Mateo Cayetano Jarquín. Cold War History. Volume 18, Issue 1. February 2018.
In 2006, a Nicaraguan non-government organisation (NGO) went to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), where it formally accused the leadership of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of having committed genocide and crimes against humanity due to its treatment of the country’s ethnic minorities in the 1980s. In particular, the complaint focused on the Sandinista government’s decision to forcibly resettle some 8,500 Miskito Indians in December 1981, killing dozens and displacing thousands of others in what is evocatively remembered as la Navidad Roja—the Red Christmas. Reporting on the case and conventional wisdom in Nicaragua suggest that the FSLN removed the Miskito from their ancestral lands along the southern bank of the Coco River because they feared that these traditionally marginalised communities might serve as ‘social and logistical support’ for armed counter-revolutionary groups, composed mainly of ex-Somoza-era National Guardsmen, operating just across the border in Honduras. While the IACHR chose not to re-open an investigation it already conducted in 1983, and although the Nicaraguan Attorney General’s Office dismissed the charges in 2010, Sandinista leaders have since apologised for what they argue was a military miscalculation born from a cultural misunderstanding of the country’s ethnic minorities. Today, the Sandinistas’ sympathisers as well as their critics remember the plight of the Miskito, and particularly the Red Christmas incident, as a stain on the legacy of the revolutionary period (1979-90).
Yet in spite of this apparent consensus, others have offered an entirely different account of what happened in December 1981. In fact, the term ‘Red Christmas’ appears in a subset of North American journalism and scholarship; though usually in reference to a related, but different series of events. According to this view, ‘Red Christmas’ was actually the title of a failed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation in which a mainly-Miskito fighting force carried out border raids from Honduras in November and December 1981. The alleged goal was to distract the Sandinista military while the incipient United States-backed Contra insurgency planned offensives elsewhere in the national territory. The FSLN’s aforementioned resettlement policy, the argument goes, was a humanitarian evacuation that came in response to this foreign intervention.
While these differing accounts offer seemingly irreconcilable explanations for the origin of the term Red Christmas—one says that it was a state-executed military operation that brought violence upon innocent indigenous communities, the other that it was a covert United States plot—they actually share a potent common denominator that has eluded most scholarship on the Sandinista Revolution: in both versions, the Atlantic Coast region’s long-marginalised indigenous communities were paradoxically at the centre of Nicaragua’s transition from revolution to civil war in the early 1980s. Because the conflict in Nicaragua is usually cast as one that was fought between the FSLN and an interventionist United States foreign policy apparatus, scholars have primarily taken note of the Miskito only insofar as their humanitarian quandary was exploited by the United States government for propagandistic attacks on the Sandinistas throughout the 1980s. Also, while social scientists have fruitfully probed the historical roots of indigenous discontent with the Nicaraguan state and the FSLN’s revolutionary programme, these studies do not explore indigenous groups’ roles as historical actors which directly shaped the political and military history of the period. In general surveys of the Revolution, FSLN-indigenous relations are treated as a minor theatre, separate from the government’s greater attempt at radically transforming Nicaraguan society while simultaneously standing up to United States intervention. However, as the Red Christmas saga exposes—whether one believes that the forced relocation came in response to a CIA plot or as a reckless answer to indigenous resistance—the racial and ethnic cleavages in Nicaraguan society should be central to our understanding of how the Revolution spiralled into civil war and thereby turned the country into what historian Greg Grandin has called ‘one of the Cold War’s last killing fields’.
Using reports from various human rights investigations, witness accounts recorded in oral history projects, declassified United States foreign policy documents, and published Nicaraguan sources, this paper traces the breakdown in FSLN-indigenous relations which began with the arrest of Miskito leader Steadman Fagoth in February 1981 and culminated with the disputed events of the so-called Red Christmas at the end of that year. Scholars tend to emphasise the Reagan administration’s November 1981 approval of CIA operations to undermine the Sandinistas as the beginning of the so-called Contra War; several months earlier, however, the FSLN government was accusing an ethnic minority’s political leadership of plotting separatism and counter-revolution. By the end of the year, dozens of Sandinista cadres and unknown numbers of Miskito Nicaraguans had lost their lives in domestic armed conflict. While the United States was beginning to organise ex-Somocista guardsmen and would later fund Miskito insurgents, in 1981 it was primarily other American states—Honduras and Argentina—that were directly assisting the indigenous rebellion. It was also in 1981 that fractious FSLN-indigenous relations began to attract foreign media attention for the first time. The internationalisation of the affair ultimately gave birth to duelling narratives of the Miskito crisis that matured in the rest of the decade and whose remnants live on in the strange co-existence of multiple ‘Red Christmases’ in the historical record. This essay explores the chasm between those two narratives—a Nicaraguan one which views the Red Christmas as a domestic affair removed from the country’s entanglement in the Cold War, and a primarily North American narrative which saw the violence as the result of plotting in Washington—using la Navidad Roja to show how both indigenous action and Latin American intervention played an understudied role at the onset of the Nicaraguan Civil War.
