GUNS IN COSTA RICA

                                               Guns in Costa Rica

     In Costa Rica, I started with a map, with the bits of information I'd picked up reading and listening, and with my own hunches about how military operations, and secret ones in particular, work. First, the border-jumpers would need roads. And, because they were working with Americans, they'd need airstrips, preferably close to roads which were passable in all seasons yet not too heavily traveled.

     And, since the real energy behind the push against Nicaragua came from Americans rather than Hondurans or Costa Ricans, there would have to be places for the secret-war types to hang out, get drunk, get laid, and otherwise indulge themselves in the neo-colonial niceties that were part of the reason they lived the lives they lived. (Some of us began referring to people from the United States as "North Americans," feeling that people from Central and South America were as much "Americans" as we were.) The usage never seemed to take hold in the U.S., but it is common in South America, where many (not all) people see North Americans’ habit of seeing themselves as the only “Americans” as just another example of our national arrogance.

     I went to the office of the Tico Times, Costa Rica’s respected English-language newspaper. People there, including the proprietor, were helpful. But when I asked a reporter who had written about the Nicaragua situation if he cared to accompany me to the border area, I got an emphatic "no." He went further, saying that he very much doubted that I would find a journalist in Costa Rica who would be willing to go there, not now. It was because of La Penca.

     In May of 1984, the contra leader Edén Pastora, who was leading a group of contras raiding across the border, had held a press conference just inside Nicaragua at La Penca. Someone disguised as a journalist had set off a bomb, gravely wounding Pastora and killing three of the journalists present and wounding over a dozen. A reporter from the Tico Times was one of those killed.

     During the three or four days I hung around San Jose trying to get my bearings and to get the lay of the land from journalists working in the country, I prowled the streets of the capital at night, sniffing for the spoor of the covert-operations types I knew must be flocking to the tiny, neutral, anti-military country Mickey had told me was becoming a fogón of military activity.

     One of the first watering holes I wandered into was Nashville South, a hole-in-the-wall country and western bar that was a habitual stop for all manner of U.S. expatriots, including being something of an "in" place for the more adventurous among the American Embassy crowd. The place was lined with barn wood and wooden shingles, had a lot of Jimmy Buffet and Willie Nelson on the jukebox, and a green and white flag with the words CALIFORNIA REPUPLIC in bold letters, a dead replica of the original Bear Republic flag, except that it had two bears instead of one, and they were fucking.

     Good a place as any to start, I thought.

     The covert war was definitely present in Nashville South, but I didn't get very far in penetrating it. Military people wear civilian clothes in a way that lets you know it's a change from how they normally are, even when they're trying not to. When such types would be cloistered at the bar in what appeared to be a particularly focused conversation, they always quieted when I sauntered by. I guess I was as obvious to them as they were to me. I did see a couple of different Latinos, obviously just in from the boonies, hurriedly stash military rucksacks in the back. The closest I came there to getting useful information was several conversations with a young German woman who worked for a U.S. agency that administered aid to people in outlying towns. She said that her boyfriend, a Texan, was working on a massive construction project, a wide road with over-strength bridges up near the border that she was sure had something to do with planned operations against Nicaragua. She herself was adamantly against the contra effort, as much for its attempt to militarize Costa Rica as for its targeting of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

     I asked for her help. Could she talk to her boyfriend? Get me facts, numbers, names of contracting companies, documents? She thought it over, agreeing that a military move by the U.S. against southern Nicaragua could trash the fragile Costa Rican democracy. But finally she said helping me would jeopardize her job. She backed off.

     Another place I went to a few times was Key Largo, decorated with posters of Bogart and Bacall from the movie of the same name. It was known as a pick-up joint, and openly worked by prostitutes. Still, with its dark hardwood bar and old palms growing just outside the windows, it had a certain sleazy class about it. I got in a couple of long conversations with a young Costa Rican who was a member of a folk-dancing troupe. He deplored the U.S. attempt to militarize Costa Rica. He said that he didn't have direct personal knowledge of what was going on in the border areas, but could probably find out, as it was common knowledge among "Ticos," or Costa Ricans. But it turned out that the main reason he talked to me was that he wanted to go to bed with me, and when that failed, so did his willingness to help. He'd get in trouble, he said.

     There was a restaurant called the Varadero, or Traveler, (also the name of a well-known beach in Cuba) where people weren't so timid. It was run by Cuban exiles. The food was good, and cheap. A glance at the menu told you where these people were coming from: a featured item was pollo a lo Reagan.

     I'd already noticed people in civilian clothes carrying concealed pistols. I seemed to have a knack for that since the time in Colorado Springs when I'd yelled out in the restaurant, "Hey Dave, look! Those guys are all packin' guns!" and the three feds, or whoever they were, had melted away. Once when I was eating dinner in the Varadero I looked up to see a muscular forty-ish Cuban man emerge from a back room, talking in a loud voice to someone over his shoulder. He was carrying a pozo like Shooter and Flaco had carried in Tegucigalpa, and my eyes were immediately drawn to the pendulousness with which it hung from his hand.

