Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: A book worth reading

Friday, March 9, 2001 | 10:49 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

ALMOST 12 YEARS have passed since I returned from the jungles of Honduras to write about my views of the Contras. During an earlier trip into that area with a congressional group, one "expert" kept telling us how bad the Contras were. He saw them as CIA mercenaries who were running drugs to pay for their lifestyle and had no chance of winning anything, much less a war. He also implied that most of them were leftovers from the Somoza regime's feared Guardia.

During a short meeting with Comandante 3-80, Enrique Bermudez, and two of his combat leaders, I got a different picture. Upon returning to Nevada, I packed my bags and went back to Honduras and into the Yamales Valley to find out who these fighters really were and how they operated.

What I found were men, women and children with very dark skin willing to fight the Sandinista government led by Daniel Ortega. Ortega's communist government had violated the essence of all these peasants held dear. Their family, church and land had been abused and seized by his government, and they weren't going to take it any longer.

My simple view of what was taking place encouraged my return to these jungles and east along the Rio Coco with the Miskito Indians, who were fighting their own war against the Sandinistas. Despite several visits during the closing days of the conflict, and participating in the peace-agreement meetings and the return of wounded combatants to their homes in Nicaragua, I have found a book that tells me much more.

Nevadan Tim Brown's most recent book "The Real Contra War: Highlander Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua" has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Not only does the book fill in several blank spots of my knowledge about this conflict, it shows the fight began in 1979 before the Sandinistas took power.

Brown was not only the senior liaison to the Contras for the U.S. State Department from 1987 to 1990, he is also a student and teacher of history. I had the opportunity to watch his personal courage and inquisitive mind earn him a special place in the hearts and minds of the combatants. It also got him into hot water with upper-level diplomats who just wanted the war to go away. He was able to succeed because of the support given him by Ambassador Everett Ellis Briggs.

About Brown's latest book, Briggs says it "should be required reading for students of 20th century Latin American revolutionary theory and contemporary history." May I add, it's easy reading and should be read by any American who wants to learn the truth about the Contras and what really happened before, during and after the Sandinista regime. Incidentally, today Brown will be the first one to tell you the Sandinistas haven't given up or gone away.

This book is a fine example of scholarly work presented with an earthy understanding of recent history. Very simply, the author sees the Contras for what they were: "pissed-off peasants" who had the support of a large popular movement.

In chapter 18 Brown concludes: "The 'Contras' turned out to have been just poor dirt-farming 'hillbillies' from Nicaragua's version of Appalachia. Their combat leaders were mostly anti-Somoza Sandinistas, not former Guardia, and they were created and sustained in the field for 11 years not by the CIA, but by highland peasants from a marginalized Indio people with a thousand-year history of resisting attempts to subdue, dominate, and convert them to new masters or new ways of life."

It's a real shame that these people had to wait until 2001 for Nevada scholar Tim Brown to tell their story.