From Revolution to Red Christmas
The Marxist-Leninist FSLN framed both its guerrilla insurrection and revolutionary agenda as part of a struggle for national liberation. But when Fidel Castro visited Nicaragua’s Atlantic provinces shortly after the Sandinistas’ 1979 revolutionary takeover, he alerted his Central American counterparts to a complication in this framing: the Nicaraguans, he observed, faced the problem of a ‘revolution in two countries’. Along with the rest of Central America, Nicaragua declared its independence from Spain in 1821. The country’s sizable Caribbean Coast, however, was never successfully colonised by the Spanish, as the region’s various indigenous groups (and later, afro-indigenous populations descended from Caribbean maroon communities) retained a formidable autonomy over their lands by incorporating themselves into the British Empire via informal protectorate. While the so-called Mosquito Coast was eventually annexed by Nicaragua in the late-19th century, the region’s English toponyms—Bluefields, Monkey Point, Greytown, to name a few—still serve as a stark reminder of an Anglo-American, Protestant past that further separates its inhabitants from the Spanish-speaking, self-identifying mestizo people that live on the other side of Nicaragua’s central mountain chains and who comprise roughly 90% of the country’s population. The gap is also economic; because the Atlantic Coast is home to few of the country’s traditional export commodities, successive governments in the 20th century did not bother to integrate the region, reinforcing its extreme peripherality to national political economy. Unsurprisingly, then, the FSLN-led military struggle against the 40-year, United States-backed Somoza dictatorship, which claimed some 40,000 lives, did not enjoy the widespread support of the Atlantic’s indigenous and black communities. Indeed, as journalist Stephen Kinzer put it, the ‘revolution was almost like a foreign news story to people in Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas’. Thus, in a leftist party programme which featured the expected calls for nationalisation of key industries and radical agrarian reform, the Sandinistas entirely obviated the issue of indigenous rights and of racism more generally, instead only promising the ‘Development of the Atlantic Coast region and its integration into the nation’.
Less than four months after the triumph of the Revolution, however, the new government realised that such integration would prove more difficult than expected. At a convention of Miskito Indians in Puerto Cabezas, the North Atlantic region’s largest town, Sandinista leaders urged the delegates to participate in the revolutionary process by joining the FSLN’s class-based mass organisations, such as the Sandinista Workers’ Central or the Party Youth. Already operating in the region, however, was an ethnic-based organisation called APLROMISU (Alliance for the Promotion of the Miskitos and Sumos), sponsored by European and United States Moravian pastors who had filled the void left by a largely absent Nicaraguan state in the 1960s and 1970s. Surprised by the militancy they encountered at the convention and distrustful of the existing organisation, the Sandinistas dissolved ALPROMISU and created a new political action group called MISURASATA (Miskitos, Sumos, Ramas, and Sandinistas Aslatakanta [United]). The new organisation was awarded a seat on the legislative Council of State, but its leadership was handpicked from among a group of young Miskito leaders who had previously developed ties to the FSLN while studying at a national university in the Pacific city of León.
This new pan-indigenous body failed to mitigate tensions wrought by the FSLN’s introduction of its revolutionary reforms to the Atlantic Coast. Take, for example, the landmark National Literacy Campaign, which by successfully reducing the national illiteracy rate from 50.3% to 12.9% in only five months, became the most celebrated and consequential of the Sandinistas’ efforts to substantially transform Nicaraguan society. Yet, the literacy crusade left a bitter legacy on the Atlantic Coast. After its launch in March 1980, the campaign wore on for several months before its leaders finally acceded to indigenous demands to teach not just Spanish but also Miskito, Sumo and English creole. At best, this hesitancy was emblematic of the FSLN’s well-intentioned but ultimately Managua-centred and top-down approach to implementing policies in the Atlantic region. At worst, the imposition of Spanish as the sole official language implied a violent dismissal of indigenous culture; a Miskito commander would later argue that during the literacy campaign his community felt as if ‘the Sandinistas wanted us to stop being Miskitos…they wanted us to turn into Nicaraguans like any other.’ Sergio Ramírez, a leading Sandinista figure and member of the Revolution’s governing junta, describes how tensions were compounded by racism and ignorance on the part of FSLN officials:
Yet another chasm opened when we were faced with the Miskitos, Sumos, and Ramas, indigenous groups from the Caribbean coast, which is so foreign to those of us who live on Nicaragua’s Pacific side that we do not call it the Caribbean, as we should, but the Atlantic. We expected to integrate them overnight into the revolution, its values, modern life, well-being. It was an ideological paternalism, different from Somoza’s, which had never created well-intentioned programs, but we knew nothing of their culture or their languages, to the point of communicating them via interpreters, and we had no knowledge of their religious beliefs or their forms of social organisation. Likewise, we knew very little about the black population, also situated on the Caribbean coast.