     As quickly as I noticed that, he noticed that I'd noticed. He stopped next to my table on his way to the door and stared down at me and gave me a hard smile - one that reminded me of Perico's smile at me when he'd showed us the garrote in the contra camp in southern Honduras - and raised his eyebrows as if to say, "Well?" I nodded, gave what must have been a sickly grin, and turned back down to my food. He walked on out the door, leaving me thinking that the difference in pure balls between these guys and the gentle, conscionable people like the young German woman and the young Tico who so opposed what guys like this were doing but would take no risks to oppose them, said a lot about why the militarists were succeeding. I hoped that his arrogance also said that he and his kind must ultimately fail, but just now that hope seemed thin.

     I began to spot them on the streets of San José. I remember one particular night when I was just hanging out, people-watching, on a well-lit, crowded square. A man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in a tropical suit, looking quite like a gringo of the U.S. type by his skin color, haircut, and manner, walked by a few yards from me. My attention immediately homed in on him, but the weapon wasn't the first thing I saw. It was the excitement visible in his step, in the jerky movements of his head as he looked around him, trying for all the world to pass himself off as just another person walking through a crowd, yet with the deeper longing even more visible, at least to me: the need to be someone who lived a life that required, or allowed, him to carry a gun; to be someone apart, "special;" to know that he, alone in the crowd, carried such power with him.

     Then I looked at his waist, saw the bulge. His head, jerking about like a radar antenna gone amok, found me looking at him. His hand involuntarily clutched at his coattail and pulled it around front, as if he'd been caught with his fly open.

     A news report had mentioned the town of Los Chiles. I found it on the map. It was at the end of the highway north out of San José, Costa Rica's capital. There was an airstrip nearby. And Los Chiles was one kilometer - just over half a mile - from the Nicaraguan border.

     I hired a taxi driver to take me to Los Chiles. After a drive of several hours, he dropped me at the town square and headed back to San José. I stayed in the tiny town the better part of a week. It was a zillion miles from anywhere, with the exception of its being a short walk from the border. It was also near, or even adjacent to, land owned  and/or managed by John Hull, the expatriot rancher from Indiana who critics of Reagan Administration policies in Central America had charged was aiding the contras by allowing his land and airstrips to be used as staging areas for cross‑border raids against the Sandinistas, and for resupply flights to contras inside Nicaragua. It was also charged that aircraft carrying drug shipments to help finance the contras were using the area.

     Knowing by the look of the tiny town that any accommodations would be primitive, I asked for the "best hotel in town." I was directed to the Hotel Río Frío, a little ways downstream from the town's boat landing. My "room" at the hotel consisted of three thatched panels which formed a small rectangle against the outer wall of the single‑story building. The walls went only up to about head height, to allow ventilation to pass between them and the roof. I had a narrow bed, and the lady of the house furnished me a mosquito net to drape over it.

     One evening, I got to drinking beer in a cantina with a young man named Enrique Millón. He was a member of the Guardia Civil, a lightly armed part-time police force, and quite proud of it. After we'd gotten acquainted a little, he said he wanted me to hear a certain song. He stepped to the beat-up jukebox and punched "C7", and the scratchy record began with a military fanfare and a dramatically spoken introduction: "NIcaRAgua! 1978!" The song was “Comandante Zero”, and recounted the exploits of Edén Pastora, Sandinista revolutionary hero turned contra leader, as he directed the taking of Nicaragua's National Palace by Sandinista insurgents in 1978, the year before Somoza was finally defeated. Millón said "Comandante Cero" was his favorite song ‑ both because of Pastora's former Sandinista identity and his current contra status.

     Enrique was a recent graduate of the US Special Forces infantry training course at Murciélago, in northwestern Costa Rica. With his rounded, boyish face and decidedly unathletic physique, he bore a striking resemblance to Liberace. But he was clear about why he volunteered for the US training: "I like the military," he said, making a chubby fist. "Soy hombrón: I'm a real man." Millon's outfit was a company of the Guardia's Batallón Relámpago, or Lightning Battalion. The battalion's shoulder patch consisted of M16 rifles crossed over a lightning bolt, a near replica of the US Special Forces (Green Beret) patch.

     The unit was responsible for maintaining the integrity of Costa Rica's northern border with Nicaragua. That responsibility included enforcing Costa Rica's official policy of neutrality towards all Central American armed conflicts.

