Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

Rattlesnake Dreams: An American Warrior's Story: OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983:   Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded t...

OCOTAL, NICARAGUA: 1983

  Ocotal is the capital town of Nicaragua's northern province of Nueva Segovia. I arrived there in late October, having finally prodded the Sandinista bureaucracy (efficiency was apparently not a revolutionary concept) into giving me written permission to travel and work as a journalist in areas near the Honduran border where contra ambushes had recently been taking place.

     Ocotal's central plaza was like many in Latin America. Broad paths connected adjacent and opposite corners to form an X-in-a-box. Blue-painted concrete benches sat, cool and quiet, at intervals along the pathways, in the shade of banana and palm trees. Children too young for school played around the benches on weekdays; adults gathered to sit in the shade and talk during the hot noons. The old Catholic church on one side of the square faced the municipal building on the other. A mural portrait of Che Guevara covered a large wall directly opposite the municipal building.

     Ocotal was the locus of a history I needed to touch. That history seemed embodied for me in a drinking fountain on one side of the square. It was a cairn of irregular stones and mortar seven or eight feet high, with the ceramic fountain and a bronze plaque set into the side facing the street. The plaque said that the fountain, and the potable water system of which it was the culmination, were a symbol of the cooperation between the peoples of Nicaragua and the United States. The ceramic fountain embedded in the stone cairn was long since broken; the plumbing which had once furnished water to it was also broken.

     The fountain had been erected during the reign of Anastasio Somoza García, the first of the Somoza clan of Nicaraguan dictators. He had risen to power through the Guardia Nacional, the anti-guerrilla army that had been trained and officered by U.S. Marines in the 1920's. The guerrillas, or "bandits," as the Marines called them, were the band of nationalist revolutionaries led by Augusto César Sandino, namesake of those in power when I was in Ocotal. One of the Marine officers who fought with the Guardia against Sandino was Chesty Puller, the greatest Marine hero they'd told us about in boot camp. Another officer, from an earlier intervention just prior to WWI, was Smedley Butler, one of two Marines ever to win two Medals of Honor.

     Somoza García, stepchild of those Marine heroes, had had Sandino assassinated, and once the Marines had left, turned the country into his fiefdom (“Nicaragua es mi finca” was a favorite expression) and the Guardia into his palace guard and counterinsurgency police. 

     The old Marine cuartel, or headquarters, was also facing the square, on the street at right angles to the one with the fountain and the mural of Che. The small original USMC plaque was still on the door in late 1983. 

     There was a major battle in Ocotal in 1929 between Sandino's men and the Marines, who were surrounded all night in the cuartel. The siege was broken by Marine aircraft from Managua, in what was apparently history's first use of the technique of dive-bombing.

     I looked up a fifty-seven-year old man named Joaquín Ponce, who had been a boy in the town at the time of the battle. I asked him to tell me what he remembered, and he told what he’d heard as a boy growing up, saying that the Marines were caught by surprise and trapped, and that only the bombing had saved them. He said that the bombing killed many people in the town; he didn't know exactly how many. 

     A heavy-set young woman was in the room with us, a militant Sandinista soldier who seemed to be a political watchdog sent to keep tabs on what was asked by, and said to, a foreign journalist. As I told Ponce about my own Marine history, including Vietnam, she became visibly furious. How could I have done that, and what was I doing here? 

     I explained to her and to Ponce that I now felt very differently than I had then, that I now thought that the Vietnam war was stupid and unjust, but that at the time I thought I was doing the right thing, and that I had been lied to about the situation there, and that in any case I'd been like so many other young men, thinking more with other parts of my body than with my brain. She bought none of that, and just sat there and glared at the ex-Marine who had dared crash the gate of her hard-won revolutionary world. 

     Ponce smiled a rueful, knowing smile: "Sí, Usted tuvo más corazón que cabeza;" literally, that I had more heart than head, but a fair translation of the phrase we'd used among ourselves in the Marine Corps, "more balls than brains."