As Ramírez suggests by alluding to the absence of the Somoza-era government on the Atlantic Coast, much of the tension stemmed from the fact that FSLN had promised national liberation in a national territory that was not yet fully assimilated by the Nicaraguan state.
Meanwhile, the rhetoric of revolution heightened the expectations of those sectors of the Miskito leadership that were chosen to head MISURASATA. One of the MISURASATA leaders who would later take up arms against the FSLN government, Brooklyn Rivera, partly explained his defection by saying that ‘the fervour of the revolutionary triumph injected into the soul, heart and atmosphere that everybody could express themselves and participate. Before there was no incentive.’ Following that spirit, MISURASATA immediately took advantage of its new position in the revolutionary government and launched an unprecedented campaign for regional autonomy which demanded the recognition of Indian ownership over lands that comprised roughly a third of the national territory. Sandinista leaders naturally sensed a whiff of separatism in these demands for autonomy; after all, the Atlantic Coast was the only place where the revolutionary government had encountered large-scale popular resistance, as was the case in Bluefields in September 1980, where the FSLN decided to cut telephone service and arrest dozens of people in response to massive protests against the arrival of Cuban school teachers. The Sandinista Revolution had elicited a complicated and unintended set of responses among the country’s ethnic minorities; in an intelligence report titled ‘Reports of Atlantic Coast Separatism,’ a United States embassy official ominously noted that ‘having publicly committed itself to reverse the long neglect of Zelaya [then the name of the two Atlantic Coast provinces], Managua has a lot at stake in seeking to clamp down public unrest.’
It was in this context that the government arrested 33 MISURASATA leaders in February 1981. In a press conference, the Chief of Operations for the State Security apparatus announced the disruption of ‘Plan 81’, which he described as a ‘military move forming on the Atlantic Coast, to seek the separation of that extensive zone from the central government.’ The litany of accusations against MISURASATA included their alleged coordination of massive protests against the government, ongoing attempts to boycott the literacy campaign, and plans to sabotage land reform talks with the government. As further proof of the organisation’s suspect commitment to the Revolution, State Security officials also revealed documents which demonstrated that Steadman Fagoth—the most well-known and influential Miskito and MISURASATA leader—had been an informant for the Somoza regime in the 1970s. Perhaps more surprisingly, three days later the government revealed that army troops had encountered armed resistance when attempting to arrest another suspected separatist in the coastal town of Prinzapolka, resulting in the death of four Sandinista soldiers, four ‘separatists,’ as well as the injury of 10 civilians. In light of this bloodshed—unprecedented since the FSLN took power two years before—Sergio Ramírez promised to ‘dismantle a conspiratorial organisation which on the entirety of the Atlantic Coast has promoted (we have multiple documents that demonstrate this) a separatist attitude and an absurd, ridiculously separatist movement based on a racial idea or criteria.’
Reporting on the arrests, United States ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo commented that the ‘Sandinistas, through a foolish and provocative action, have brought themselves a very serious problem.’ Indeed, the backlash was such—massive protests by Miskito Indians on the Atlantic Coast, an editorial in the opposition daily in which the remaining Miskito leadership denied all the allegations—that mere days passed before the government released most of the MISURASATA leaders, albeit only ‘those that weren’t compromised by Fagoth.’ Suddenly, Miskito leaders such as Hazel Law, who until then had been accused of separatism, reaffirmed their commitment to the Revolution and broke with Fagoth in public declarations which the United States embassy believed to have been made under duress. After two months, however, government negotiations with MISURASATA over the land reform issue had stalled, and sensing that a gesture of good faith was the only way to make progress on the issue, the FSLN released Fagoth from custody in April. Pezzullo approved of the decision, celebrating the indigenous communities’ organised resistance while also pointing out that the Sandinistas were wise to move on from a situation where the ‘threat of an outbreak of violence on the coast was real.’