     Los Chiles, a half hour's walk from the Nicaraguan border, was in an area where the presence of contra camps was such an open secret that no one even pretended it was a secret. Yet members of Millón's company told me that they were on guard "to keep the piricuacos from coming up the river (the Río Frío, which flows past Los Chiles into Nicaragua)." Piricuacos was the derogatory term for Sandinistas used by the US military and contra groups; it meant something like "yapping dogs," which I always took for a reference to the Sandinistas' penchant for shouting slogans.

     Two young men from the company, Victor Ávila and José Manuel Esquivel, talked as they lounged on duty overlooking the Río Frío. It was one of them who had made the comment about piricuacos. They wore new US‑supplied fatigues and combat boots, and communicated with a US field radio. They were armed with three US automatic weapons between the two of them: an M60 machine gun, an M16 rifle, and the deadly M203, which consists of an M16 automatic rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher mounted under its barrel. The weapons were laid across a parapet of new olive drab nylon sandbags.

     Members of the Guardia company at Los Chiles were openly pro‑US and anti‑sandinista. This gave me the idea that their training by U.S. Special Forces troopers didn't stop at weapons and tactics.

     One night when I was asleep in my cubicle in the hotel, I was awakened at 1:20 in the morning by the sound of a multi‑engine aircraft circling low overhead. It landed at the strip near town. A half hour after the sound stopped, the front door of the hotel opened and several young men, talking in loud voices in Spanish, came in and went to bed in "rooms" a few feet down the hall from mine. One of them took the room next to mine, with nothing but a thin thatched partition between us.

     There was an airstrip shown on the map at Los Chiles. It may or may not have been owned or used by John Hull. But it was just an airstrip, with no facilities that could be said to constitute a passenger, or even a freight, terminal. Certainly there were no landing lights, no tower. There was no passenger service to Los Chiles; I had checked to see if I could come that way. No charter flight would have arranged to drop in there in the middle of the night.

     Yes, I was scared. To begin with, I was alone. As the young men bounced noisily around the hotel - including past the thin front wall of my cubicle - in the manner of men who have no reason to be respectful, let alone afraid, of anyone nearby, I feigned sleep and wondered if the journalists back in San Jose I'd dismissed as timid knew something I didn't. 

     The next day, Enrique Millón, the guardsman who lived in Los Chiles, invited me home to meet his wife and mother‑in‑law. It was a tiny one‑room place on the edge of town. While we were talking I asked Millón about the airplane noise the night before. He said he hadn't heard it. The two women looked at him in disbelief, then at one another. They'd certainly heard it, they said. I asked all three what they thought a large airplane was doing landing at Los Chiles in the middle of the night. Enrique shrugged, said he didn't know. The two women looked at each other again, saying with their eyes, it seemed to me, that they didn't believe their husband/son. Their manner also suggested to me that they didn't approve of his military adventures, that he was involved in them more because of some personal need to prove himself than because of any national exigency, and that there was little they could do or even say about it because they were women and he was the man of the house.

     Then I said that I thought that the flight must have had something to do with the contras, and the two women nodded in agreement. I think they felt they could publicly agree with me because, after all, I was a man too. They seemed to hope that I might have some influence on Enrique. I didn't, both because I was there as a reporter rather than a protagonist, and because he wouldn't have listened anyway: "Me gusta lo militar; soy hombrón," as he had put it earlier.

     Back in San Jose a few days later, I went again to the Tico Times office. I spoke to the same reporter who had told me I wouldn't find anyone to go to the border with me. I asked him what possible explanations there might be for a multi‑engine aircraft landing at Los Chiles at 1:20 am. It had to be guns or drugs, he said. Or both.

     A few days later, I drove in a rented four-wheel drive Suzuki to Upala, another small Costa Rican town near the Nicaraguan border, but farther west. I pulled up in front of the Buena Vista Bar and Restaurant. It seemed to be the only one in town, and I was hungry. It was an inviting place with a thatched-roof veranda overhanging the Río Zapote. I walked in, sat down, ordered a beer, and began reading the menu.

     A stocky young Latino in his early thirties walked directly up to my table. I had literally not been in town five minutes. "I am Comandante Charro," said my uninvited guest, then continued: "I am the leader of a column of combatants from the anti‑Sandinista group UNO‑FARN, led by Comandante Negro Chamorro. I formerly fought with Comandante Edén Pastora, but now I am with UNO‑FARN. I like Americans very much. I work with la Cía. My advisor is known as 'Mister Jones.' You look a lot like him. Are you with la Cía?"

     So another of my hunches had turned out to be accurate; my first minutes in Upala already had me hoping that I hadn’t landed in a situation I wasn’t equipped to handle, a situation that justified the Costa Rican journalists’ refusal to even go near the border area.

     UNO was the Spanish acronym for Unity of Nicaraguan Opposition, the umbrella organization that had recently been created to unite the groups attempting to overthrow the Sandinista‑controlled government of Nicaragua. FARN was the  Nicaraguan Revolutionary Armed Forces, a group of perhaps two hundred contras led by Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro. La Cía was, and is, the common Latin American term for the US Central Intelligence Agency.

