Is There An Insurgent Uprising In Nicaragua? Officials Dismiss Shootout Near Honduran Border As Work Of ‘Criminals’

Even as Nicaraguan officials do their best to tamp down rumors that a recent shootout along the border with Honduras which saw 10 people killed was carried out by an insurgent group with political motivations, some of the Central American country's foremost human rights observers say guerrillas are taking up arms against the government of President Daniel Ortega in the same northern and central parts of the country where Contra rebels once had their bases in the 1980s. "There are people who are armed and unhappy with the government," Bishop Juan Abelardo Mata, who says he has been in touch with one guerrilla group, told the Associated Press. "We have come warning of this without finding any receptive ear, and these are the results."

"They're criminals," the Nicaraguan government's chief of staff Ana Isabel Morales told the AP in reference to the alleged insurgents. "The residents themselves say it, and the facts are there." Ortega, who led the rebel Sandinista army in knocking dictator Anastasio Somoza from power and headed the government until 1990, returned to the presidency in 2007. He has been looking to amend the country's constitution to allow him to run for a third term, one of a long list of grievances which many on the Nicaraguan right hold against him.

Two rebel leaders known as "Yajob" (real name Jose Garmendia) and "Black Pablo" (Santo Joyas) had accused the government of not respecting the law and listed other perceived injustices, including the failure to distribute enough ID cards to citizens and ensuring electoral transparency, in statements to local media. Both of those leaders were killed in the past three years under mysterious circumstances, and the police and army have not as of yet clarified any involvement they may have had in their deaths.

Bishop Mata says he has tried to warn Ortega's Sandinista government that it must act to effectively reduce the poverty and injustice lived by Nicaragua's poor. Another human rights defender, Roberto Petray, director of the National Association for Human Rights, told the AP that the shootout in the town of Ayapal were the work of 12 members of an armed guerrilla group led by former Contra soldier Gerardo Gutierrez, or "El Flaco", who on July 18^th killed one soldier in another shootout with an army patrol in another small town near the northern border. In the Ayapal shootout, said Petray, El Flaco's armed group was "trying to take control of a police post, but it seems someone warned the police and they opened fire at the entrance to the village." He dismissed the government's assertion that the battle was simply the work of "criminals". "We can't accept that there are 10 deaths in an attempted assault on a small town. It's illogical," he said.

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