By Paul Jeffrey for The Christian Century

     It's been seven years since the war came to an official end, yet for many Nicaraguan peasant farmers the day seems far away when they can live in peace and unafraid.
     Leonel Martínez doesn't think that's right. Martínez is a delegate of the word--a Catholic lay pastor--in Nueva Guinea, a rugged frontier town in southern Nicaragua. In this violent land, he is one of hundreds of ordinary citizens who have risked their lives over the past decade to make peace a reality in their communities.
     Martínez repairs radios and televisions for a living, working in a small shop in the front of his house a block from the town square. While his fingers wrestle with transistors corroded by the humid tropical air, he confesses his real vocation. "We are sent into the world to evangelize with our word and with our testimony," he says. "We go with divine authority to build reconciliation, to construct the peace that God has dreamt for our communities."
     Martínez incarnates God's dream of peace by working tirelessly with dozens of local "peace commissions" spread throughout the villages that dot the surrounding countryside. The commissions were created during the worst of the war by ordinary folks, most of them local church leaders, who had simply grown tired of war. They forged a dialogue between Contra and Sandinista leaders in an effort to reduce the violence and lessen its impact on the civilian population.
     Such peacemaking entails risk. The Contras usually saw peace commission members as Sandinista agents snooping for intelligence. Many Sandinistas viewed them as fellow travelers to the Contras. Yet the grassroots activists persevered, faith overcoming fear. They always gathered their courage during common worship before hiking into the mountains. When meeting with armed groups or government officials, they insisted on reading from the scriptures before talking about war and peace.
     Slowly, their work began to bear fruit; with their insistence on dialogue and respect for the rights of noncombatants, they gradually carved out a space where peasants could plant their crops and survive even though the country at large remained at war. Although the isthmus' presidents got international billing as peacemakers after their 1987 summit in Esquipulas, Guatemala, laid the groundwork for reducing tensions in Central America, it was quite ordinary people who at great personal risk made peace a reality on the ground.
     By 1987, 28 commissions had sprung up in the area around Nueva Guinea. When the war finally ended in 1990, 60 commissions had been established. Rather than closing up shop with peace, however, the commissions continued to multiply. In the mountains around Nueva Guinea today there are 120 peace commissions, twice the number at war's end. In other nearby areas, the number of commissions has similarly multiplied. And if they didn't have commissions then, they're likely to now. Around Boaco, for example, eight commissions were created in 1996 where there were none before.
     If the war in Nicaragua is over, why are the peace commissions growing? 
     "The government ended the war but never sowed the seeds of peace," says Arsenio Alvir, the Nueva Guinea coordinator of the Council of Evangelical Churches (CEPAD). Alvir supervises the peace commissions throughout southern Nicaragua. 
     A majority of Nicaraguans voted for Violeta Chamorro for president in 1990 because they believed she could end the decade-long war wracking their country. Indeed, shortly after Chamorro took office, she convinced more than 20,000 Contras to turn in their weapons. Yet within weeks of watching United Nations troops cut their weapons in half, many of the former combatants, frustrated at the president's apparent inability to meet their needs, dug up hidden arms caches and set out to cause trouble once again. Hundreds of former Sandinista soldiers did likewise.
     Chamorro made new promises, threatened, offered amnesty, sent in the troops. Whatever she did, it didn't work for long. By the time her seven-year administration ended in January, well over 2,000 people had died as a result of violence by the rearmados--the "rearmed." 
     Martínez claims that Chamorro, who tried buying up weapons from the rearmados, bears part of the blame. "She tried to sell reconciliation in exchange for arms. That turned war into a business," he reports. "Selling arms became the only manner of surviving. And there were always more arms to sell." Vilma Núñez, director of the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, recalls how combatants "would get in one line, sell an AK-47, then go get another and get in a different line to sell it." 
     Chamorro's administration also gave away housing materials to the former combatants, mostly tin roofing, "but often the combatants sold it by the next day," says Juan Carlos Palma, peace commission coordinator in the northern province of Jinotega. "Maybe about 4 percent of those who received houses still live in them. The rest were sold and when the money ran out they took up arms once again."
