysts as well as FSLN party leaders in the postwar period have identified arbitrary and politically motivated expropriations of farms of all sizes by the FSLN as a source of resentment and fear among the rural population (Bendaña 1991; IHCA 1991). At the same time it is also generally recognized that the FSLN’s land reform policies, which first turned expropriated land into state farms and later required peasants to join production cooperatives to gain access to land, failed to satisfy poor peasants’ demands for land in the early 1980s (Martinez 1993; Kaimowitz 1988; Ortega 1990). In addition, scholars suggest that the FSLN directed a disproportionate share of economic resources, credit, and technical assistance toward state farms and later collective cooperatives, and neglected individual peasant producers (Baumeister 1991; Zalkin 1990; Martinez 1993).

Scholars have cited FSLN market interventions as another key source of tension with the peasantry. Middle and wealthy peasants in particular, it is argued, resented Sandinista government controls over the buying and selling of basic grains and export crops, epitomized by the roadblocks (tranques) on the edge of rural towns to control the black market sale of crops. Other economic difficulties faced by Nicaragua’s rural population in the 1980s include declining terms of urban-rural trade, rationing measures, and shortages of consumer goods, agricultural inputs, transportation, and labor. Scholars also suggest that the Sandinista draft was particularly burdensome to peasant families, who depended on family labor. In addition, in interior zones where the contras were active, abuses by the Sandinista Army and State Security contributed to peasant opposition to the FSLN.

While the present study focuses primarily on exploring the internal dynamics of peasant resistance to the FSLN and armed mobilization in the municipality of Quilalí, it should be emphasized that this local study is located within a larger geopolitical context in which the U.S. government served as a powerful external agent in Nicaragua’s war. That is, although in their narratives of the origins of conflict anti-Sandinista peasants in particular tend to downplay the role of the United States, at several key junctures U.S. material and organizational resources were critical in transforming localized rural rebellion into large-scale war. Specifically, U.S. government policies of low-intensity warfare and support for the contras served to reinforce internal contradictions of the revolution, promote the use of violence as a means to express peasant grievances, and rapidly expand the scope and intensity of the conflict.

Overall, this study supports four additional main points. First, resistance to the revolution in the municipality of Quilalí was community-based, multiclass, and built upon a discourse of common peasant identity. Second, this resistance was not only a reaction to the FSLN policy errors discussed above, but also an expression of more intractable tensions between the revolutionary program and ideology and preexisting interior structures and values. In addition, the dynamics of militarization in the municipality, which pushed anti-Sandinistas into direct armed confrontation with the government, made it all but impossible for the FSLN to reverse this process of polarization by the mid-1980s. Finally, this study emphasizes that Quilalí peasant consciousness is complex, contested, and dynamic, and in the course of the 1980s shifted from prerevolutionary quiescence to a high degree of mobilization.

Peasants in Arms asserts that the support of a majority of Quilalí peasants for the contras in the 1980s was not the act of individual, isolated peasants. Rather, resistance to revolutionary change in the municipality was linked to a perception of a common interior peasant identity and drew upon family, community, and clientelistic networks. As was suggested earlier, Quilalí, which formed part of the agricultural frontier and attracted hundreds of peasant migrants in the 1950s and 1960s, was not a traditional community of subsistence farmers. On the eve of the revolution, the municipality was an economically dynamic zone linked to national and international markets by the production of cattle, coffee, tobacco, and corn. The partial penetration of capitalism into the municipality left key interior values and structures—patron-client ties, respect for private property, autonomy, a strong work ethic, and family loyalties—at least partially intact, but also promoted greater economic stratification in the municipality and the consolidation of a sector of locally powerful rich peasants, or finqueros. In 1980 a dozen such finqueros, many of whom had gained military skills and confidence as FSLN guerrillas, organized with friends and workers one of the first rural uprisings against the FSLN. Soon afterward these men joined ex-National Guardsmen in Honduras and with access to U.S. aid assumed the role of field commanders in an integrated contra force. There they played a key intermediary role in recruiting middle and poor peasants to the anti-Sandinista cause. While the FSLN attempted to mobilize peasants through a nationalist and class-based discourse, which emphasized the shared interests of poor peasants, finquero contra leaders worked to forge a multiclass base of peasant support by drawing on clientelistic ties and in their discourse highlighting common elements of interior rural history, culture, and forms of production.

A second important finding of this study is that while, as will be seen, a significant minority of Quilalí peasants supported the FSLN, a majority of municipality residents began to distance themselves from revolutionary programs and ideology that, as suggested above, challenged prerevolutionary values and structures and in the words of Quilalí peasants, turned everything upside down. Essentially, hastened by a contra campaign of selective repression, the municipality began to polarize politically and militarily in the early 1980s around competing Sandinista and anti-Sandinista worldviews. The basic ideological dichotomies of these worldviews include: exploitation versus cross-class solidarity; equality versus hierarchy; land reform versus respect for private property; state economic intervention versus free markets; nationalism versus local family and communities loyalties; urban versus rural interests; and militarization versus prerevolutionary tranquillity.

