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Nicaragua
Before Tatanka’s birth and after returning from my honeymoon in Libya, I had gone to Washington in the fall of 1984 to see Francisco Campbell, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States. AIM and the International Indian Treaty Council wanted to take the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty issue to the International Court of Justice, but we needed a member nation to sponsor us. Nicaragua had been among the court’s founders and AIM had ties to the Sandinistas that predated the revolution, so I felt they should and would help us. I therefore attended a reception at the Nicaraguan embassy at which the press attaché tried to drum up media interest in a forthcoming visit by Jaime Wheelock, the Nicaraguan minister of agriculture and one of President Daniel Ortega’s closest confidants.
That was at the height of the Reagan administration’s anti-Sandinista hysteria. No reporters covered Wheelock’s arrival at Dulles Airport. I was there with an AIM delegation and a sacred drum. Because Indians were the original inhabitants of this hemisphere, I thought it was highly appropriate that Indians should greet an international visitor. We brought symbolic gifts of welcome—an expensive piece of Indian beadwork, a bit of tobacco, and an eagle feather. A short, slender, Irish-looking man in his late twenties, Wheelock was from a wealthy family that had long been prominent in the Nicaraguan oligarchy. As he descended the stairway from the plane, we welcomed him with the AIM song. He swept past without a word, not even glancing at us, motioning vaguely with his hands as if to say, “Give that stuff you brought to one of my underlings.” I’ve been around the world, and no one else except Americans had ever snubbed me or other Indians so blatantly.
I had an appointment to see Wheelock. Later that day, I went to his suite at the Madison Hotel. I waited for about four hours; then his aides said he had to leave for a reception, but I could have fifteen minutes with him. Wheelock acted as if he didn’t want to dirty himself by touching me, and wouldn’t shake my hand. I told him the United States had breached international law when it unilaterally violated our treaty, and we wanted to sue for damages in the world court. I remember him saying, “The Nicaraguan government is afraid of what the U.S. government can do to us economically, so we don’t want to do anything that could antagonize Washington or jeopardize our position in the international community.”
“What happened to the Sandinistas’ revolutionary fervor?” I asked. “What did all your slogans mean? What about the justice that the revolution was supposed to bring? Isn’t that why we fought alongside you?”
“Well, now reality has set in and we must deal with it,” he replied. Speaking as though I were a third-grader, he explained that he hadn’t come there to take risks, and that his government would never drag the United States to the world court on our behalf. That seemed to smash to smithereens AIM’s new treaty strategy, but I couldn’t believe that Wheelock’s statements accurately reflected his government’s position. I tried not to take his obvious distaste personally. I knew that despite the departure of Somoza, Latin America’s economic system—a creature of feudal oligarchies established to exploit the land and the indigenous people—had never changed. Its way of life rests on the most vile racism known on earth. The conquistadores and their descendants tortured and murdered Indians in ways even the Nazis couldn’t have stomached. Most whites in Latin America still treat dogs and farm animals better than they treat Indian people. Even their churches collaborate in indoctrinating people to look on us as primitive subhumans. Racism is institutionalized in every aspect of their society.
I knew a cultural attaché whom we had affectionately nicknamed Low Rider. A dedicated revolutionary who had worked for the struggle with leaflets and demonstrations in the streets of San Francisco and by fighting in the Nicaraguan mountains, he had become the Sandinistas’ informal liaison to AIM. When he spoke about solidarity, I believed him, so we could talk straight up. After leaving Wheelock, I found Low Rider and said, “Your revolution hasn’t changed the oligarchy a bit.”
He emphatically disagreed. “Oh, no, these guys are different. Wheelock comes from one of the established families, but look how young he is! He’s in there for change.” He promised to try to find someone else among the Sandinista leadership who would be more receptive to our request. That night at an embassy reception for Wheelock, I cornered Ambassador Francisco Campbell and put it to him directly. “What about Wheelock’s snubbing us? What kind of bullshit is this?” I said.
“You misunderstand,” he replied soothingly. “At this time in Nicaragua, we’re forging new relationships with the U.S.” He went on in that vein until I realized it was a different recording of the same old tune.
Several AIMsters witnessed that insult and the one at the airport, but when I mentioned it to my brother Bill, he said I had been offended because I wasn’t treated with the usual degree of respect that Russell Means had become used to. But that wasn’t it. Unfortunately, I now know Bill doesn’t understand that it isn’t a matter of people choosing their favorite Indian. When one Indian anywhere in the world is treated with racial hatred, all Indians are victims. Bill has yet to fully understand the depth and scope of the hatred that the Western Hemisphere focuses on Indians.
A few weeks later, in November of 1985, a Chicano/Indio lawyer named Jim Anaya, a law-school classmate of Glenn Morris’s, asked if I wanted to investigate how Nicaragua’s Miskito Indians were faring. The Sandinistas were negotiating with MISURASATA, a coalition of Nicaraguan Indians formed during the honeymoon year after the revolution and led by Brooklyn Rivera. In 1981, many Nicaraguan Indian leaders had been arrested. The Miskito people had charged that their rights were being systematically violated. Indians had hoped that the Sandinistas would keep their revolutionary promises and allow self-determination and autonomy within their territories. The new regime kept saying that was what they wanted; but more and more, it looked as if they were out to incorporate Indian lands and people within a Marxist, state-controlled economy—and were willing to use military force to do it if necessary. When the Sandinistas began forced relocation, the Indians declared war. In May, MISURASATA met with the Sandinistas to resolve differences, but the talks broke down.
