By Stephen Marks
MANAGUA — The names of Juan Dávila, Xiomara and Alma Nubia will never be registered in any US State Department "Human Rights Reports". Juan Dávila was shot in the chest by recontras when he answered a late night knock at the door of his home on a cooperative near Waslala in Nicaragua's north on February 15. Xiomara and Alma Nubia, his infant children, died when the recontras sprayed the house with rifle fire.
These barbaric assassinations have added urgency to the warnings of Nicaraguan farmer associations that members of cooperatives are facing genocide. According to the president of the National Farmers and Ranchers Association (UNAG), David Nuñez Rodríguez, more than 300 UNAG cooperativists have been assassinated since the 1990 election of Violeta Chamorro.
Ariel Bucardo, president of the National Federation of Cooperatives, said that since December more than 100 campesinos, including 30 leaders, have been assassinated. Cooperative buildings, plant, stores and legal documents which confirm land title have been destroyed.
While some armed bands withdrew to enclaves in January prior to negotiations with the government, other groups have refused to disarm and echo the slogans of the ultraright faction of the United National Opposition, the Patriotic Opposition Alliance (APO-UNO).
While recontras murder cooperativists, the National Assembly deputies of the APO-UNO have launched a campaign of demonstrations and "civic disobedience" to bring down the Chamorro government. A rally of 15,000 here on February 20 has been their largest mobilisation to date.
The APO-UNO's basic problem with Chamorro is that she has largely excluded them from the spoils of office and has been too slow in overturning the Sandinista land and property reforms, as well as eroding Sandinista influence in the armed forces, police, judiciary and mass movements. The ultraright cry that the Sandinistas have returned to power through a so called "co-government" with Chamorro and her chief minister, Antonio Lacayo.
A more dangerous accusation is that Sandinista "death squads" are exterminating former contras. With the fictional report of US Senator Jesse Helms' aide, Deborah De Moss, providing the background, the recently released 1992 US Senate Human Rights Report is echoing this charge internationally.
The US Senate makes a great deal of a few selected cases of violence while mentioning nothing of the murder of Sandinistas, their supporters and cooperative members who stand in the way of former Somocista landlords returning from Miami.
Recently the members of the Oscar Garcia Cooperative in Nueva Guinea, r region in south-east Nicaragua, told me that their former president, Antonio Hernandez, had been murdered by unknown assailants on September 3. The ex-owners of the cooperative's land, which was redistributed under the Sandinista agrarian reform, had visited them a little while before and had unsuccessfully tried to convince them to "return" the land.
Antonio had been very active within the community, organising games of baseball and trying to get a pool table for the village's young people. He was killed on Farmers Day, on his way home to his young wife and three infant children, after giving a literacy class.
Many demobilised former contras have actually become supporters of UNAG because cooperatives help poor farmers pool resources, seek financing and stand united against the divide and rule tactics of big landlords.
Campesinos returned their arms after the war ended to support the peace effort. However, as Lucrecia Huete Aguilar, the wife of Juan Dávila, explained to Barricada newspaper, "We thought it was a general disarmament, we thought we would be able to work and educate our children, but now they slaughter my innocent family".
In Waslala, where Juan Dávila was killed, all of the 32 police officers are ex-contras despite the fact that the town returned a Sandinista mayor in the 1990 elections. The Sandinista Popular Army has only one battalion of 30 soldiers in Waslala to patrol 1500 square kilometres.
UNAG leaders have accused APO-UNO deputies of coordinating the campaign of extermination. Some APO-UNO deputies have admitted meeting with the recontras, and external interference has returned, with mysterious flights once again dropping supplies and arms to recontras in remote parts of the country.
Accusations have also been raised about the International Verification Committee of the Organisation of American States, which supposedly monitors the disarmament. Sandinista leader Dora Maria Tellez has accused its officials of providing communication between the different recontra cells as well as allowing recontras to escape and regroup by declaring truces before the army can attack recontra positions.
The vast majority of the former army, National Resistance and Sandinista combatants want peace. They want the government to comply with its promises and resolve insecurity, unemployment and poverty. Precisely because cooperatives have become the focus for many successful efforts at national reconciliation, they have become targets of recontra death squads while the human rights advocates in the US government remain silent.