As a general rule, Quilalí’s finqueros and middle peasants tended to covertly and openly oppose the Sandinista model, while the position of poor peasants toward the revolution was more complex and contested. Poor peasants were attracted to certain aspects of the revolutionary programs, particularly land reform, and a substantial number of them supported the FSLN. Other poor peasants, however, became resentful when in their minds the Sandinista government failed to live up their expectations for land and other benefits or were drawn into the counterrevolutionary struggle by continued economic and ideological dependence on local elites.

In addition to these underlying ideological tensions, a series of what I term secondary or reinforcing factors served both to push anti-Sandinista young men into active armed opposition to the revolution and to reinforce the dynamics of military conflict in the municipality. Most important among these factors were the Sandinista draft, intimidation by Sandinista State Security, and repression and forced recruitment by the contras, as well as family and community pressures and loyalties. As will be seen, in the mid-1980s the FSLN undertook a series of pragmatic policy reforms to attempt to win back peasant support in Quilalí, but in part because of the reinforcing factors mentioned above these policies had only limited success.

A final important point that emerges from the Quilalí experience of revolution and counterrevolution is the complex and dynamic nature of peasant consciousness. While it is true that many Quilalí peasants actively or passively supported the contras, the FSLN was able to win and maintain the support of an important minority of mainly poor Quilalí peasants and through land reform to consolidate a substantial pro-Sandinista cooperative sector. In addition, among peasants who fought with the contras in defense of prerevolutionary values and relationships, the struggle itself and the example of the FSLN transformed their attitudes and expectations. Anti-Sandinista Quilalí peasants of the postwar period were no longer the quiescent peasantry of a decade earlier. In the 1990s they demanded for themselves and their families selective rewards and were willing to employ violence to bring about government response. This highly mobilized peasantry, combined with a weak central government, national political conflicts, and economic recession, was a key element in continued postwar rural instability and violence in the municipality.

Chapter 2

The Agricultural Frontier

AS RESIDENTS proudly inform visitors, the municipality of Quilalí lies in the heart of the Segovia mountains at the meeting place of the region’s most important body of water, the Río Coco, and the smaller Río Jícaro. Centuries ago indigenous peoples named the fertile valley where the rivers converge Quilalí, the place of waters. As will be seen, Quilalí is also known as a rebellious zone with a strong culture of resistance dating from the 1920s, when Augusto Sandino based his guerrilla struggle against U.S. Marines in the zone. After World War II, Quilalí formed part of Nicaragua’s agricultural frontier and thousands of peasants were drawn to the zone. These migrants developed their own unique modo de vivir (way of life), which emphasized self-sufficiency, clientelistic ties, patriarchy, respect for private property, and a strong work ethic. From the 1960s onward, however, the municipality entered a new phase of development characterized by the growth of exports, increased stratification, continued patron-client ties, and a relatively quiescent poor peasant population.

Winding dirt roads link the municipality of Quilalí to both the departmental capital of Ocotal, fifty-five kilometers northwest, and the northern city of Estelí, seventy-five kilometers southwest of Quilalí, where several times a day old trucks that have been transformed into passenger vehicles depart to make the arduous six- to eight-hour journey into the mountains (montaña adentro) to Quilalí. Passengers seat themselves on rough wooden planks in the back of the truck and a ragged piece of canvas tarpaulin is stretched over the metal frame of the truck to provide protection from the sun, dust, or rain, depending on the season. Once loaded with passengers, sacks of rice, beans, and corn, boxes of consumer goods, and small livestock, the truck pulls out of the city of Estelí and travels north along the Pan-American Highway toward the Honduran border. After reaching the town of Palacaguina the vehicle heads east onto a dirt road that leads through the rural heart of the western sector of the Segovia mountains. The western Segovias, often referred to as the dry zone, encompass a portion of three northern departments—Estelí, Madriz, and Nueva Segovia—and sixteen municipalities.¹

Rainfall in the western Segovias averages 1,000 mm (forty inches) per year or less and in the dry season the zone appears barren and desolate (CIERA 1984, 33). Brown deforested hills and wilted, dust-covered vegetation dominate the landscape. Along the roadside, bony cows graze on the withered remnants of the prior year’s corn crop. This western section of the Segovias was the birthplace of many present-day Quilalí residents. In the decades following World War II, the expansion of large cattle ranches and deteriorating ecological conditions here pushed hundreds of peasants to migrate eastward toward Quilalí and the agricultural frontier.

After the passenger truck passes the town of Telpaneca the landscape is gradually transformed. The mountains are steeper, more rugged, and there is now a lingering aroma of moisture in the air. Small waterfalls spill down the mountainsides and coffee bushes cover many of the slopes along the road. In the distance across the gullies, pastures, groves of pine trees, and an occasional farmhouse, smoke pouring from the rooftop, are visible. This zone, the municipality of San Juan del Río Coco, marks the end of the dry western portion of the Segovia mountains and the beginning of the more humid eastern Segovias, of which Quilalí is a part. The road from San Juan del Río Coco to Quilalí is particularly slow and at times dangerous. In the rainy season vehicles often lose traction completely on steep muddy inclines or become stuck in quagmires several feet deep and must be pulled out with chains. Even in the best of weather flat tires and breakdowns are common. Passengers, who risked contra mines and ambushes to travel to Quilalí during the war