Unfortunately for the FSLN Pezzullo was wrong. Roughly one week later, Fagoth broke his promise to cooperate with the government and fled across the border to Honduras. While MISURASATA leaders still loyal to the FSLN denounced him as a traitor and called on Miskitos to stay firmly in solidarity with the Revolution, Fagoth began broadcasting counter-revolutionary calls to armed insurrection on Radio 15 de Septiembre, a Honduras-based radio station operated by Nicaraguan exiles. Speaking in the native Miskito language, Fagoth argued to his compatriots that their situation was worse under the revolutionary government than it had been under Somoza, and called on all Indians to cross the border and join his camp. That summer alone, somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 heeded his call and crossed the Coco River, which forms the Honduras-Nicaragua border but does not serve as a natural boundary for the Miskito community—it runs right through it.
Nevertheless, Fagoth’s crossing to Honduras in the summer of 1981 marked the internationalisation of the FSLN-indigenous crisis. In July, the FSLN passed its agrarian reform law—a cornerstone of its revolutionary project—without recognising or legalising communal indigenous lands. They disbanded MISURASATA shortly afterwards. Meanwhile in Tegucigalpa, Fagoth warned of a Miskito ‘invasion’ if the Sandinistas did not accede to indigenous demands, and for the first time publicly promised to look ‘for alliances with democratic groups and countries including Nicaraguan exiles.’ A CIA report commenting on those declarations noted that exiles in Miami were sending shipments of food and perhaps other materials to Puerto Lempira, the Honduran port city where Fagoth’s camp was based. Perhaps just as significant as the potential involvement of foreign-based military actors was the fact that FSLN-indigenous tensions first began receiving international media attention at this time. In reporting on those frictions, some North American journalists emphasised the revolutionary government’s ‘bungling’ of integration and their failure to take note of the Miskitos’ cultural and ethnic idiosyncrasies. Others, as exemplified in a Guardian report from 3 August titled ‘Steadman’s beachhead—a report on the non-Nicaraguans who threaten the Sandinista (sic),’ took a much more positive view of the FSLN’s approach, describing their attempts to improve the livelihood of Nicaragua’s Indians as a ‘thankless task’. General sympathy or antipathy toward the FSLN informed the authors’ depiction of the Nicaraguan government’s indigenous policies, a pattern which would persist throughout the decade as Sandinista treatment of the Miskito—including the Red Christmas episode—received greater international scrutiny.
The foggy events which transpired along the Coco River during the fall of 1981 are at the heart of the conflicting accounts of the so-called Red Christmas. After two years in power, the FSLN’s leaders were proud of their accomplishments and of the interest that their project had attracted globally, but they were also keenly aware of further work that had to be done to consolidate the Revolution. That year’s inauguration of hawkish President Ronald Reagan alerted the Sandinistas to the urgency of this task, especially once the new administration halted economic aid to Nicaragua in March and quietly began allowing former National Guardsmen to organise and train on United States soil. However, while the party daily Barricada frequently reported on any signs that the new United States government was preparing to intervene or otherwise undermine the Revolution, it did not reveal that between September and January, there were at least 25 instances of armed combat between Sandinista troops and Miskito combatants. During that period, 60 Sandinista military and civilian officials lost their lives, with half of those deaths taking place in one notable incident where Miskito fighters ambushed FSLN soldiers at Fagoth’s hometown of San Carlos. In a retaliatory attack, Sandinista troops killed dozens of unarmed Miskito at the river town of Leimus on 24 and 25 December, an event which is central to contemporary human rights complaints against the FSLN government. The total number of Miskito casualties is unknown, because Fagoth’s forces also committed countless atrocities against local inhabitants they regarded as Sandinista sympathisers.
The Ministries of Defence and the Interior did not acknowledge that any conflict had taken place until a press conference the following February, where officials revealed that the Sandinista Armed Forces had successfully disrupted a ‘separatist plot’ in which ‘ex-National Guardsmen and deceived Miskitos led by Steadman Fagoth hoped to sow terror in the Northern Region’. While the official list of casualties attested to the violence which had taken place in the North Atlantic region, the evidence for allegations of a greater separatist conspiracy was provided by a Moravian pastor named Efraín Wilson, who was arrested upon the discovery in his home of a nylon string which had allegedly been used to strangle a Sandinista worker. In a videotaped confession played for the media, Wilson claimed to have been instructed by Steadman Fagoth to lay the foundations among the Miskito communities on the Nicaraguan side of the border for a counter-revolutionary plot, ‘which he said had been christened “Red Christmas” because they expected that there would be a lot of blood’. This is the first time that the attention-grabbing term appears in the historical record.