A second round of talks was coming up at the presidential palace in Bogota, Colombia, and Anaya invited me to go as an observer. I said, “I’ll check with Bill and with the AIM leadership, but you know our position. We’re pro-Sandinista. We don’t support the Contras.” Anaya reassured me that the Miskitos were not “Contra Indians.” I called Bill and asked him what he thought about my going. He had visited Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast as a guest of the Sandinistas, and had been told that Moravian priests controlled the Miskito communities, and villagers did whatever they were told to do. Bill said the Sandinistas had proof that the Miskito people were not truly indigenous—not really Indians—because in the sixteenth century, they had separated from the dominant mixed-blood Spanish-speaking culture. Somehow, in the last hundred years, they had made up their own language!
I said, “When did the Sandinistas make you an anthropologist?” and he laughed it off.
Finally, he said, “Go on down there—I’m confident you’ll see Brooklyn Rivera for what he is.”
I called Larry Leventhal, and he said, “You should go and find out.” Finally, I called Clyde Bellecourt, who said he didn’t want me to go—it wasn’t AIM’s business. Nevertheless, I charged my tickets and left.
At the presidential palace in Bogota, I met Lumberto Campbell, military commandant of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast region, which includes the Miskito homeland. After a friendly handshake and some small talk, I said, “Tell me one thing—are Brooklyn Rivera and MISURASATA Contras?” He told me, “We wouldn’t be here if they were.” That was good enough for me.
Among the observers at the peace talks were Indians from Central and South America, representing tens of millions of Indian people in Panama, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico. Every one of them had come to support MISURASATA. No matter what my brother Bill believed, how could I insist that they and Lumberto Campbell were wrong?
Brooklyn Rivera was in his early thirties, a wiry, good-looking man of average height. His wavy black hair was cropped short and he sported a thin mustache. Fluent in four or five languages, he had a graduate degree in math. He sat for long periods listening to a barrage of “expert” advice from groups that included the American Indian Law Resource Center. The center had hired Armstrong Wiggins, a MISURASATA lawyer and a refugee from Nicaragua, as its liaison with the struggle inside Nicaragua. The rest of those guys, however, acted just like white men, telling Brooklyn in detail what he should do and how he should do it. My respect and admiration for him grew as I watched him listen to hours of conflicting advice and, with the interests of his people paramount, make one wise decision after another.
The U.S. State Department was telling the American public that Rivera was the leader of no more than a dozen people living in refugee camps in Costa Rica. I didn’t believe that, but I had no inkling that MISURASATA was anything but an organization in exile. Within a few days of my arrival in Colombia, however, I began to hear that the group also had fighters inside Nicaragua.
I became more and more disgusted with the insults the Sandinistas laid on MISURASATA. They were much like the offensive remarks I had heard from BIA staff members in the 1950s and 1960s, expressions of a mentality that assumed Indians were so stupid that everything had to be explained as though we were little children. Every time they talked that way, the MISURASATA delegates would reply so wisely and simply that the Sandinistas should have been embarrassed—but like the fat BIA woman who “taught” me how to dial a telephone, they apparently had no shame. Even in public, Tomas Borge Martinez, representing the Sandanistas at the Bogota peace conference, called the Miskito people “monkeys hanging around in trees.” I wanted to know how those “monkeys” got him to an international peace conference.
The Sandinistas insisted that actual negotiations be held behind closed doors, so none of the observers could watch. Even so, we met with Rivera every day. When the Sandinistas abruptly walked out of the talks, I called Bill and told him I was attending a press conference to support MISURASATA and Brooklyn Rivera. My brother went nuts. He didn’t ask how I had arrived at that decision; he just screamed at me. He called me a sellout and a goon and cursed me with every obscenity he could think of. When he paused for breath, I said, “Wait, you don’t know what you’re saying! Brooklyn is like Red Cloud, a great leader.” That only set him off again. When he quieted down, I asked Bill not to condemn Brooklyn until he had seen him in action. “Never! I only want to see him at the other end of a gun—and I’ll pull the trigger!” he shouted. His anger mystified me. Bill had never met Brooklyn, but he certainly knew me well enough to know I had some idea of what I was doing.
Just about every organization attending the peace talks was at the press conference. I said, “I do not support the racist policies of the United States of America and I do not support the racist policies of Nicaragua…. I have a record of fighting against the imperialists…. I’m going to go home, get a hundred AIM warriors, return to Nicaragua with a shovel in one hand, a rifle in the other, and the sacred pipe of peace in my heart. It will depend on the Sandinistas which hand we use.”
Bill went bananas over that. Worse, he wouldn’t talk to me or return my calls. I was confident in my decision, and believed my integrity was beyond reproach. I had been jailed countless times for my beliefs, gone to prison for those beliefs, survived five assassination attempts for them. I was sure that as soon as I got home and laid out the facts, people in AIM would share my support for the Miskito people. Instead, I returned to a maelstrom of hatred—the most intense I had encountered since I sued the Cleveland Indians baseball team. The entire Left rose up to condemn me.
For years, the International Indian Treaty Council had been building up a status of most favored organization with the Sandinistas. Council leaders got free plane trips to Managua, where they were feted at receptions and treated like heads of state. By publicly announcing support for MISURASATA, I had undermined what they had built up. To guys such as Vernon Bellecourt, AIM was always supposed to be on the far left of whatever white man’s movement was most popular. Supporting Brooklyn Rivera and Indians who were fighting for their lives, their people, and their culture against the “darlings” of the Left—the Sandinistas—wasn’t part of that plan.