     The young contra, without waiting for an answer, continued to talk about himself, launching into an account of his participation in the 1983 attack on the southern Nicaraguan border station at Penas Blancas. Having just driven five hours to Upala from San José and not knowing a soul in the little border town, I had to interrupt.

     "No. I'm not with the la Cía. I'm a reporter."

     "Oh," the young man replied, still smiling. "In that case, would you like an interview?"     

     Charro unhesitatingly showed his cédula, or Costa Rican national identity card, listing his real name as Gerardo Acuña Gonzalez (he said he was also known as Gerardo Noguera Acuña). He sat down at my table and exhibited recognizable scars from bullet wounds on both lower legs, describing in detail which bones had been fractured. He also spoke knowledgeably about weapons and tactics.

     The next day, Arturo Ruíz, one of the proprietors of the Buena Vista, came and sat down at my table. I asked him if there were any contras around, and if so, how he and other people in the town felt about them. "I help them (the contras) often," he said. "They come in here, and if they don't have any money, I give them free meals, transportation...." Ruíz also operated what appeared to be Upala's only taxi, a red Toyota jeep. He seemed, as did other Upala residents, totally unworried about disclosing information about contra activities in "neutral" Costa Rica to a reporter from the US. Most of the people there seemed to assume that anyone from the US was in favor of Reagan policies. He did, however, insist that nothing he said about helping the contras, or about their activities, be published in Costa Rica. Other sources in Upala spoke freely, but tried to impose the same conditions.

     Several times during one conversation, Ruíz would indicate a young man who had just entered the restaurant ‑ usually dressed in jeans, US‑made combat boots, and a civilian shirt ‑ and say, "He's a combatiente," meaning a contra fighter. And at another point, he said that four jeeps which had just passed the restaurant were contra vehicles. The restaurant owner said that there was a contra camp near the village of San Antonio, about four miles north of Upala near the Nicaraguan border.

     The tall, rather chubby Ruíz also smilingly pointed out the house of "Tamuga," the local UNO‑FARN representative, which was across the street from Ruiz' restaurant and about three doors north, next to Upala Sport, a sporting goods store. Tamuga's house, obviously known to everyone in town as a contra meeting place, was also just a few doors south of a post of the Guardia Rural, a more countrified version of the Guardia Civil. Both guardia groups were supposed to be enforcing Costa Rica's neutrality. But I saw uniformed guardia personnel standing and talking in the street a few feet from where members of the contra group UNO‑FARN were lounging on Tamuga's porch.

     "Lots of people around here support them (the contras)," Ruiz continued. "Half of the people around here are Ticos [Costa Ricans], half are Nicas [Nicaraguans], and the other half are half‑and‑half," he joked. "But most of us are anti‑Sandinista."        "Comandante Charro" was one who said he was half Costa Rican and half Nicaraguan.

     There seemed to be a feud between Tamuga and Charro. Tamuga said that Charro was a "former combatant," but was no longer with UNO‑FARN; Charro said that the two hated each other "to the death," and that Tamuga was a non‑combatant and "a thief who joined only to steal money." Charro's story was supported by restaurant owner Ruiz and other people in Upala, but Tamuga's status with FARN was confirmed by reliable sources in San Jose.

     "Charro" was not the only person in the Upala area to mistake me for a CIA operative. After offering rides to a young man and, a little later, to a campesino family north of Upala nearer the Nicaraguan border, the woman in back asked the young man in the front passenger seat, who was dressed in combat boots, jeans, and a civilian shirt, if I was "in charge of the fighting." The young man's answer was a curt "No!"

     Another day, Charro led the way down one of Upala's few dirt streets to the house of his friend, a high‑school teacher named Figueroa. Charro had stayed with Señor Figueroa's family while he was in Upala being treated at the local Social Security hospital for a wound in his back caused, he said, by firing a 60mm mortar over his shoulder. Inside the small, low‑ceilinged house where a space had been partitioned off for Charro, the two men pulled camouflage fatigues out of a hiding place, and Charro put them on and led the way out back to a grove of cacao trees where I photographed and interviewed him.

     He began the taped interview by saying that we were "somewhere in Nicaragua," which is typical of contras in both southern Honduras and northern Costa Rica, where both countries officially deny allowing contra groups to use their territory. Reporters sometimes play the game to get the interviews they need. Charro posed for photographs in his camouflage fatigues with a US flag proudly displayed on his left shoulder.

    Sr. Figueroa also introduced me to Upala's alcalde ‑ a politically appointed combination mayor and circuit court judge ‑ who was a slim, dark‑haired young lawyer named Rafael Calderón. Rafael Calderón was also the name of the Social Christian Party's candidate for President in Costa Rica's coming elections, but Upala's mayor of six months said he wasn't related to the presidential candidate.

