Nicaragua A Town That Peace Forgot

By John Borrell/Pantasma

The menu at Alejandra Mirano's restaurant on the dusty main street of Pantasma is as sparse as the surroundings. Brown beans, rice and corn tortillas are the staples, served sometimes with eggs from the hens that cluck about the bare concrete floor. The ancient refrigerator no longer works, so the syrupy sodas are served at room temperature, an oppressive 90 degrees F at midday in April, as the town awaits the onset of the annual rains.

If the food and ambience at Mirano's restaurant are spartan, they mirror life in Pantasma, a garrison and farming town in Nicaragua's Jinotega province that has been as close to the center of the brutal six-year war as any other town in the country. Pantasma's 4,000 inhabitants should be happy: after signing a 60-day cease-fire last month, Sandinista and contra leaders met in Managua last week to negotiate details of the final accord. The talks bogged down on both technical and substantive issues, but the two sides predicted that progress would be made when they meet again this week. Nonetheless, Pantasma seems more weighed down by its bloody past than it is buoyed by any belief that the battles may finally be over. "The people have no confidence in either the government or the contras. They have been oppressed by both," says Padre Victor Mendoza, the town's Roman Catholic priest. "They hope, but they don't really dare to believe in an end to the war."

! "This is a town of widows," says Mirano, 31, a mother of five who lost her husband three years ago. Marlene Jarquin, 28, nods in agreement; she regularly visits the little cemetery by the river where her husband and 36 others, all victims of a contra attack in 1983, are interred in a mass grave. "Life is hard for us," Jarquin says. "It is difficult to believe in peace until it happens."

Such skepticism is understandable in Pantasma. The golden patchwork of maize and tobacco fields that spreads outward across the valley is halted halfway up the surrounding mountains by a wavy line of thick rain forest. It is ideal guerrilla cover, and the contras have used it to put Pantasma under a siege that has lifted only as the truce has taken hold, and then just partly. A dusk-to-dawn curfew continues, and government troops still patrol the winding mountain roads leading into Pantasma.

While peace means different things to different people, no one in Pantasma seems to feel that the conflict should continue until victory is claimed by either side. "We want peace because we want to be free," says Omar Cruz, a farmer. "In a war, no one is free."

The truth of that observation is apparent to Noel Rodriguez Sanchez, 19, a conscript in the Sandinista army who has spent nearly two years based in and around Pantasma. During that time, he says, he has been involved in more than 50 skirmishes or battles with the contras and seen more than a dozen friends die. "In Managua they don't know what the real war is like," he says. "It is tough and it is dirty, and people get killed every day." As Rodriguez sits in the shade of a store's veranda, his AK-47 gripped between his knees, he is counting the days until his demobilization. "Just a few more now," he grins, "and then I'll be going home. I don't want ever to fight again."

While the conflict is only one factor in Nicaragua's economic decline in recent years, an end to the fighting would probably result in an immediate, if small, increase in agricultural production. And for hundreds of thousands of campesinos in contested areas where the gun is king, peace would remove a lot of fear from their lives. "Farmers are often too frightened to work their lands properly," says Cruz, who has had crops and animals taken by the guerrillas. "And what is the point of producing things that get blown up by land mines on the way to market?"

For some, though, an end to the war is only the first of the country's many + desperate needs. Though the government recently announced a series of economic reforms and introduced a new currency in a bid to defeat an annual inflation rate of some 1,500%, few people believe it is capable of extracting Nicaragua from the economic mire in which the country finds itself. "We all want peace more than anything else," says Julio Duarte, a salesman from Managua who sells cheap cosmetics and novelties to the stores in Pantasma. "But peace and prosperity don't necessarily go hand in hand."

Like a growing number of his countrymen, Duarte blames the Sandinistas' prefabricated revolutionary socialism for many of Nicaragua's economic woes. He turns to baseball, a game made popular in Nicaragua by U.S. Marines in the early part of the century, to explain what he feels needs to happen. "What do you do when a pitcher is getting hit out of the ball park?" he asks. "You change him and try someone with a fresh arm, don't you?"

Taking refuge behind an analogy and a double interrogative may seem unnecessarily furtive at a time when the Sandinistas and the contras are talking earnestly of ending the bloodshed. But it is a pointed reminder that peace and the broad political consensus needed to sustain it are still no more than dreams for most Nicaraguans.