So firmly does the Left control higher education in America that all my scheduled lectures at state universities and community colleges around the country were immediately canceled. Everyone from Ted Kennedy to the hippies condemned me as a traitor to AIM. Clyde and Vernon issued press releases. Clyde claimed he had kicked me out of AIM, which was absurd. AIM hadn’t had a national office since Dennis had gone underground almost ten years earlier. Every chapter is autonomous, and I never belonged to Clyde’s.
In short, they treated me like an Indian. As far as the Left is concerned, no Indian has integrity unless he goes along with their programs. For that alone, I despise the Left. What hurt me most was not that my own brother and the Bellecourts, especially Clyde, had publicly vilified me and sided with a government against Indian people. I knew then that if I maintained even informal involvement with AIM’s leadership, I would have to turn away from my search for Indian freedom and independence to address their attacks—in short, I would have to join the fight among ourselves.
A few weeks after my return from Colombia, I was invited in early fall to go into Nicaragua on a fact-finding mission with representatives of other North American Indian groups. Brooklyn said if I could get myself to Costa Rica, his people would take us into Miskito country along the Atlantic coast. I recruited a small contingent to come along, including Glenn Morris and Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota College student who came as a reporter for his school newspaper. The others were Hank Adams, director of the Survival of American Indians Association; Chauncy Whitworth, a Dakota from the Fort Peck Reservation; and another guy representing Washington state Indians involved in the fishing-rights struggle. Tagging along were Bob Martin, a free-lance television reporter from Albuquerque; and a correspondent from a Tokyo magazine.
In early October of 1985, we flew to San Jose, Costa Rica, where MISURASATA leaders took us to Miskito refugee camps on the way to Puerto Limon, on the Atlantic coast. Because Costa Rica’s land border with Nicaragua is mostly impassable rain forest, MISURASATA used motorized canoes to bring supplies into and people out of their homeland. We helped the Miskito people fell a giant tree and turn its trunk into a huge dugout canoe. We left the first week in November—the start of the Caribbean gale season. After staying overnight in a little village north of Limon, we loaded our gear and supplies aboard our canoe. More than thirty feet long and six feet wide, it had powerful twin outboards.
Early the next night, two Sandinista patrol boats appeared and chased us out to sea. As we headed for some low-lying keys, the wind came up. The seas began to grow, and soon we were battling waves as high as twelve feet. I sat in the bow; as we topped one wave, I glanced back. The stern of our boat was below me—almost straight down. Gray-green waves broke over our canoe, and we were bailing constantly. The seas were so rough that we had little choice but to head back to Costa Rica, but the furious waves had smashed our compass. The captain of our boat, a Miskito named Eustice, was as familiar with the coastal currents as a New Yorker is with the subway system. I’m not sure how he did it, but he didn’t seem to need a compass or even the stars to navigate.
Seated on top of the supplies and wearing a life vest, I was so seasick that I didn’t care if I was washed overboard. I would have welcomed anything to end the dizzying rock and roll of the angry ocean. The others kept encouraging me, “Hang on, make sure you’re secure!” but I didn’t give a shit. “Help us bail!” they shouted, but I still didn’t give a shit. I felt worse than I ever imagined a man could feel. Eustice shouted above the wind’s roar to tell us that if the seas got much bigger, our canoe might break apart. If that happened, we should each try to grab a piece of anything that floated and hang onto it, he said.
At dawn the wind slackened and the seas subsided to rolling six-foot whitecaps. I looked around at a panorama that seemed right out of a Turner seascape. Even our twin fifty-five-horsepower engines couldn’t keep us heading into the swells. Time after time, we struggled sideways through wave troughs, with water pouring in over the gunwales. Somehow, Eustice and his boatmen steered us through the storm—a miracle I’ll never forget. Finally we neared the mouth of a big river where warmer, lighter fresh water mixed with the cooler, heavier salt seas to create vicious riptides. Even laden with all our supplies, our craft rode like a surfboard. It looked as if the swirling water would toss us around until we broke into pieces. Eustice said, “If you’re in the canoe when it gets busted up, you’ll probably get slammed around and killed—so we’ll tell you when to jump and swim for it.”
Suddenly we were in a bay with a beach on each side. Brooklyn and the other Miskito people yelled for us to jump, then took their own advice. Glenn and Eustice and I looked at one another and stayed put. For some reason, I wasn’t scared. I watched wide-eyed as we sped headlong toward the beach, driven by the current and what was left of the storm. We were alone as the shoreline rushed up at us. Suddenly we were past all the turmoil, floating slowly on calm waters. In a few minutes, our dugout gently nudged the bottom as the bow ran up on a beach of white crystalline sand.
Everyone was safe. Paddling up the estuary to a little cay with a house, we unloaded the boat, then headed into Limon with our camouflage raincoats turned inside out to show bright yellow linings—we didn’t want to look like soldiers making a clandestine entry. It would be months before we could return to Nicaragua. We were eager to get home and tell America’s leftist organizations, which so often had professed support for Indian rights, that Brooklyn and his followers were willing to make peace with the Sandinistas, but only as full partners. We hoped that once they had the facts, those groups would work to persuade the Sandinistas to forge an agreement with MISURASATA to guarantee Indian autonomy. There was at least one good reason why the Left should want that. As allies, the Sandinistas and MISURASATA would be far more effective against the CIA-backed Contras.