The FSLN waited two weeks before revealing exactly how it had responded to the alleged plot: Sandinista troops forcibly moved 42 villages from the southern bank of the Coco River to a camp of settlements 60 km into Nicaragua’s interior dubbed Tasba Pri (‘free land’ in Miskito). As explained in the introduction to this essay, Nicaraguans typically refer to this government relocation of 8,500 Miskito Indians, which actually took place during the first few days of the new year, when they call to mind the Red Christmas. At the time, the government tried to frame the resettlement as a humanitarian project, a position which was at odds with both the Miskito death toll as well as the significant proportion of the local population that fled to Honduras in response to the military’s mobilisation. During the resultant investigation carried out by the IACHR in 1983, the FSLN Vice Minister for Atlantic Coast Affairs, in defending the government from accusations of genocide, explained that while the original plan was to gradually resettle the Miskito to
more fertile lands and more secure areas…the resettlement process necessarily had to be undertaken quickly for military reasons, due to the war situation in the zone as a result of the presence of counterrevolutionary camps along the left bank of the Coco River.
This military justification satisfied Article 27 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which stipulates that member states might break with the convention’s provisions ‘in time of war, public danger, or other emergency that threatens the independence or security of a State Party.’ Beyond acquitting the Nicaraguan government of extraordinary wrongdoing or systematic human rights abuses, the Commission also poured cold water on some of the demands that had inspired action by Nicaraguan Indian organisations, arguing that their claims were supported ‘only with respect to the preservation of their culture, practice of their religion and the use of their own language, but it does not include the right to self-determination or political autonomy.’
Indigenous Rebellion and the Origins of the Nicaraguan Civil War
In the second half of 1981 and early days of 1982, there were not one, but several Red Christmases in revolutionary Nicaragua. In remembering this moment, some point to the Sandinista government’s mistreatment of the Miskito community, while others emphasise foreign actors’ role in inciting violence. The reality is capacious enough for both perspectives.
The FSLN’s decision to coercively relocate thousands of its citizens cannot be disentangled from the acrimonious state-indigenous relations that date back to beginning of the Revolution; it also cannot be divorced from government fears of foreign intervention, especially as other Latin American states—Honduras and Argentina—sought to exploit indigenous discontent in Central America for their own anti-communist crusades at this juncture. By tracing the breakdown in FSLN-indigenous relations in 1981 we can begin to shed light on the conflicting accounts of the Red Christmas but, more importantly, we also see how a critical turning point in Nicaragua’s Cold War history does not fit neatly into the traditional, Washington-centred framework that typifies most scholarship on the Latin American experience during the period.
Close examination of the origins of FSLN-Miskito strife shows that Nicaragua’s revolutionary government faced a significant military threat inside national territory earlier than most scholarship suggests. Surveys and general analyses of the revolutionary period overlook the Sandinistas’ repeated accusations of separatism, the violence that accompanied their attempts to control the indigenous leadership, and the bloody skirmishes they fought in the final months of 1981. All of these events took place several months before the Contra’s first major attack of 15 March 1982, in which Frente Democratico Nicaragüense (FDN) commandos blew up two bridges in northwestern Nicaragua using high-tech explosives and detailed maps provided by the Pentagon. In response to that ‘opening shot of the Contra War’, the FSLN decreed a nationwide state of emergency and took extraordinary measures to crack down on dissidence. But the Sandinistas had already taken similar measures—albeit on a smaller scale—in response to indigenous mobilisation, such as their 24 November 1981 declaration of a military emergency zone affecting 24 municipalities across a large swath of the North Atlantic territory.
This neglected history of indigenous rebellion calls into question the ability of the term ‘Contra War’ to do justice to the full range of domestic sources of political violence in the early revolutionary period. While the FSLN could look to Nicaraguan exiles and former Somocista militants abroad and dismiss them as traitors or holdovers from the ancièn regime, the leadership of MISURASATA and the communities they represented tied their insurrectionary threats to concrete demands that they expected to be fulfilled within the framework of the Revolution. French anthropologist Gilles Bataillon, who conducted hundreds of interviews with Miskito combatants between 1984 and 1985, argues that ‘the armed option’ only became attractive when decades-old dreams of autonomy and independence were activated by FSLN’s cultivation of a myth of the guerrillero and their organisation of MISURASATA cadres as professional revolutionaries ‘in the style of What Is to Be Done?’ An oral history project conducted by the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Nicaraguan Caribbean Coast (URACCAN) explores the historical grievances which motivated Miskito leaders to revolt, but also shows how other Miskito Indians took up arms due to ‘circumstantial preoccupations’ such as their loyalty to leaders like Fagoth, or the everyday mistreatment they received by FSLN troops and officials. Thus, if historians are to fully comprehend how a tremendously popular revolutionary project degenerated into civil war, they should pay as much attention to Nicaragua’s ethno-racial fissures as they do to civil opposition in Managua or interventionist plotting in Washington.
