Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 8, 1990 TAG: 9003082111
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/4 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: JINOTEGA, NICARAGUA LENGTH: Medium
Sandinista leaders say they'll hand over the government April 25, but their local forces don't appear ready to give their guns to the United National Opposition, which they fear will return confiscated land to previous owners.
"All the barrios have guns. They are all defending their land," said Francisca Castileblanco, a party organizer in Barrio Roger Angin, a slum of 400 homes without water and electricity on confiscated land on the edge of Jinotega.
Castileblanco, a 52-year-old tortilla vendor, then went into her house, a ramshackle shell of mismatched planks and tin over a dirt floor, and pulled out her new AK-47.
It is one of 400 assault rifles she and her neighbors said the army delivered on Feb. 27, two days after UNO defeated the Sandinistas in elections. Castileblanco and her neighbors say the AK-47s were distributed to anyone age 15 and over.
The army, a party organ, is delivering truckloads of the weapons to civilians in Jinotega and Matagalpa provinces who live in the poor neighborhoods the leftist Sandinistas regard as their "social base."
International observers, diplomats and opposition officials are worried about the large-scale distribution of weapons at a time when tensions are so high.
"It's a time bomb," said Luis Serrano, part of the Organization of American States observer team monitoring Matagalpa and Jinotega provinces.
High-ranking Sandinista officials in Jinotega and Matagalpa at first denied civilians were being armed.
When confronted with evidence, the officials said they were creating a self-defense network to fend off possible attacks by Contra forces that the Sandinistas have been battling for years.
But they also acknowledged that guns are going to people living on land confiscated after the 1979 revolution, areas the party regards as its roots.
The Sandinistas have said they will "defend the conquests of the revolution," including opposing any efforts to return land to previous owners and possibly other aspects of the conservative economic policies of the new government of President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.
UNO officials say they won't dislodge peasants from land that is being worked, even if it was expropriated under Sandinista rule.
UNO officials say they have reports of arms being distributed in several other provinces.
UNO representatives have met with top-ranking regional officials of the Sandinista party and the Sandinista army, said Santiago Rivas, UNO's legal adviser in Matagalpa, 78 miles north of Managua.
"We've argued that they shouldn't give arms to civilians. It could provoke a civil war," Rivas said in an interview.
by CNB