Opposition to Tacho Somoza finally erupts into all-outfighting
I't's civil war. Somoza has to go." The teen-age girl shouting anti-government slogans in the battered town of Masaya last week hardly looked like a revolutionary. But, as upon countless others, revolution had been thrust upon her. An overwhelming number of Nicaragua's 2.6 million people had come face to face with something most of them had long anticipated and feared—civil war.
Leading the fighting was the small but deadly Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which has been waging a battle against the entrenched regime of President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza Debayle, 52. Last month, in a daring attack on Managua's National Palace, the Sandinistas took 1,500 hostages and forced Tacho to ransom them back for $500,000 in cash and the release of 59 political prisoners. Next, the well-armed Marxist guerrillas staged a pitched battle against Somoza's National Guard in the coffee and cattle town of Matagalpa. Finally the Sandinistas raised the stakes to civil war by launching coordinated attacks against guard posts in widely scattered cities and towns: in the capital itself, Managua; in Masaya, 20 miles southeast of the capital; in the pleasant coffee town of Diriamba, 28 miles south; in León, Nicaragua's second largest city; in Chinandega; and in Esteli, on the Pan American Highway in the north.
Fighting back, Nicaragua's longtime dictator last week declared martial law, a familiar tactic of troubled governments (see page 40). Somoza instructed his tough, 8,100-member National Guard to destroy the rebel forces and end the uprising. Guard units set out to rescue the embattled towns; in the south at Sapoá and Peña Blanca, they also violated the Costa Rican border in hot pursuit of Sandinistas. After a week of steady fighting, the conflict had taken on the proportions of a bloodbath, and U.S. diplomats met hastily with the government to speed the evacuation of a reported 1,500 Americans caught in the fighting.
In each place where the Sandinistas struck, National Guard posts were the principal target. In Esteli, beleaguered guardsmen protected themselves by holding twelve of the town's leading citizens hostage. And in Monimbó, an Indian barrio of 12,000 people on the outskirts of Masaya, angry rebels who have been battling the National Guard almost daily since February finally overran the local guardia station and slaughtered its two officers and a dozen enlisted men.
Ominously for the Somoza regime, the Sandinistas were not the only force that had risen. As soon as the guerrillas' well-planned attacks began, they were spontaneously joined by other youths—"los muchachos" (the boys), townspeople called them—and even by older men and women wielding their own hunting rifles and automatic weapons grabbed from the hands of fallen members of the guardia. Copying the Sandinistas, the new rebels tied handkerchiefs over their faces to avoid identification. Their fight, as a result, soon was dubbed "The Revolution of the Scarves."