WAR AND PAIN

In 1984 I was living and working in a rural farming cooperative in the north central mountains of Nicaragua.  I had been at the cooperative for a few months, contributing what I could through manual labor while I documented the lives of its members.  On this day, I hitched a ride into the nearby city of Esteli.  I arrived in town around 10 a.m.  Walking from the main highway up to the town center town where I hoped to meet up with some other North Americans, perhaps pick up some mail and later have an inexpensive restaurant meal before heading back out to the cooperative, I came abreast of the town’s post office where, unusually, there was a large crowd gathered in the lobby, spilling out into the cobblestone street.  Inquiring, I found that word had come that a group of 20 to 25 young postal workers who had left a few days earlier for a stint of coffee picking in the nearby mountains (a semi-voluntary practice of government workers to assist in the recollection of the all-important exportable and cash generating crop) had been ambushed by a group of anti-government contra rebels operating in the region, and that most if not all of them had been killed.  The looks of anguish and fear on the faces of the parents and family members gathered at the post office was stark and compelling.

I stayed in town throughout the day to find out more and to see if there might be something - some little thing - that I could do to help.  By 6 p.m. the city square, located in front of the main Catholic cathedral, was overflowing with townspeople.  As dusk descended on the area, the crowd parted when a caravan of pickup trucks entered into the square - each carrying one or two makeshift coffins containing the bodies of the young telephone workers.  Word had circulated as to how they had died:  while travelling in the back of a large open bed truck along an isolated dirt road heading toward the coffee plantation, they were attacked from the side of the road by mortar and machine gun fire.  One survivor reported that the contra fighters poured gasoline on the truck and set it on fire.  We heard that the bodies of some of the young people had to be cut apart as they had wrapped their arms around each other as they were burned alive.

That evening, the crowd of townspeople walked slowly through the streets of Esteli, following the trucks as they delivered, one by one, the remains of the young workers at the doorsteps of their families, where a wake of friends and neighbors would be held that evening and the following day in the humble living rooms of their home.  Many of the townspeople participating in the procession passed silently and sadly in a single file line through the houses of the deceased in order to pay their respect to the family.