Since she doesn't worry about being blown up anymore, Amalia Mendez doesn't have to walk so far to wash her family's clothes.
     Mendez lives near a major highway bridge over the Rio Negro, a bridge that the U.S.-backed Contras blew up in 1983. The Nicaraguan government rebuilt the bridge, just six kilometers from the Honduran border, and surrounded it with concentric rings of anti-personnel mines. Mendez was luckier than many neighbors, she only lost cows to the explosives. But she had to walk an extra four kilometers every day to do her laundry.
     Last year, army troops finished clearing the last of the mines away. "The nightmare came to an end," she says. "There are a lot of people around here sleeping better at night now."
     Although Mendez and her neighbors are sleeping better, others in the region remain at risk. More than 130,000 mines remain scattered around Central America, a souvenir of the conflicts of recent decades. Most are in Nicaragua. With somewhere over 90,000 mines--experts disagree on exactly how many remain--Nicaragua leads the hemisphere in both mines and mine-related injuries and deaths.
     Hector Pedrosa, supervisor of an Organization of American States demining program here, said at least 50 people have been killed by mines in Nicaragua since the war ended in 1990. Another 250 have lost limbs. Pedrosa says the real numbers are probably much higher, since many of the incidents occur in remote zones and aren't reported to authorities.
     Often the victims are children gathering firewood. A lot of cows are killed as well, when their owners turn them loose in areas believed to be mined. "Many farmers believe it's better to lose a cow than a leg," quips Mendez.
     Along the border north of Mendez's home, Julio Vergada is one of those patiently removing the mines. He learned about the deadly devices a decade ago when he laid hundreds of them in an effort to keep the Contras out of Nicaragua.
     Vergada was a captain then; he's a private today. With few job options in civilian life, he reenlisted in 1995 to join the army's special demining team. While a normal private earns only $40 a month, a sapper like Vergada earns $100 teasing the rusting old mines out of the ground. His co-worker with the metal detector--the first person to enter a known minefield--earns an extra $10 a month for the added danger. It's a well-paid profession in a country with high unemployment.
     Sweating under a heavy armored vest, Vergada is one of 95 soldiers looking for mines along this section of the border. With funding from the Danish government, members of his unit have removed 2,700 mines in ten months. They've also certified that another 1,000 mines were already blown up. In some cases they find the bones of the cow or the person who detonated the artifact. 
     When Nicaraguan soldiers laid mines in the 80s, they made careful maps showing where the explosives were buried. Today, those yellowed maps prove invaluable in removing the mines. "Yet some of the men weren't very well trained in mapmaking," admits Vergada, taking a break in his work after another member of his unit found a mine in an area that the maps show should be free of explosives.
     While the head of Vergada's unit, Major Manuel Baldizon, assures a reporter that his sappers can leave an area "100 percent free of mines," Vergada says they can "more or less" make that promise.
      "There's always a two to three percent factor of error," admits Pedrosa. He says erosion can move explosives and new vegetation can change a landscape after ten or twelve years. "Some of the mines just aren't where they left them, they've walked a ways away," Pedrosa says.
     Across the border in Honduras in September, then President Carlos Roberto Reina dedicated 155 square kilometers that the army had declared "mine-free" after removing some 2,000 mines in two years of work. Yet the day before the ceremony, one peasant farmer was killed and another injured when they set off a mine while clearing a field for planting along the border.
     Government officials in Honduras believe another 29,000 mines remain to be removed, some planted by Nicaraguan troops, others planted by the Contras.
     In Nicaragua, some 5,000 mines planted by the Contras also remain to be removed, but sappers have no maps to those.
     Politicians throughout the region say they want all the mines removed by the year 2000. Pedrosa says that's "impossible." Some 13,000 mines were removed last year in Nicaragua--at that rate, there's at least six years of work remaining.
     Some rural residents, impatient with the pace of official demining operations, have taken upon themselves the removal of the mines. Vergada says his unit has found mines stacked up by peasant farmers who successfully removed them. In some areas, residents are helped by the fact that 80 percent of the mines have been rendered ineffective by the weather. "But the other 20 percent still work just fine," says Baldizon. "It's a kind of gambling."
     Juan Ramon Lopez lost a leg and the use of both eyes in December while trying to remove a mine near San Fernando, a border village northeast of here. Lopez, a civilian, has earned a living for several years removing mines at $20 apiece for large landowners. Without the training and the sophisticated equipment of army experts, such "artisan sappers" face greater risks. Yet impatience at the inability to replant dangerous fields provides strong motivation. "Too many years have passed, we can't continue waiting with these fields around us and yet we're unable to plant them," Lopez says.