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From: berman@ihuxm.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Nicaragua: Know Thy Enemy
Message-ID: <506@ihuxm.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-Sep-83 11:08:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihuxm.506
Posted: Thu Sep  1 11:08:08 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Sep-83 20:09:05 EDT
Organization: BTL Naperville, Il.
Lines: 50

>From the NEW YORK TIMES, August 28, 1983:

     "Eduardo Rojas, a farm laborer in the [Nicaraguan]
      village of Achuapa, stood under a wilting tropical
      sun and shook his head with amazement as he pointed
      to a school that had opened a few months previously.
      'My children are going to school---can you imagine
       it?' he said.  'They will get other ideas. They
      will be able to choose a different life for
      themselves---whatever they want. This is a total
      change. Without the revolution, it would never
      have happened.'


     "Although only 35, Eduardo Rojas looked withered 
      and played out. His leathery face was deeply
      lined, and many of his teeth were missing. All
      his life, starting when he was 5 years old, he
      had worked a small plot of land in the fertile
      hills outside his village in the northern
     province of Leon. Half the produce was sent to
     an absentee landlord; Rojas, when he grew up,
     had to keep himself, his wife and their five
     children alive on what remained. That was how
     his father and grandfather had lived. That is
     how his children would live. Poverty, ignorance,
     illness and back-breaking toil have been the
     lot of hundred of thousands of Nicaraguan peasants.


     "Now things are different. The Sandinistas took
      the land outside Achuapa away from its owner last
      year, compensating him with a plot in another
      part of the country that was formerly owned
      by the Somozas...  In Achuapa ,Rojas told me a maternity clinic
      had recently opened. There was even talk of
      electricity being extended to outlying hovels
      like his.

     "The Sandinistas have given many downtrodden Nicaraguans
      something as precious as it is rare for poor
      people in Latin America:  hope for the future."




Is this the enemy?


Andy Berman