     Asked for his assessment of the politico‑military situation in and around his jurisdiction, Calderón gave the impression that it was his job to know nothing. "The problem," he said, "is that the [Costa Rica‑Nicaraguan] border is ill‑defined near here. There is no clear marker. And the Government of Costa Rica allows no private land use within two kilometers of the border, so we have no way of knowing if there are armed groups operating within those two kilometers of Costa Rican territory." This seemed a strange statement coming from the mayor of a tiny town, especially at a moment when several young men who had just been identified as contra combatientes, posted at tables around the thatch‑roofed veranda like Apache sentries in an old Western movie, were listening intently to the conversation.

     He continued with a shrug, "The people around here may know more than I do. But I'm just the mayor. Who's going to tell the mayor anything?"

     As the conversation drew to a close, a fierce‑looking young man at the next table dressed in jeans, combat boots, and a civilian shirt made a stern finger‑to‑the‑lips gesture to me.

     As the group got up to leave, Figueroa tugged on my right arm and tried to say, in poor English, "Don't tell him [the mayor] about the comandante."

     Another member of the group, a local photo shop proprietor named Señor Marín, pulled on my left arm and shouted (he was a little drunk): "Aguas que no has de beber, déjalas correr." Or: "Any water which you don't need to drink, better let it run." In Spanish, it's a pungent, rhyming piece of folk wisdom about staying clear of forces that are bigger than you are.

In the CONTRA camp, + THE TAPE

                  4. Rus Rus    

     The aircraft was a silver, twin engine C‑47 "gooney bird," the workhorse twin-engine aircraft which had been hauling cargo and passengers since before WWII. The plane belonged to Setco Air, a company which was said by the Sandinistas to be a CIA proprietary in the tradition of Air America, the so‑called "civilian airline" which had been wholly owned by the CIA and had done so much of its hauling ‑ and some of its fighting ‑ in Southeast Asia. Christopher Robbins wrote in his 1979 book Air America that at one time that airline was the largest in the world.     

     I was never able to nail down the precise pedigree of Setco Air. Flaco would only say that the company was "very, very cooperative... they try in their own way to help with what we're trying to do."

     The plane was loaded with several large, heavy sacks. Stewart said they contained a thousand pounds of rice and beans which he was donating to the Indians at Rus Rus. Most of the Indians there were Miskito; some were Sumo. (The anti‑Sandinista military organization there, MISURA, took its name from the first two letters of the Miskito, Sumo, and Rama tribes. The Rama lived farther down the Nicaraguan coast.)

     Flaco and I talked as we flew. He had called Shooter and Perico over to see if they remembered what UNIR meant. (It was being floated as a new name for the contra umbrella organization.) They didn't, but both stopped to chat. My notebook has this quote from Shooter: "You can call it UNIR, FDN, whatever the fuck you want. But if I don't get to kill communists, I'm out." This was the kind of blunt honesty that journalists later came to value him for. He was unapologetic about what he did for a living, thoroughly enjoyed it, and didn't much give a shit who knew about it, except for the kind of information that might shut down the operation.         

     Perico didn't have much to say. I asked him how he chose his nombre de guerra, which I knew as a common name for small parrots in Central America. He said it was the name of the village he'd come from in Cuba. I didn't learn until later that "perico" was a Latin American slang term for cocaine.

     Flaco said that UNIR included the major contra organization, the FDN, as well as MISURA and ARDE, or Alianza Revolucionaria Democrática, the organization headed by the charismatic former Sandinista guerrilla hero, Edén Pastora. (“Arde” is also the third person singular of the Spanish verb “to burn,” while “unir” is the infinitive “to unite.”) Pastora had electrified the world in 1978 when he led an astonishing raid on the National Palace, right in downtown Managua, capturing so many influential hostages that he was able to demand a sizeable ransom, an exchange of the hostages for Sandinista prisoners held in Somoza's jails, and get away clean. But following their revolution's triumph in July of 1979, Pastora had become disenchanted with the comandantes'  increasingly leftist policies and ties with the Soviet bloc. His critics would claim that his objections grew more out of having his nose bent by not being given a position in the new government appropriate to his heroic status as "Comandante Zero," Commander Zero.

     In any case, Pastora had broken off with the Sandinistas in Managua, calling himself and his band the only true followers of Sandino, formed ARDE, and began conducting guerrilla raids out of Costa Rican sanctuaries, and southern Nicaraguan hideouts, against Sandinista government forces. He managed to cause serious discomfort to the Sandinista leaders, though his small units were not as serious a military threat as the FDN operating out of Honduras. Managua was forced to allocate scarce resources along its southern border to deal with Pastora, a tiny version of the problem faced by Hitler in WWII when he tried to add the Soviet Union to his list of conquests, resulting in his having to fight a war on two fronts.