     I was hanging around the corner in Ocotal where the local buses loaded and unloaded, asking if there was a bus to Teotecacinte, which is about a kilometer – a half hour’s walk - from the Honduran border. There were none. Someone said I could get as far as El Jícaro (which the Sandinistas had renamed Ciudad Sandino) or Jalapa. Someone else said I'd have better luck heading for El Espino or Las Manos, which are near a section of the border much closer to Ocotal than is Teotecacinte, but not as far north. I was puzzling over whether to take the path of easier access or to chance striking off in the direction of Teotecacinte, with less hope of getting there but, I thought, more to write about should I succeed. 

     An intense Nicaraguan man in his late twenties, who  reminded me of the actor Ricardo Montalban, approached. I'd noticed him scrutinizing me from the crowd. He asked where I wanted to go. I hesitated. Was he a cop? An agent? If so, for which side? And what did he want with me? 

     He wanted business. He had a jeep, he said. Doble tiro, four wheel drive. It ran good, he said. For fifty dollars, I could have him and the jeep for the whole day. He'd take me anywhere I wanted to go. Teotecacinte? I asked. His wince was visible. Why there? I'm a journalist, I said. I hear the contras have been crossing the border and raiding in that area. He nodded, winced again. Teotecacinte, okay. 

     His name was Alejandro Guillén. We drove around Ocotal while he bought fuel, said goodbye to his wife at their little house on one of Ocotal's dirt back streets, then to his girl friend on another street across town. He looked at me as if to ask if I was sure, gave a tense shrug, and we headed northeast into the bright morning.

     As we drove north from Ocotal, I asked Alejandro if he’d seen any other North American journalists in the area. He reached into a cubbyhole in the dash, pulled out a new business card, and handed it to me, saying this guy had recently been through, and was his last customer. It was the card of Stephen Kinzer, of the New York Times.

     We passed ambush sites marked by white crosses and fresh flowers (it was shortly after November 2, Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, when Latinos honor deceased relatives). We drove through the village of San Fernando, where, Alejandro told me, Sandino had led a miners' strike in what turned out to be one of the early armed confrontations between Sandino and the government of Somoza García.

     In San Fernando we had to stop and visit the local comandante, who, when we entered the building where he held sway, had one boot up on a low stool, getting a shoe shine from a young boy. His manner with the boy, and with Alejandro and me, was that of someone who liked the fact that he had been given some authority, and was not averse to letting us know that. After making sure that his boots were shined to his liking and taking his sweet time signing my permission slip to continue up the road, he dismissed us.

     Alejandro didn't seem to have any particular love for either side in the war; he seemed mostly to want to be left alone to do business. He didn't mind telling stories against both sides. He asked the rhetorical question, Who are the new bourgeoisie? and answered it himself by saying that it was the Sandinista comandantes and their hangers-on, with their nice houses and cars and special privileges.

     And he told a story, which he said was well known among Nicaraguans, about the former dictator's son, who was named after his father and nicknamed "Tachito" by those who liked him, because his father had been known as "Tacho,” but was called "El Chigüín" behind his back. The nickname had some derogatory origin; when I asked about it I never got a better answer than a shrug and a contemptuous leer(

). "El Chigüín," the story went, returned after his graduation from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and assumed command of EEBI, the Guardia Nacional's Escuela de Entrenamiento Básico de la Infantería, or Basic Infantry Training School. More than a military training institution, EEBI was the Guardia's counterrevolutionary elite. If you called it a Soviet-style NKVD with US military training and weapons, you wouldn’t be far off.

     Guillén said that, while training his recruits in EEBI, Tachito Somoza had a little call-and-response shouting match to raise their fighting spirit:

     Somoza: What are you?

     Recruits: Tiger!

     Somoza: And what does the tiger drink?

     Recruits: Blood!

     Somoza: And where does it get this blood?

     Recruits: From the Nicaraguan people!