Despite all I had heard in the refugee camps, when I returned from Costa Rica I still had faith in the purity of the Nicaraguan revolution. I still believed it was the revolution, the turning point for this hemisphere. Everyone in AIM believed it would be the dawn of a new era for Indians, that the Sandinistas would be the first government to deal with us as human beings. When I reflect on how naive and stupid I was, I’m almost ashamed to talk about it.
Shortly after my return to the United States, Colorado AIM called for a leadership meeting to straighten out our disagreement over the Sandinistas. Neither my brother Bill nor the Bellecourts showed up. Dennis Banks gave what was effectively his retirement speech. He said it was time for younger people to take the helm and that he was stepping down. He wished everyone well and concluded by saying he would always be identified with the American Indian Movement. Nothing about AIM’s position on Nicaragua was resolved.
Elsewhere around the country, instead of showing a constructive interest in our eyewitness account of what was happening in Miskito country, everyone from liberal Democrats to full-blown Marxist ideologues joined in vilifying us. The lefties all but lined up to challenge everything we told them. They demanded concrete evidence of the Sandinista atrocities we had heard about from Miskito people. Our integrity, never questioned when we spoke out about U.S. Indian policy, was suddenly suspect. Not even reporter Bob Martin’s photos and videotaped interviews with refugees were acceptable proof. The Left was behaving like the John Birch Society, demanding evidence of a standard usually reserved for murder trials.
I had conversations with Hank Adams and with Brooklyn Rivera, who was then working out of a Washington, D.C., office provided by the Indian Law Resource Center. We decided that if the Left wanted proof, we would travel through Miskito country long enough to get that proof. The day after Christmas, I appeared on the Larry King Show to explain why I was returning to Miskito territory, and then I headed back to Costa Rica. Besides Brooklyn, our group included Bob Martin, Hank Adams, and Clem Chartier, a Metis from Saskatoon, who was president of the World Council of Indigenous People. We assembled in Puerto Limon in the first week of January 1986 and loaded our canoe with food, supplies, and gasoline. Our plan was to spend two weeks or so touring coastal villages, taking photos and videos and tape-recording depositions as we went.
We left Costa Rica in the afternoon, and at dark put in at a low-lying island several miles offshore in Nicaraguan waters. I had expected to have to sneak into the country, but at noon the next day, Eustice and two other boatmen began to reload our canoe. Brooklyn flashed a grin and said, “Get ready, I’m going home.” As we headed in, I thought, this is great. We’re going into an Indian nation that’s so secure we can arrive safely in broad daylight. When we went ashore, I was astonished. Lined up in ranks on the beach were about a hundred MISURASATA warriors waiting to welcome us. It made me proud to be an Indian.
I noticed that some of the warriors seemed to be Creoles or Ladinos. When I asked about that, I learned that many Nicaraguan Creoles had joined MISURASATA because it was the most effective way of resisting Sandinista policies. Ladinos, people of mixed Indian and European blood, had rallied to the MISURASATA cause from as far away as the Pacific coast because the Indians were by far the best-organized group fighting the Managua regime.
We spent two days as honored guests in the village of Kwamwatla, where just about everyone came to greet us, and nearly every family offered to feed us. We also spoke with elders’ councils and leaders from nearby communities who came to tell us about conditions in their areas.
On the first day, Bob Martin, a trained medic, was asked to patch up a wounded warrior. Few doctors or nurses venture into Miskito country, so he was asked to treat sick and wounded people of all ages throughout our journey. In Kwamwatla, he went from house to house, bandaging wounds, treating minor ailments, and making extensive notes on every disease he encountered. People, especially children, were dying of white man’s ailments, such as malaria, measles, and whooping cough, that could easily have been cured with inexpensive drugs—if any had been available.
From Kwamwatla, our canoe took us north to Ariswatla, where we took more depositions. Our next destination was farther north, near Puerto Cabezas, Sandinista military headquarters for the Atlantic coast. To get there, we had to go back to the coast, passing through Prinsapolca, a town occupied by about 250 Sandinista troops. We moved by night in our seagoing canoe and several smaller ones over the Miskito’s amazingly efficient transportation system of lagoons, jungle marshes, rivers, and canals. As we neared Prinsapolca, the engines were shut down and the boatmen began to paddle. There was a ragged chorus of metallic clicks as rifles were loaded and rounds were chambered. Then it was quiet. I was told to lie down in the boat, but I raised my head to look around a few times. The river was lined with houses on stilts. From beneath them, I saw, from time to time, flashlights blinking coded messages. Feeling naked and exposed, I whispered to Brooklyn, “Give me a gun!” He said, “They’re all in use.”
Prinsapolca is strung out along a meandering river. We paddled for several minutes at a time in nearly total silence until a few blinks from a flashlight halted us and we waited for a signal that it was safe to continue. We went deeper and deeper into a town that was crawling with Sandinistas. It was so quiet that my own heartbeat sounded like a drum. Then faintly, I heard the sound of waves breaking on a beach ahead. We were approaching the sea, and the time of greatest danger. The Sandinistas had surely posted a heavy guard at the river’s mouth. The tension became almost unbearable as we eased along, stopping and waiting and moving ahead, with the ocean’s roar growing louder by the minute. Suddenly we were paddling into breakers. After a few minutes, we started the engines and headed northward out to sea. We were safe, at least for the moment.
