314 UNIT 3 MODERN MESOAMERICA
Through the mediation of Mexico, Costa Rica, and other countries, the Sandin-
istas and Contras finally agreed to a cease-fire in 1988. New elections were held in 1989,
and the Nicaraguan Opposition Party (UNO) candidate, Violeta Chamorro (the wife
of the newspaper editor who had been assassinated in 1978), was victorious over Daniel
Ortega of the FSLN party, winning almost 60 percent of the vote. President Chamorro
agreed to allow the Sandinistas to retain control over the army, and a degree of rec-
onciliation began to take place in Nicaragua after thirty years of civil war.
The peoples identified as Indians in Nicaragua today for the most part are the
Miskito, Sumu, and Rama of the Caribbean coast, descendants of tribal peoples who
lived outside the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world. Making up about 4 percent of
the national population, these coastal Indians form a small minority of relatively iso-
lated natives similar to indigenous groups such as the Talamanca and Kuna found in
the countries of Costa Rica and Panama. In Nicaragua, these native groups took no
part in the revolutionary war against the Somoza regime, and later they vigorously
resisted attempts by the Sandinista government to integrate them into the emerging
socialist society. MISURASATA (Miskito-Sumu-Rama-Sandinista), the organization
set up by the Sandinistas to bring the Indians into the revolutionary fold, was taken
over by Indian leaders like Steadman Fagoth, whose goals were Indian self-
determination rather than national integration. When MISURASATA began to cozy
up to the Contras, the Sandinista government declared it a counterrevolutionary
force and began resettling the Indians inland, away from their coastal villages. This
move further alienated the Indians, and despite later gestures of goodwill the San-
dinistas were never able to gain their confidence.
Nicaragua’s native Mesoamerican population located on the Pacific coastal side
of the country had become largely invisible by the time of the Sandinista revolution.
Perhaps 20 percent of the population retained Indian biological features and traces
of the Mesoamerican cultural heritage, but they were generally identified as mestizos
rather than Indians. Nicaragua’s revolutionaries concluded that these Indians had al-
ready lost their communal lands and native identity by thetime Augusto Sandino
launched a rebellion against the occupying U.S. Marines toward the end of the 1920s.
In the process of their becoming mestizo peasants, it was thought that the Indians
had developed greater revolutionary “consciousness” than their Indian ancestors.
According to the ideology of the Sandinista revolutionaries, Indian identity was
a vestige of colonialism and an impediment to the creation of a socialist state. Once
in power, the Sandinista government created a program that called for the emanci-
pation of peasants, workers, women, blacks, and the repressed peoples of Asia, Africa,
and Latin America, but not of their own native Mesoamericans. They made reference
to the non-Mesoamerican indigenous groups of the Caribbean coast in policy state-
ments, but only in the context of the need to incorporate them into national life.
Despite being ignored, in the 1970s thousands of people who still thought of
themselves as native Mesoamericans resided in communities in and around the cities
of Managua, Masaya, Granada, and León. These people could no longer speak the
Mesoamerican languages previously spoken in the area (Pipil, Chorotega, Subtiaba),
but they had reconstituted certain traditional cultural practices in craftsmanship,