     For the CIA, Pastora was a pain in the ass. They liked the idea of harassing the Sandinistas from two directions; what they didn't like was not being able to control Pastora. For Pastora's part, he needed recognition, arms, and money from the interna-tional community; but not, he claimed, at the price of the independence of his movement. He insisted that alignment with the two elephants playing Cold War politics with their country was what was hurting Nicaraguans most.

     As Flaco spoke with me on that C‑47 from Tegucigalpa to Rus Rus, he was particularly animated about the issue of Pastora. His manner seemed to indicate that a decision was then being made about how to deal with Pastora, and that some sort of showdown was imminent. Months later, I would have cause to regret not having taken more notes during that part of our conversation aboard the plane. In my notebook, I have two direct quotes from Flaco regarding Pastora. One is "They've made a dozen attempts, and he just don't cooperate." "They" was understood, in the context of our conversation, to mean some unspecified people calling the shots in Washington regarding Central America.               

     The other direct quote regarding Pastora from Flaco's comments on the plane is that the unspecified situation then playing itself out between Pastora and whoever "they" were in Washington constituted "Pastora's last chance." Terrell repeated those words, or others to that effect, several times during the week. Adams would make similar comments. All this took place, of course, only a few months after the attempt to assassinate Pastora with a bomb at a press conference on May 30 of the previous year at La Penca, in southern Nicaragua. Besides injuring Pastora and some of his guerillas, that bomb had killed three journalists and wounded more than a dozen others.

     The C‑47 banked steeply; I looked down the wing at a small cluster of wood‑framed, metal‑roofed buildings beside a red dirt road, and had a startling flashback of flying into the Special Forces camp at Mangbuk, in the Vietnamese highlands, over sixteen years before. Someone said it was the village at Rus Rus. At 11:03, less than five minutes later, we touched down on a straight stretch of the red dirt road a few miles away. "Suave," someone said: soft landing.

     We climbed out and piled our gear off to the side of the road. We were immediately approached by a patrol of 3 or 4 Honduran soldiers, but they seemed neither surprised nor alarmed by our presence. I made a questioning motion with my camera, and one soldier stood obligingly at attention alongside the C‑47 while I took his picture. He seemed unconcerned that he was giving me photographic evidence of his government's knowledge of activities taking place on its soil which it claimed were not.

     The area was a grassy savannah, flat to gently rolling, sprinkled with sparse young pine trees. We sat on our duffel for nearly three hours waiting for a vehicle ‑ our circling over Rus Rus had been the signal for them to start toward us. We brushed aside cartridge casings (M16, AK47, and .308, which is the civilian equivalent of the 7.62mm NATO round used in the M14 rifle and M60 machine gun), stetched out, napped, talked, took pictures of one another. Maco Stewart was perched on his duffel bag reading Robert Heinlein.

     Larry Pino was saying he remembered stories of his people, generations earlier, taking journeys as long as ten years to this part of the country in search of parrot feathers. I heard Shooter talking with a couple of the Indians, saying "I love it down here. There's no law..." except the gun, or except strength: something like that. Flaco told us we were only a few kilometers from the Nicaraguan border.

     We were driven to a camp where we were directed to a large olive drab tent and told to claim a cot. I looked the place over and immediately grabbed a cot nearest one of the two tent openings.

     "You got a thing about doorways too, huh?" It was Shooter, dropping his gear onto the other cot near the opening. We began to chat, discovering that we were both ex‑Marines and Vietnam vets. He said he'd been there for a short time in the early 1970's. As we talked, he picked up an expensive‑looking black and chrome briefcase, set it on top of his gear, and snapped it open. Inside, in its custom‑fitted velvet nest, was an Israeli‑made 9mm Uzi submachine gun, along with a folding stock and two long magazines. He took it out, snapped the heavy wire stock into place, slid a magazine into the receiver, slapped it home, and pulled back the bolt, chambering a round. He did all this with the easy dexterity of an experienced secretary dialing a touch‑tone phone. He also took from his duffel bag a pistol belt with a 9mm semiautomatic pistol in a black nylon holster with a Velcro flap. He loaded the pistol and strapped it on. Good system, he explained: two weapons firing the same cartridge. Easy resupply.

     Before we'd settled in, it was decided that we shouldn't stay there after all. Back in the pickup, back on the red dirt road. We came to another, larger camp comprised only of tents, save one tiny pole structure with a barred door which had obviously been a jail cell. This was one of several such camps slightly removed from the Rus Rus river, but generally referred to by its name. The Indians thereabouts pronounced the name "Roos' Roos'," with a softly rolled initial r and a sibilant, near ‑ "sh" sound at the end. I took it to be an onomatopoetic mimicry of the sound of the river flowing.

