An Incident in Leon

Abstract

AT ONE POINT in the Nicaraguan struggle against Somoza his National Guard was able, in the language of a communique, to recuperate the ancient city of Leon. The rebels all went underground, or fled, and the people of the City were left without any food or water. When they came into the streets from their battered houses to share their terrors, they told stories to anybody who would listen: of indiscriminate bombings and strafings; of certain young men and boys being rounded up and machine-gunned to death, with their hands fastened behind their backs, by elite killer squads of Guardsmen, and paramilitaries. All the barricades they had built up before were being demolished now by big orange government bulldozers, and some of us in the press were promised safe conducts by the Guard, if we agreed not to stray too far off the main avenues of the City. My friends and I returned to the old city with the hope of finding certain of our friends in Leon, people we had met and thought we knew a little and cared about. Food was still scarce everywhere so we brought only what we could buy from the hotel to give as presents to these people to eat: huge whipped cream cakes, and sacher tortes, fruit pies, expensive silver foil chicken box lunches. Laden down, we made our way past all the final road blocks waving our white flags, fearfully cavorted along the cobbled streets, like intrepid Lady Bountifuls, hoping to locate these old friends. There was a great deal of street life, a milling about. Each greeting was an acknowledgement that one had survived with hope and defiance intact. But occasional sniper fire kept going off in the adjacent barrios, like billiards caroming. Around the market place, we had also been told, the Guard had taken to shooting into the air to scare off those hungry people who might be looting. The people in the streets, after we had relieved ourselves of our packages, showed us all the numerous freshly-dug graves in their back yards, and the holes they had dug into back yard adobe walls so that they could communicate one to the other during the bombardments with some degree of safety. I met very few Somocistas on the streets of Leon that day, or any other day. A woman on the street told me, If we ever are victorious I shall learn how