At Wounta and later, inland, at Layasiksa, we walked through savanna country for hours before reaching the jungle. Then we climbed to the mountain village of Sukupin on our way to Yulu, where we completed our observation of Indian life in the region. The Miskito, as well as the Sumu and Rama peoples, maintain a traditional balance with the natural world. We saw a prosperous region that offers a peaceful, comfortable lifestyle in which to cultivate Indian values. We found no evidence that the Miskito people had traded their heritage for pie-in-the-sky promises from the Moravian Church. Instead, we saw that even those who professed belief in Christianity had adapted that European doctrine to their own traditional values. The church had been “Indianized” far more than the people had been Christianized.
Under the Somoza regime, Managua’s dictators didn’t try to do much for the Indians, but they didn’t try to do much to them, either. Indian regions were self-sufficient and largely self-governing. All that had changed when the Marxists came to power. The Sandinistas were trying to force the Indians to integrate with the rest of the country by using all the tools of traditional colonialism. We were amused to learn that MISURASATA was actually a Sandinista creation. The acronym means “Miskito, Sumu, and Rama Indians with the Sandinistas,” and the coalition was supposed to convince Indians to join the revolutionary government. When Managua, with typical Eurocentric arrogance toward Indians, chose MISURASATA’s leader themselves, their true purpose was exposed. Their hand-picked Miskito, Steadman Faggoth, was a CIA-backed opportunist who was accused of having worked with Somoza’s dreaded National Guard. One of his first acts was to denounce several genuine Miskito leaders, including Brooklyn Rivera and Armstrong Wiggins, as tools of the CIA. After arresting them, the Sandinistas discovered their mistake, but by then their credibility with the Indians was nil.
Confusing matters still more, when Faggoth was exposed, he led a small group to Honduras, where they called themselves MISURA and allied themselves with the CIA-backed contras. When MISURA collapsed, Faggoth took off for Miami. The remaining handful of his followers formed yet another splinter group that obeyed the Contras in return for salaries and supplies. When it became obvious to Foggy Bottom that MISURASATA wanted nothing from the CIA and would instead defend Indian interests, the CIA started another “Indian” organization, operationally a Nicaraguan equivalent of the BIA. So although Managua and Washington continued to loathe each other, they did have one thing in common. The last thing either wanted was for Indians to exercise autonomy and self-determination.
In the village of Layasiksa, we took several depositions from people who described how Sandinistas had rounded up about twelve thousand Miskito and Sumo people who lived along the Rio Coco, and had relocated them to concentration camps farther south. Everywhere we went, I noticed that there were few teenage boys. When I asked about that, I learned that the Sandinistas were trying to keep the Indians from raising an army by systematically murdering young men. In Ariswatla, Sandinista helicopters had landed troops who rounded up all boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen, herded them into a local schoolhouse, and set it afire, burning them alive. As I continued to ask about the absence of young men, I heard the same story, with minor variations, in almost every village. In Wounta, soldiers had clubbed the youngsters to death. In a village near Sukupin, children had been buried alive. In several other communities, they had been machine-gunned.
We collected depositions from many other teenagers who had been abducted and forced to serve in the army. Dozens of Miskito women said they had been raped by Sandinista soldiers. I was only a little relieved to learn that although those atrocities still occurred, they were increasingly rare since MISURASATA forces had taken control of the countryside and forced the Sandinistas to change tactics. Denied control of roads and waterways, in recent months the Sandinistas had taken to bombing and strafing Indian communities. They had also begun to use airmobile operations, landing infantry to seize certain villages. Surrounded by hostile territory, however, the Sandinistas were trapped in those enclaves; they had to resupply and reinforce by air. Managua’s bully boys had managed to create their own little Vietnam.
Arriving in each Miskito hamlet or town, our small party was greeted like heroic liberators. The outpouring of warmth and friendship was even greater than I had experienced during the siege of Wounded Knee or in Yellow Thunder Camp.
The Sandinistas must have realized eventually that the information our tiny group was accumulating might cause them international grief, so they set out to kill us before we could tell the world what their revolution was really about. Long before we reached Layasiksa, the moccasin telegraph had brought us word that troops were hunting for Brooklyn Rivera in his hometown, Big Sandy Bay. Later, our radios monitored Sandinista military traffic from Puerto Cabezas that made it apparent we had become the objects of a massive manhunt.
Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast road system begins near the edge of a village called Lapan. There we left our canoe. Brooklyn and a few men calmly commandeered a military truck—the driver and guard surrendered without protest—and we drove north to Yulu, a town less than thirty kilometers from the Sandinista headquarters at Puerto Cabezas. Virtually under the guns of the Sandinistas, we wandered around for two days. If anybody had snitched on us, we would have been dead meat. But Brooklyn showed no concern for that possibility: The people feared and loathed the Managua regime.
When we finished interviewing in Yulu, we headed home by way of Layasiksa. Although the Sandinistas had recently destroyed almost everything the villagers owned, including their priceless traditional clothing, jewelry, and art, the villagers prepared a feast. The Miskito people put together outfits from leaves and grass and danced for us in celebration of our visit. They serenaded us with an old guitar and instruments made from hollow sticks, and we danced the night away. Resting there on that Sunday morning, January 21, 1986, we noticed that some villagers were packing their belongings and leaving. We had heard by MISURASATA radio that an American wire-service story had just confirmed our identities, our presence, and our mission on the Atlantic coast. I figured that had spooked the Miskito people.