In fact, the role of the United States in these early indigenous rebellions is far less straightforward than scattered allegations of a CIA plot suggest. As discussed in the previous section, ‘Operation Red Christmas’ was the name that FSLN officials claimed Steadman Fagoth had given to his late 1981 Miskito border raids. However, there is currently no documentary evidence suggesting that United States intelligence directly participated in this effort, let alone pointing to an actual CIA operation by that name. Violence between armed Miskito groups and the FSLN government predates the Reagan administration’s formal approval of CIA covert action in Nicaragua, which was signed in late November 1981. Indigenous discontent with the regime clearly dates back even further. Moreover, Fagoth—whose forces did not join the FDN until 1982—himself has claimed that he did not receive training or financing from the CIA until the spring of 1983, when the agency gave him $600,000 worth of weapons, 500,000 bullets, and 2,000 pairs of boots. Uriel Vanegas, another Miskito leader who broke with Fagoth later in the decade, also claimed that starting in 1981 the insurgents maintained themselves for almost two years without the support of the United States, which only offered direct assistance at the end of 1982 and early 1983, as Fagoth suggests. In fact, when FSLN officials defended their Tasba Pri resettlement policy at the IACHR or in other public venues, they did not directly accuse the CIA of inciting or financing the violence which presaged the relocation effort. The previous year, when the government released the detained MISURASATA leaders, Lenin Cerna, the head of the State Security apparatus, insisted that ‘if we thought the CIA was involved, we’d be doing much more.’ The first time that the term ‘Red Christmas’ appears as a CIA plot was in a 13 November 1983 full-page advertisement in the New York Times, sponsored by the indigenous rights group Indigenous World, warning readers of an imminent covert intervention in Nicaragua and citing as evidence the December 1981 ‘Red Christmas: a CIA operation reminiscent of the Bay of Pigs, designed to inspire a Miskito uprising against the Sandinistas.’
While such claims were unsubstantiated, foreign intervention still played an important role. The Miskitos’ success in challenging the Nicaraguan state, forcing the government to declare a military emergency zone and take the costly decision of resettling thousands of its citizens, begs the question as to how these indigenous groups developed such military capacity in the first place. Gilles Bataillon says that in the December raids which included the successful ambush at San Carlos, the Miskito guerrillas equipped themselves with.22 calibre hunting rifles they gathered from their own communities. From the moment that Fagoth fled Nicaragua in May, however, the Miskito insurgents began to receive substantial support from two other American states that wished to intervene against the FSLN government—Honduras and Argentina. The Honduran military allowed Fagoth to operate freely in Puerto Lempira and to set up a training camp near the town of Mokorón. Ariel Armony, in his study of Argentine anti-communist intervention in the Central American crisis, describes how a group of 50 Argentine advisors replaced former National Guardsmen in training the fresh Miskito forces in guerrilla warfare.
Argentine and Honduran meddling was no secret to the Sandinista leadership. Indeed, it was made plainly obvious when on 29 December 1981, a Honduran military plane crashed in an accident near the Coco River and Steadman Fagoth—along with his local benefactor and School of the Americas graduate, Major Leonel Luque Jiménez—emerged from the wreckage (unscathed). That small- and mid-level American states, pursuing their own Cold War agendas, would take the leading role in exploiting the Revolution’s social fissures should not come as a surprise to historians either. As political scientist William Leogrande explains, when in December 1981 CIA director William Casey presented his interventionist plans to the House of Representatives, ‘it was presented as an accomplished fact. Argentina and Honduras had already begun building the exile army; Washington was simply “buying in” to an ongoing operation.’ Or as FDN leader Enrique Bermudez put it after the CIA initiated talks to bring together the disparate Contra (but not yet Miskito) forces, ‘The Hondurans will provide the territory, the Americans the money, and the Argentines the front.’
