Nicaragua’s Ex-Soldiers Brave New Battlefield

SOMOTILLO, Nicaragua â€”  Mariano Jose Castillo spent most of the 1980s as a soldier planting land mines around Nicaragua’s borders, bridges and power lines while officers like Manuel Segura carefully mapped their locations.

The men were protecting their then-socialist country from U.S.-backed rebels who sneaked in from base camps in Honduras and Costa Rica. At the same time, the soldiers kept careful records of where the mines were planted, anticipating a future when the weapons would no longer be needed. Now, seven years after Nicaragua’s civil war ended, that future has arrived.

The mines once thought essential to protecting Nicaragua’s creaky, war-worn infrastructure from rebel sabotage are getting in the way of peacetime development. They prevent power line repairs and upgrades, utility officials complain. In places such as Somotillo, foreign donors have offered to replace makeshift bridges with wider, more durable constructions. But they cannot build because the areas around these former targets are mined.

The devices also take lives: Mines killed at least 30 Nicaraguan civilians and wounded 46 others from 1987 to 1996.

So 306 sappers, or mine experts, like Castillo and Segura are dusting off those old maps. The veterans who sowed this landscape with the deadly weapons and have themselves been their victims are now civilian contract workers employed by international donors to remove them. The maps, showing circled Xs strung between trees and hills, have become the guides for finally cleaning up what the Organization of American States says is Latin America’s most mine-infested country.

But even with the maps, getting rid of land mines is proving far more expensive, dangerous and difficult than the retired soldiers had expected when they created the minefields.

“Removing the mines has been a lot harder than laying them was,� Segura said. A former captain with 18 years in the army, he got through the war without a major injury. In spring, he lost 50% of the vision in his left eye during a mine-removal operation. It was one of three accidents in a six-week period that wounded eight men and emphasized the unpredictability of the leftover mines.

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During more than a decade of heavy rainfall, mudslides and Earth tremors, the mines have moved. Trees and bushes have grown over some. Others, like the one that exploded in Segura’s face, have turned on their sides.

And there are so many of them: The army estimates that 120,000 mines--mostly from the old Soviet Union--were planted in this country one-third the size of California. By 1996, only about 22,000 of them had been removed by two Nicaraguan army programs that quickly ran out of money.

With this year’s internationally financed removal program, the pace has picked up. Still, even at the 1997 rate of 13,000 a year, it would take more than six years to destroy the 85,000 remaining mines--and that’s only a conservative approximation of the number of mines left.

Nicaragua, the second-poorest country in the Americas, cannot afford the equipment needed to put more mine removal teams on the job.

Sappers earn modest salaries for such dangerous work--about $120 a month for squadron leaders and slightly less for other team members--but gear to protect them is costly, according to Maj. Ricardo Torres, head of the army’s special de-mining unit.

Current operations rely on donations from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the European Union, Russia and the Organization of American States.

And de-mining is not a job that should be rushed. “Patience is the most important weapon in the arsenal of a sapper,� Castillo said.

Nevertheless, the sappers sometimes face time pressures. Segura, Castillo and their unit originally were assigned to remove mines along the Honduran border. Then, Nicaragua received international financing to rebuild a bridge over the Rio Negro, about six miles from the frontier.

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The 558-foot bridge was blown up in 1983 by the U.S.-backed Contra rebels and replaced with a narrow, prefabricated substitute. The area around the new bridge was mined all the way up the riverbank to Maximina Moncada’s one-room adobe. A few months later, an animal tripped a mine. The explosion frightened Moncada into premature labor, she says. Her son is still sickly and spends his days lying in a hammock.

A minesweeper supposedly cleaned the area a few years after the war ended. The minefield postings were removed, and Benito Villalobos, a farm worker, began gathering firewood there. On his third trip, in February 1995, a mine blew off his left leg, Villalobos said. He has learned to ride a bicycle with a wooden leg but cannot help his wife support their four children.

Because of his accident, the government knew the area was not safe. So this summer, authorities sent the sappers in to clear mines before the construction crews arrived.

Following procedures they learned in a 45-day course, Castillo and two members of his squadron still enter the old minefield each morning with a $2,944 metal detector. All wear protective gear that includes goggles, special boots and metal-lined vests and trousers. The equipment is heavy and sweltering in the 100-degree heat, but Castillo is grateful for it: None was available during the war when he lost his left eye in a mine-maintenance accident.

When they hear the distinctive rattle of the detectors, one man crouches and gingerly pokes a rod sideways into the ground. About 97% of the time, the metal is an old can or a nail.

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But if the object appears to be a mine, the detector team leaves, and a fourth man enters the field. He cautiously brushes away surface dirt, like an archeologist excavating a tomb, until he finds the top of the mine. He marks the site with a red arrow.

About noon, explosive charges are set at all the red arrows. Traffic is cleared from the road leading up to the bridge, and the old mines are set off.

The sappers found 174 mines that the minesweeper left behind here. Two days before they were scheduled to turn the cleared area over to the construction workers, on their third and final sweep through this area, they found three more. “You can never guarantee that an area in 100% clear,� Torres said. And mines can stay lethal for 40 years or more.

Their own injuries and role in removal efforts have given the sappers a distinctive perspective on an international treaty scheduled for signing Wednesday in Ottawa. The treaty pledges its signatories to halt production of land mines.

“The people who had the least to do [with the war] are the ones that suffer,� Segura said. “From a military perspective, they accomplish their objective, but I hope they get rid of them.