At about one that afternoon, an O-1 Bird Dog spotter plane swooped low over the village. Knowing all too well what was coming, the Miskito women began to whimper and wail, round up their children, and look for places to hide. Within minutes, two push-pull tank busters—two-seater attack planes with propellers in front and back—appeared low on the horizon. Not wanting to provoke the Sandinistas or to provide any excuse for attack, Brooklyn ordered his warriors not to fire at the planes. Hank, Bob, and Clem, all wearing civilian clothes, were ordered to join the civilians heading for an open area near the lagoon. I was wearing camouflage gear, so I remained with the warriors in the village.
The Sandinista planes came roaring in to drop five hundred-pound bombs. The ground shook as shrapnel and splintered trees flew everywhere. Beneath the forest canopy, we could hear but not see the aircraft. We ran from tree to tree, trying to anticipate where the next bombs would fall.
I guessed wrong.
A jagged sliver of shrapnel dug a furrow in my belly. There was a bit of blood, but again, no vital organs were hit. I could tell it wasn’t going to kill me—at least not right away. Crouching by a tree, I looked up and saw Condor, a MISURASATA veteran, nonchalantly leaning against the trunk. When our eyes met, he winked and gave a little smile.
When the planes had dropped their last bomb and buzzed off, Brooklyn’s warriors huddled. They estimated that it would take about an hour and a half for the push-pulls to return to their base, refuel, rearm, and return. By then, it would be late afternoon. We decided to disperse, wait out the second attack, and try to escape when it was over. It would be dark before the Sandinista planes could return for a third strike.
Two hours came and went with no sign of the Sandinistas. Just to make sure, we waited another thirty minutes before loading our canoe and motoring onto a lagoon that widened into a large lake. Suddenly I heard the familiar snarl of a spotter plane. Our canoe was a sitting duck. Eustice cracked the throttle wide open, but as we sped for shore, the push-pulls began to circle to attack. The nearest cover was a swampy tangle of mangrove with a floating field of giant lily pads at one end, but even traveling flat out, we were never going to outrun those planes. Orange flame blossomed under their wings as they began a strafing run. Two youngsters in the bow of my canoe stood up and emptied their AK-47s at the planes, tossing their rifles into the center of the boat before diving overboard. I looked back. Eustice had disappeared. I grabbed my fatigue jacket—my passport was in a pocket—and jumped in after them. When I surfaced, I saw everyone dive each time the planes made a run. The water was chest deep to me, but everyone else had to tiptoe or swim. I thought, this is bullshit, I’m not going to go underwater and wait to die—I’m going to stand up and watch those Marxist motherfuckers! Brooklyn and Hank were trying to cover their heads and arms with lily pads and rubbery green leaves. As the planes returned for strafing runs, they ducked underwater. I watched while the push-pulls came yet again. Four rockets swooshed downward, bracketing the spot where Eustice’s head had ducked beneath the waves moments before. Fountains of water soared skyward. I figured he had been blown to pieces.
Suddenly, swimming for shore seemed like a good idea.
As the planes came around for another pass, I decided to see how fast a Plains Indian could do the Australian crawl. I beat Clem Chartier to the mangroves, but not by much. Among the slippery roots, we discovered David Rodriguez, a MISURASATA comandante, writhing in pain. His knees were shattered and his chest was a mass of shrapnel wounds. I tried to carry him closer to shore, but he screamed in pain. He asked me to break a trail for him so he could pull himself along. I was awed by his courage and toughness. Clem helped me bend mangrove roots and the stems of water plants out of the way so David could float through. It was slow going. Then we heard someone moaning, “Mama! Mama!” I helped David as Clem went back into the lagoon for a warrior perhaps fourteen years old. His name was Peko. When Clem got him in, we saw that his left shoulder, upper arm, hip, and thigh were shredded by shrapnel. The boy stared at me in shock and agony.
Traveling through the swamp required great effort. The wounded, much as Clem and I, were covered with mud. Then the marsh opened into what looked like a little canal. I towed David across so he could hang onto some branches, let the water cleanse his wounds, and give him relief from the pain. He said he could hang on, so I left him to help Clem with Peko. Ahead, we saw dry land, but we had to cross what looked like a small pond to get there. The water was only about three-and-a-half feet deep, so I waded in. Suddenly I sank into the bottom. The mud had taken hold of my legs and was sucking me in. The more I struggled to free myself, the deeper I sank. I yelled, “It’s quicksand! Go back!” The water was at my chin; in a terrifying moment, I realized I was trapped.
Clem said, “Relax, Russell, give it up to God.”
I murmured a quick prayer, “ Tunkasila Wakan Tanka”—Revered Great Mystery—and relaxed.
Then I said, “Unci Maka, unsimala Grandmother Earth, pity me.
She let go of my legs and, relaxed, I floated to the surface and paddled across the water to safety. I called to Clem to swim across, and he brought Peko halfway. I grabbed him and lifted him as gingerly as possible onto the little spit of dry land. My thrashing had muddied the water, and his wounds were covered with it. We washed them with clear water from the lagoon.
As we stood on our dry spot, we saw Bob Martin swimming back to our canoe; he was only 40 to 50 yards away through the mangroves. He climbed in and tried to start an engine, pulling on the starter cord over and over. Bob was Clem’s best buddy, so he started waving and yelling, “Bob! Over here! We’ve got two wounded!” Bob turned to look in our direction, then returned to starting the engine. He got it started, then inexplicably took off in the other direction. That was the end of what had been a very close friendship between Bob and Clem.