Armony has persuasively argued that while ‘the Contra army would eventually become a wholly United States-owned, and operated venture… it was originally set up by the Argentines to promote their own foreign policy interests.’ Those interests included practical concerns, such as the desire to expand Argentina’s influence in the hemisphere as well as the fear that a Sandinista Nicaragua might provide exiled Argentine guerrillas with a platform for intelligence operations back in the Southern Cone. Armony places special emphasis, however, on Argentina’s Central American intervention as an ideologically fueled ‘crusade’ launched by a military regime that sincerely felt that the Carter administration’s human rights agenda had compromised the global ‘war without frontiers’ against communism. Some sceptics have claimed that, in any case, the ideology was born from United States National Security Doctrine, the tactics learned in North American military academies, and that the real purpose of Argentine meddling in Central America was to win favours from Washington in other policy areas.
But the timing of Argentine intervention in Nicaragua with respect to the Carter and Reagan administrations’ own policies complicates what might seem like a simple case of collaboration with a superpower patron. When the Carter administration cut off military aid to the Somoza regime in 1979, the Argentine government broke with United States policy by stepping in to fill the void. And when Thomas Enders, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, visited Buenos Aires in March 1982 to coordinate policy in Central America, Argentine military advisors had already been operating in Honduras for at least 14 months. Paradoxically, the virulently anti-communist Reagan administration, which adopted a much more aggressive posture vis a vis the Nicaraguan government than its predecessor, inadvertently wound up dialling down Argentine operations against the Sandinistas. That same spring, Argentina invaded the South Atlantic’s Falkland Islands—the sovereignty over which it disputes with United Kingdom—falsely presuming that its intervention in Central America would buy United States neutrality in the crisis. After some wavering, however, Reagan backed the United Kingdom, shocking the Argentine generals and leading them to pare down their participation in the Contra scheme. The Argentine Junta’s subsequent military defeat helped produce its downfall and replacement by a democratic government. But remarkably, some Argentine officials stayed in Central America to work with anti-Sandinista forces through the end of 1984—two years after the collapse of the anti-communist military regime.
Further research using Honduran government documents is required to illuminate the sources of that country’s conduct in the late Cold War. Publicly, the Honduran government—which had maintained cordial diplomatic relations with Managua in the first year of FSLN rule—began complaining in 1980 that the Sandinistas’ arms buildup was disturbing the balance of forces in Central America. In addition, the government in Tegucigalpa accused the FSLN of supporting Salvadoran Marxist guerrillas operating inside Honduran territory. Similarly upset over Managua’s support for the Salvadoran rebels, and still hoping to exert a moderating influence on the FSLN, the Carter administration cut off aid to Nicaragua that year. But according to Robert Pastor—then a staffer on the National Security Council—the United States government was not immediately aware that Honduras was beginning to receive Argentine advisors in December 1980 to help train Nicaraguan exiles. In any event, United States organising for such an operation would not have been required given the extensive personal and ideological links between the Honduran and Argentine armed forces. General Gustavo Martínez Alvarez, who became head of Honduras’ Public Security Forces in August 1980, was trained at an Argentine military academy for three years and subsequently borrowed Southern Cone Dirty War tactics (e.g. the ‘disappearance’ of leftist dissidents) for implementation in his country. During his training, Alvarez befriended Argentine officers like Osbaldo Ribeiro—who later became Argentina’s point man in Central America—and assimilated their rabidly anti-communist world view. Alvarez’s sympathies for the South American country ran so deep that, in a remarkable example of the tangled, overlapping conflicts of the Cold War in the Third World, he allegedly threatened to stop cooperating with CIA operatives in Honduras when the Reagan administration backed United Kingdom in the Falklands Crisis. Unlike Argentina, and despite the façade of a civilian government, Honduras continued to be ruled throughout the decade by military leaders who acted as proxies for the CIA and turned the country into a base of operations for the Contra.
The origins of Miskito rebellion against the Sandinista Revolution cannot be fully understood without considering the interests and ideologies of the Honduran and Argentine military regimes. Soviet and United States interventions undeniably shaped the framework in which political change and conflict took place in the Third World during the second half of the 20th century, but Nicaragua’s Red Christmases provide a window on the Latin American agendas and intra-regional state interventions that also moulded the region’s Cold War.