     The camp was unoccupied when we arrived. On the way in we passed a small sign that read HOGAR DEL TEA (HOME OF TEA). I remembered reading an article in Soldier of Fortune magazine about Tropas Especiales Atlánticas, which the article had said was MISURA'S version of Special Forces.

     Fiske, Stewart, the four Indians and I were given a military surplus pyramidal tent with canvas army cots. The three mercenaries moved into a nearby tent with steel‑springed bunks. They all changed into camouflage fatigues, and all were now armed. Shooter had his Uzi and pistol, Flaco had a similar pistol, and Perico carried an M16 rifle.

     Stewart immediately grabbed an entrenching tool, went outside the tent, and began energetically digging at the hard, rocky ground. He said that he had been in the Marine Corps – late in the Korean War, I believe – and was digging himself a fighting hole, just in case. Several Miskito Indians gathered around and looked on with bemused expressions. We came outside the tent to watch. Shooter walked up and stood with folded arms. He turned and said to me in a stage whisper, "This is better'n TV. They never saw a millionaire dig a hole before." He chortled. "Come to think of it, neither have I."

     We were treated to a canned speech by "Comandante Raúl," a twenty‑nine‑year‑old MISURA officer named Raúl Tobías. I copied the speech, then translated it for the others. It began "We are here in the Republic of Honduras, 37,000 refugees. There are young volunteers with the idea of returning to their country, Nicaragua. Then the young men put forth their sacrifice and their last drop of blood to regain their lands. It is a difficult war against communism, but we are making that war...." and so on. It was obvious that he hadn't written the words, and that his delivery was rehearsed. Over the next several days, we would hear a number of such speeches, some totally canned, with crude prompts from behind by armed MISURA officers. Though much was canned, it was also obvious that these people had some genuine complaints about the Sandinistas, who had indeed killed some Indians and driven many from their homes and burned whole settlements and killed or run off their livestock. Sandinista claims that they had been forced to clear the area because of CIA‑sponsored FDN and MISURA raids across the border had some base in fact, but didn't cut much ice with the Miskito and Sumo people who had been driven from their homes.

     At dusk someone cranked up a small red Kawasaki generator, illuminating a single bulb in each tent. We ate whatever we could scrounge from our own packs. One of the Indians had brought pemmican, a traditional food for traveling. In one corner of the tent, I noticed several silhouette targets and about half a dozen LAWs, the Light Antitank Weapon that had replaced the earlier "bazooka," or 3.5" rocket launcher, used during WWII and Korea, and with which I had trained before Vietnam. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was watching a large grey spider, over two inches in diameter, crawling upside down along the underside of the tent roof. With that, the smell of the canvas, the putt of the generator, the feel of the canvas cot... it was Vietnam revisited. I felt strangely at home.

     Life in the camps reeked of the presence of the old "special operations" network of CIA officers and agents, military intelligence types, Special Forces people, "civilian" adventurers of various stripes, even the odd civilian fresh off a plane from Washington with a briefcase and secretive manner. Somewhere in the camp at Rus Rus I had noticed a slogan which was clearly an attempt to translate into Spanish one that was drummed into our heads when I went through Marine Corps boot camp, and which has been used to motivate generations of US recruits: "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer." But in Spanish it had come out "Si es imposible lo haremos," or "If it is impossible we will do it," which to my ear sounded so odd that I imagined it evoking quizzical expressions among the Indians it was supposed to motivate.

                           5. The Tape

     We spent a good part of that week riding in the back of Toyota pickups with teenage Miskito and Sumo warriors armed with AK47 and M16 automatic rifles. They climbed in and out of the trucks with no regard as to where their rifle muzzles were pointing. By the end of the week I'd looked down so many rifle barrels that I began to have the physical impression my torso was perforated, that breezes were passing between my ribs, that I was breathing in and out directly through my chest. Meeting young Miskito and Sumo Indians who'd been wounded in combat, and showed us their scars, intensified that feeling.

     One of the Miskito we rode with in the back of a pickup was Alejo Teofilo Barbera. He was older than most of his fellow warriors; I'd say in his mid‑30's. He was from Puerto Cabezas, the Nicaraguan Caribbean port I'd flown out to in late 1983 to interview people after a contra raid, possibly conducted by some MISURA warriors in a speedboat supplied by the CIA, had damaged a freighter docked there and injured a few people.

     Teofilo said that he'd been fighting against forces of the government in Managua since 1973, which meant that he had fought first against the Guardia Nacional, then since 1979 against the Sandinistas. He echoed a common Indian complaint: that "los españoles," the Spaniards, as they called the European‑derived culture and political structure in the nation's capital, mostly ignored the indigenous people who lived in their country; and when they did pay some attention, that attention was typically racist and exploitative. He gave examples: there were three major gold mines, he said, in what was traditionally Miskito territory: Bonanza, Rosita, and La Luz. "The Sandinistas promised that 80% of what richness come from Indian lands would be for Indians; 20% for the government. But it is not like that." Teofilo was speaking in broken but clear English, unlike most of his comrades, who spoke mainly their own languages and Spanish.