I couldn’t bear to look at Peko’s wounds—pounds of human flesh turned into raw meat. I had a tough time helping to wash them. Fortunately, Clem did a great job. My respect for him increased as I saw that he knew what to do. While we were waiting, Hank Adams showed up. After what seemed like hours, we heard an engine—a MISURASATA canoe with warriors found the inlet where David was clinging to branches. They took the wounded and sent another canoe back to bring us to a spot in the jungle where Brooklyn, many of the local villagers, and the rest of our group had gathered.
In addition to Peko and David, three MISURASATA warriors had been wounded and three others killed. Miraculously, I found Eustice wrapped in a blanket, sitting under the trees at a small, smokeless fire and eating fruit and fish. I asked him, “How did you survive those rockets?” He said, “Only God knows!” Peko died the next day. I’ll never forget his big dark eyes. They remind me of my son Scott’s.
As we sat around the fires eating and drinking the best coffee I’ve ever tasted, Bob realized he had lost his journal, cameras, and film—everything in his knapsack. He and an older man went back to search and returned with the cameras, lenses, and a little film. The journal, however, was gone.
It was too dangerous to travel by water during daylight, so at dawn, we went ashore to walk through the jungle. One of our young warriors climbed a tree to hoist a length of wire that served as a radio antenna, and we made contact with MISURASATA headquarters. We were directed to a night rendezvous with our canoes. Another canoe came alongside and a medicine man came aboard to tend the wounded. After singing songs and applying herbal medicines, he slipped back into the night and vanished as silently as he had appeared. For days, I slept only an hour or two a night in the canoe and ate little except wild fruit and what fish we could catch.
By radio, we learned that the Sandinistas had found Bob’s journal, which listed all the villages we had visited and all the people he had interviewed. One by one, all the villages we had toured were bombed. People were arrested. Few of them ever came back to their homes. Meanwhile, MISURASATA told us the Sandinistas were moving their forces toward us from three sides. Our choices were to continue farther into the interior or to head for the coast. If they had been alone, Brooklyn and his men might have opted for the interior, where they could elude the Sandinistas easily. But because we norteamericanos could tell the outside world what was really happening in Nicaragua, we headed for the coast, where we had the best chance of getting out of the country.
As we headed east, Sandinista aircraft were overhead constantly. Every time I heard them, I felt a stab of panic—a reflex that would continue for months afterward. Cut off from the outside world, we were unaware that when reports of the Layasiksa bombing had reached the American media, Nicaraguan Ambassador Francisco Campbell had baldly denied it. “We do not bomb Indian villages,” he said. “Not for any reason.” A few days later, when pictures of the bomb craters appeared in U.S. newspapers, he backtracked. The Sandinista air force had bombed “Contra positions near Layasiksa,” he said. The Sandinistas also cited my statement from Bogota about bringing a hundred AIM warriors to Nicaragua as proof that I was trying to overthrow their government. Sure. Hank, Bob, Clem, and I were going to drive the Marxists out of Managua.
The army couldn’t find us, but Indians from villages we passed on our trek seemed to have no trouble. Every night, they came through the jungle to warn us about Sandinistas in the vicinity. When I offered to give myself up if it would stop the bombing and hunting, Brooklyn’s men asked if I knew how the Sandinistas treated prisoners. Then they said, “We came in together, we’ll go out together.”
It took more than two weeks of travel through very rugged country before we approached the coast. We made camp, and as we waited for darkness, two elders and a younger man came to speak with Brooklyn. After a time, he came over to Hank, Clem, and me and said, “These elders want to talk to you.” They were men who appeared to be in their eighties. Brooklyn translated verbatim. They said, “We apologize to you. We want to ask your forgiveness.” Knowing what was coming, my eyes filled. I didn’t want them to see, so I bowed my head very low, but the tears rolling down my cheeks gave me away.
They continued, “We don’t normally treat visitors this way. When guests come, we open our homes to them and offer them feasts. We give them gifts and try to show our best hospitality.” That is pure Indian, and it made me feel very proud and humble. I knew many North American Indians who would have said, “We have to live here after you leave, and if you hadn’t come, none of this would have happened and our people wouldn’t be killed and maimed.” But those Miskito elders knew who the enemy was.
Afterward, Brooklyn asked why I had cried. I told him, “It was the beauty of the moment. I finally met Indians who know what it’s all about.” When we left, they returned to their village to put their lives on the line again so we could escape.
I never knew the name of the small village where we emerged from the jungle, but it squatted along the west bank of a small lagoon that emptied into a cove. The Sandinistas had an outpost on the north side of a sand spit that extended partly across the mouth of the cove. While we waited in the jungle for darkness, I performed a special tobacco ceremony that Dennis and I had learned from Sam Drywater, a Cherokee holy man. I gave each man in the boat a little tobacco to hold in his left hand until we were at sea. I asked that all of them go along with the ceremony, even if they didn’t believe in the spiritual power I was invoking. After nightfall, we paddled along the north bank. The new moon was a tiny sliver and the jungle was pitch black. As we drifted closer and closer to the garrison on the sand spit, our paddles hissing as they bit carefully into the dark water, our friends in the village cranked up a diesel generator to power their church’s lights. The villagers began a prayer meeting with a loud and enthusiastic hymn. Their kids and dogs joined in the general clamor. Just as we passed the Sandinista compound, red tracers arced over our heads, followed by the stuttering roar of assault rifles. I almost swallowed my heart. Suddenly it was quiet again. Perhaps bored with their duties, the soldiers had relieved the tedium by making a little noise. I’ll never know for sure.