Conclusion
News of the resettlement effort immediately exposed the Sandinistas to a costly and persistent propaganda assault which would last the entirety of their time in power. As evidence of their ‘atrocious genocidal actions’, Secretary of State Alexander Haig drew attention to a photograph published by Le Figaro which apparently showed hundreds of burning and mutilated Miskito corpses—but another news agency was quick to point out that it was actually a four-year-old picture of Red Cross workers burning casualties of the insurrectionary war against the Somoza dictatorship. Jean Kirkpatrick, United States ambassador to the United Nations, took advantage of the resettlement to compare the FSLN regime to that of Nazi Germany and argued that with their ‘massive assault on the Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua probably stands in the first place as a human rights violator in that region.’ And perhaps most memorably, President Reagan would eventually declare that as a potential victim of totalitarianism, he too was a Miskito. Although their claims were grossly exaggerated, and while the Sandinista government’s abuses paled in comparison to those of United States-backed neighbour regimes, the Reagan administration’s Miskito crusade—entirely motivated by its self-declared Cold War objective of ‘rolling back the Communist Empire’—helped inform the development of an indigenous rights agenda within the revolutionary government. By 1986, years of indigenous insurrection as well as pressure from the international community pushed the Sandinistas to pass a landmark constitutional amendment that finally recognised Nicaragua’s ethnic pluralism and granted autonomy to the country’s two Atlantic provinces.
Long after the Cold War ended, however, familiar problems remain on the Coast; the persistence of ethnic tensions in the absence of North American intervention forces us to ask if the ‘Cold War lens’ is truly the appropriate one for historians studying Third World revolutions in the late 20th century. At the end of 2015, Miskito leaders in the North Atlantic town of Waspám warned of another potential Red Christmas as hostilities arose between their communities and mestizo settlers moving in from the west. Indeed, the term Navidad Roja is frequently invoked in such a catch-all manner as a general signifier of mestizo-indigenous conflict, suggesting that at least in Nicaraguans’ social memory, the Red Christmas incident is remembered for its connotations of ethnic strife rather than for its relevance to the Sandinistas’ attempts to ward off foreign intervention. As this paper has described, the FSLN’s costly decision to resettle the Miskitos was informed by both fears of foreign intervention as well as the concern that indigenous demands for autonomy might compromise their efforts to quickly consolidate their revolutionary state and programme. This serves as an important reminder that, to borrow historian Matthew Connelly’s words, the Cold War can circumscribe the views of historians as much as it can cloud the decision-making of its actors: in this case, the traditional Cold War historiography on the Sandinista Revolution, which emphasises the Reagan administration’s efforts to undermine it, has overlooked the importance of the 1981 collapse in FSLN-Miskito relations for the origins of civil war in Nicaragua.
The Cold War as an analytic category is still essential for arriving at that conclusion, however. As Odd Arne Westad explains, ‘Third World leaders’ choice of ideological allegiance brought them into close collaboration with one or the other of the superpowers, and led them to subscribe to models of development that proved disastrous for their own peoples.’ Disappointment among Nicaragua’s Indian populations was both a reaction to the Sandinista agenda as well as a product of the aspirations it unleashed. When the Miskito decided to act, they received critical assistance from Latin American states like Argentina and Honduras (without whom Fagoth’s rebellion at least would have been dead in the water) pursuing their own reactionary, anti-communist agendas.
Which is to say that the Cold War lens is still fruitful—in this essay, because it helped bridge the period’s military and socio-cultural histories—so long as it does not merely provide the view from Washington. As with recent studies on Allende’s Chile and the intra-Caribbean origins of the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz, this article used local sources to show how the global superpower conflict and its corollaries overlapped with pre-existing regional conflicts to inform what Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough call ‘the indigenous origins of the Latin American Cold War’. The Sandinista Revolution is especially worth revisiting under this framework because, by virtue of having taken place in the 1980s, it can also point to the uniquely Latin American legacies of the Cold War. To cite but one example explored here, Nicaragua’s 1987 Constitution and its recognition of indigenous rights—born from a strange mix of ethnic organising, Marxist-inspired revolution, and Cold War-informed military concerns—was the first major victory for a transnational indigenous rights movement that became a major player on the Latin American political scene in the 1990s and 2000s. While scholars can point to the persistence of human rights abuses in the region as a direct legacy of the era of United States-sponsored anti-communist dictatorships, other trends such as the belated emergence of wide-scale ethnic-based organising in Latin America at the end of the 20th century are not usually interpreted as consequences of the Cold War.
Back in 1983, however, the OAS Human Rights Commission concluded its report on the Miskito crisis by repeating its recommendations to the FSLN while also cautioning ‘that an overall solution to the difficulties of the Government of Nicaraguan with a considerable number of Nicaraguans of Miskito origin to some extent will depend on the achievement of peace throughout Central America.’ Their conclusion was nothing less than an admission that the fate of all Nicaraguans—indigenous, mestizo, Sandinista, and otherwise—was ultimately and intimately tied to the Cold War.