     I took notes as we bounced along in the truck. My notebook still has mud splotches in it, and the writing makes it clear when we were moving and when we weren't. Most of this information came from Teofilo as he was conversing with Larry Pino. I was seated on my pack at arm's length from the two of them.

     After the talk of the gold mines and the broken promises and the Indian elections, their conversation took a shift, and they began to compare older Indian stories. They weren't exactly current news, but they were interesting, and things I hadn't heard before. And it was becoming harder to take notes, with the jouncing of the vehicle. I turned on my tape recorder and set it between Larry and Teofilo. Both noticed it, and didn't seem to mind. They continued with their stories.

     Suddenly Larry remembered something he'd wanted to ask Teofilo about. Following is an unedited transcript of the next portion of my tape:

DM: Larry was asking Teofilo if their people came down from the north as well. He [Teofilo] said yes. That's when I turned the machine on.

(Saying the above, I stepped on the first part of Larry's next sentence, when he'd said something about white men, or about Columbus):

LP: ...discovered the Indians. Bullshit.

TEOFILO laughs.

DM: Teofilo, what was the name of the reverend who knows all your history in Tegoosh [Tegucigalpa]?

TEOFILO: Molling Stellet (phonetic).

DM: Molling Stellet?

TEOFILO: Mm‑hmmm.

DM: How do... how does a person find him?

[A few words where LP, TEOFILO, DM all speak at once.]

LP: Miskito office.

TEOFILO: MISURA office.

LP: Oh, MISURA office.

TEOFILO: ...there's ... other reverend, Silvio Díaz. Him too.

LP: Did you hear a story about two months ago, about American paratroopers coming here, landing seven miles into Nicaragua? Have you heard that story?

TEOFILO [guardedly eyes red light on my tape recorder]: Yeah.

LP: 'Cause one of my cousins was in there.

TEOFILO: Oh yeah?

LP: He parachuted into Nicaragua. He didn't tell me anything 'cause it was top secret, he said. The government won't let him talk about it.

TEOFILO: Top secret?

LP: Yeah.

TEOFILO: Top secret. Only for them. [laughs]

LP: He says, 'Just know I was there. And don't ask me no more questions, 'cause I'm gonna have to tell you to shut up.'

TEOFILO: Mmmm. [laughs]

GARY FIFE: You can tell him you were there too, and you can ask anything you want....

[DM laughs.]

[Here GF and LP both speak at once: GF says "...providing we have a propeller tomorrow.' as LP says something about "...rangers....' The propeller remark refers to the broken shear pin which had stopped us from crossing the Coco earlier the morning of this conversation.]

     At that point the conversation shifted to something else. Larry Pino hadn't seemed to realize the newsworthiness, or political significance, of what he'd said, or the fact that he'd spoken directly into a tape recorder with its red on light clearly visible. Or his nonchalance might be explained by the fact that he was a Native American, that he had a certain built‑in disdain for the political shenanigans of the white men's nation, the United States; it was clear that mainstream journalists were included in that disdain.

     Alejo Teofilo Barbera was different. I could tell by his body language that he immediately knew the ramifications of what was being said, and particularly that a U.S. journalist was listening in. And, most particularly, that the red light on my tape recorder was glowing. His first reaction when Larry mentioned the paratroopers was to look down at the red light. Teofilo had already demonstrated his political savvy in his long discourse about Miskito troubles and alliances. He would obviously know about the Boland Amendment, and, whatever he might privately think of the ongoing tug of war between Congress and the Reagan Administration over Central America policy, he would realize that if what Larry said were true (and he seemed to be admitting that it was), and if it were proven and published in the mainstream US media, the whole Central America equation might be changed, likely in the direction of even less aid getting to his people to fight the Sandinistas.     

     I couldn't believe my luck. I fervently hoped that the recorder was working properly (it was), and that the growling of the truck's engine hadn't drowned out the critical parts of the conversation (it had not). I resolved that, no matter what else happened, my most important task now was to get that tape back home in good condition. 

     Over the following six years, I would spend hundreds of hours of unpaid time, at least four thousand dollars of my own money in travel expenses and long‑distance phone bills, and travel something like eighteen thousand miles (about a third  of that in my pickup), chasing that story. I started out using my status as correspondent for Pacific News Service([1]); then, from the summer of 1987 through the Spring of 1991, I worked on a Special Correspondent's credential with Doyle McManus of the Washington, DC bureau of the Los Angeles Times. 

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[1] PNS was an independent international news service based in San Francisco. Sandy Close was Executive Editor, a tough-minded ex-Southeast Asia hand, and my boss. After I made several trips to Central America with her credential, she was awarded a Macarthur “Genius” grant for her work at PNS.