We moved almost silently through the cove and out to sea. When we were out of small-arms range, we rested, hugging one another and the two villagers who had risked their lives to guide us to safety. When they had slipped over the side and were swimming strongly for shore, we got ready to start our outboards. We had only a few minutes before the tide would push us back to the village; once we tried to crank, everyone for miles around would know we were there. Both motors started at once. We released our tobacco to the wind with a prayer. Bob Martin, his eyes big as saucers, said, “I believe! I believe!”
We had used almost eight drums of gasoline coming from Costa Rica, but gas was scarce among the Miskito people. All we could get for our escape was two full drums and one about a third full. We decided to head north toward Honduras, which was closer than Costa Rica. Our canoe rode so low in the water that it was invisible to shore-based radar, so we decided to try to slip past Puerto Cabezas.
As we passed it well out to sea, the running lights of two gunboats appeared low on the horizon. Within minutes we saw that they were converging on us. Eustice opened the throttles and we ran away with the current to the southeast. Our Johnson 55s drove us so fast that we skipped from wave top to wave top, landing with a crash that was hellish torture for our wounded. My own injury had begun to heal, but the pitching and tossing made me seasick. As the lights faded behind us, we knew we couldn’t go north to Honduras—we would never get past the patrols. We had only one chance—San Andres, a speck in the Caribbean about 140 miles southeast of Puerto Cabezas. The island belonged to Colombia, so we would be safe there.
First, however, we had to cross more than a hundred miles of open sea without even a compass to guide us. Within minutes, we noticed a more immediate problem. Near the bow, a long crack had opened in the bottom of our boat; it had probably split after hitting waves at high speed. We shut off one engine and ran the other at barely more than an idle, to conserve gasoline and to keep the hull from splitting open. We stuffed clothing in the crack and used plastic milk jugs to bail.
As daylight approached, we began to worry about Nicaraguan planes and fishing boats, which are radio-equipped and double as a network of coastal sentries. But we saw only one other vessel, which appeared briefly on the eastern horizon, then faded away. As the day went on, the sun seemed to crawl across the sky. We were in the middle of an endless ocean, and it seemed as if we were going nowhere. The sun burned down on us. When I wasn’t bailing, I studied the waves, looking for some pattern, some indication of the current—a hopeless task. There was nothing else to do but think, and I didn’t want to get my mind wrapped around our possibilities. We would run out of gas before we reached the island; we would miss it entirely and lose ourselves at sea; our canoe would split open and we would be at the mercy of the sharks. The day crawled along monotonously, the putt-putt-putt of our motor a hypnotic lullaby that all of us expected would stop at any moment.
Just as the sun began to go down, we pumped the last of our gasoline into the outboard tank. A few minutes later, Bob Martin, standing in the bow, yelled the sweetest words I’ve ever heard: “I see it! Land! I see land!”
Everyone cheered, and a rush of excitement flooded over me. As the faint smudge on the horizon became a firm line and then a panorama of jungled hills and red-roofed homes, it was apparent that Eustice had guided us to the precise center of San Andres—an unimaginable feat of navigation. As the sun dropped over the horizon, we used the last of our gasoline to drive our canoe up on the white sands of a beach. Tourists in skimpy bathing gear gawked at our stained camouflage fatigues, ragged beards, and my braids.
The police didn’t know what to make of us. They sent for ambulances to take our wounded to the hospital. Immigration officials came, gruff bureaucrats who herded us into a dumpy waiting room until Brooklyn could make a phone call to his friend, the governor of San Andres. In minutes, we went from being mysterious strangers to welcome guests. I called Gloria from our hotel, and she cried when I told her I was safe.
While the Sandinistas were chasing us, my brother Bill, concerned for my safety, had tried to stop them from hunting us down and killing us. Their response was, “He knew the risks and he’s in our country illegally—so he’ll just have to take his chances like anyone else.” So much for personal rapport and solidarity between the Sandinistas, AIM, and the International Indian Treaty Council. When it came to killing Bill Means’s brother, the Marxists said essentially what the U.S. government had said at Wounded Knee—”You broke the law and we’re coming to kill you.”
Brooklyn was on good terms with the president of Colombia, who was so interested in peace in Nicaragua that he had hosted several meetings between the Sandinistas and MISUBASATA. He had even tried to broker a peace agreement between the United States and the Sandinistas. During our four days on San Andres, we got first-class treatment. The Colombians picked up our hotel tabs until arrangements were made through the U.S. embassy in San Jose to fly us back to Costa Rica. There we met with State Department representatives who told us that Brooklyn was unimportant, that he led only a few dozen men, and that MISUBASATA was nothing of consequence. Hank and I jumped all over them, but those guys knew only what they had been told.
It was unfortunate that most of the depositions, the video, and the film we had taken were lost in Bob Martin’s knapsack. He had salvaged enough, however, to put together a thirty-minute documentary that was aired by the ABC affiliate in Albuquerque. I didn’t need the film or notes to remind me of what I had seen and heard. I will never forget the young Miskito mother who, after giving birth beside a river, was forced to watch while a Sandinista officer decapitated her baby and tossed its tiny body into the water—or the young Miskito man whose genitals were severed and shin bones smashed because his brother was in MISUBASATA. Those Indians were struggling to survive the same kind of genocide my own ancestors had faced. I could not turn away and let them fight alone.