NICARAGUA: Murder at the Crossroads

Augusto Cesar Sandino walked slowly through the white portico of Nicaragua’s Presidential Palace and stepped into his car. His stomach was warm with the fine dinner his oldtime friend and fellow rebel, President Juan B. Sacasa, had given him. He was among friends: the father who had brought him up a Liberal, his brother Socrates, two of his favorite generals, Estrada and Umanzor, and the Minister of Agriculture, Sofonias Salvatierra, his host in Managua. From the Palace eminence on a dead volcano he could see all Managua lying flat under a pale moon, its two-story houses and paved streets dark and quiet. There was not a U. S. Marine in the place. Across the lake a pink plume of smoke rose from Mount Momotombo, most perfect of the volcanoes Sandino and his countrymen reverence as their national emblem. Farther north; 100 mi. through the jungle, was the peacetime residue of his followers, sleeping among the farms and mines of his El Cooperative Rio Coco settlement. When the car reached the main palace gate, it was stopped by a squad of native guardsmen. The little brown men waved their rifles, ordered everybody out of the machine. They pushed aside Father Sandino and the Minister of Agriculture. Sandino, his brother and his two generals they hustled into a motor truck. The truck careened out past long rows of silent peasant shacks, past the airport, to the little crossroads of La Reynaga. A few frightened Indians peered from their cabins as the guardsmen prodded four men in polished black puttees to the ground. A machine gun barked in the night. Four corpses sprawled on the ground. A guardsman pumped the gun for a while longer. Its clatter drowned the dying scream of a ten-year-old child in one of the dark cabins.

The death of Sandino, hero and symbol of Latin-Americans’ resentment against what they call “The Colossus of the North,” sent a pang of sorrow and dismay from the Rio Grande to the Horn. Named for a Caesar by his well-to-do coffee planter father, Sandino got a fair education at Nicaragua’s Granada Institute de Oriente, roved aimlessly north. He worked in mines, in U. S.-owned oil fields, in filling stations and for a Banana company. He was back in Nicaragua when Dr. Sacasa and General Jose Maria Moncada set off a Liberal revolution in 1926. A vengeful-looking little man, scarcely five feet tall, part Indian, part Spanish, he talked well, was silent better. He gathered together 800 men and declared war. Sacasa and Moncada agreed to a government compromise, but not Sandino. He dismissed all the married men in his army and went to the hills. He called his favorite mountain El Chipote (The Tough Guy), himself “the wild beast of the mountains.” His men reverently called him San Digno (The Worthy Saint). When he went into battle he hung extra cartridge belts around his neck, shined up his puttees and stuck a jungle flower into his shovel-shaped cowboy hat. The Nicaraguan Government could not stop him. Five thousand U. S. Marines chased him for five years, killed nearly 1,000 of his followers, reported him dead a score of times but never laid hands on him. U. S. newspapers uniformly called him “bandit.” But what Sandino wanted, and what he finally got in January 1933, was the withdrawal of all U. S. Marines from Nicaragua. When they left, he quit fighting and took over a large part of the Department of Segovia for his men. His old friend Sacasa, elected President, promised him $1,000 a month to get his farms and mines started. Sandino, a great hater, still had one open enemy, General Moncada. And Moncada’s nephew is General Anastacio Somoza. commander of 2,500 Guardia Nacional. Sandino had said: “There are now three powers in Nicaragua, Sacasa, the Guardia and myself.” As the price for laying down his arms, he demanded that President Sacasa break the Guardia as well. Last week Moncada’s men suggested that Sandino’s own men had killed him, resenting his “peaceful intentions.” With rare impudence General Somoza announced: “I declare to the nation our illustrious President is absolutely innocent of responsibility for what has occurred.” Days passed and no one was arrested for the crime. The body of “The Worthy Saint” was dug up and reburied. And last week his followers kept ominous silence as one by one they slid out of Managua, going north, toward Mount Tough Guy and the guns.