     As called for in the treaties that brought an end to the decade-long war, the Nicaraguan government gave land to former combatants from both sides. Some 8,000 former Contras received farm plots, but only a quarter of those got a deed with their property. And even those who did get titles to their property often found someone else already living there. Alvir complains that government negotiators "flew over the area in an airplane, assigning lands from the air. They often gave away tracts which had an owner who had lived there for 20 years but who didn't have a title, so they considered it unoccupied." The resulting confusion convinced many former Contras to lose any remaining trust they had in the government.
     Growing desperate as she watched her pacification efforts bear little fruit, Chamorro tried buying off former Contra leaders. "Violeta and her advisors tried to demobilize the groups by buying off their leaders, giving them land, trucks, and naming them to posts in government ministries," Núñez says. "They thought they could thus behead the movement. But another group with another head would always emerge, feeling betrayed by those the government had bought off." And a lot of the four wheel-drive rigs given to Contra commanders by the government ended up smashed into trees, their drivers fatally unwilling to learn that war-time combat machismo didn't translate easily into peacetime driving skills.
     Chamorro next tried granting amnesty--several times--to those who took up arms, yet it also failed to stop the violence. "Some of today's rearmados have received amnesty two, three, or four times," Núñez says. "For them, amnesty serves as a permit to continue doing what they want because they know that later the government in desperation is going to give them amnesty again."
     No one denies that Chamorro faced a daunting task. Her little country's fratricidal war had been fueled ideologically and materially from the White House, yet U.S. interest and assistance had grown scarce by the time Chamorro had to pick up the pieces after the bloodshed. In addition, few Nicaraguans deny her good will. Donald Rios, the Sandinista mayor of Nueva Guinea in the eighties (he's today a member of the city council), admits Chamorro "had very little time to respond to so many demands at a national level. It was perhaps unfair to demand so much so soon of her government, right after the war had ended. She meant well, but for whatever reasons she failed to respond adequately."
     As the postwar years went by, it became more and more difficult to distinguish any ideological motivation among the leaders of the rearmados. Many became simple bandits, terrorizing the population at will, controlling large areas of the countryside, yet conveniently wrapping themselves in political colors every time the army got serious about repressing them.
     One of the factors contributing to the growth of the rearmados was the ego of former Contra commanders who had a hard time adjusting to civilian life. After carrying an assault rifle around for years, exerting life and death control over others, it was hard to go back to the farm and follow oxen around all day. "To have carried the rank of comandante is something that changed many people," Martínez says, "making ordinary, humble peasants into something else, something arrogant. They were the maximum authority in the countryside. The whole world existed to serve these guys." 
     Martin Zavala was a commander in the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the major Contra army that the CIA cobbled together in Honduras from remnants of the Somoza-era National Guard. During the war, Zavala was Comandante Repollo ("Commander Cabbage"), a nom de guerre he still maintains today in Las Miradas, a sleepy crossroads along the dirt road that heads from Nueva Guinea back to Managua. Comandante Repollo is a "voluntary police officer," checking permits on buses and trucks that roll through the village. It's a compromise the peace commissions hammered out between Repollo and government officials. By granting him the non-paying post, officials allowed Repollo to keep the AK-47 which he claimed he needed to feel safe.
     Repollo admits he was frightened at war's end. Every time he saw a Sandinista, he recalls, "I couldn't turn my back on them, I was afraid they were going to screw me, terminate me." Repollo had hopes that Chamorro would change this environment, after all, that's why he had campaigned for her, like many other Contras, gun in hand. Yet he quickly grew disappointed. "Once we turned in our weapons, we were no longer important to the Señora," he says.
     Frightened and frustrated, Repollo and 190 of his fighters took to the hills again within months of disarming. They didn't lay down their weapons until 1994, following months of jawboning from members of the peace commissions who trekked unarmed through the mountains searching for dialogue.
     Repollo, like other Contra comandantes, at first considered the peace activists to be spies. "Everyone was suspicious of the commissions," Repollo recalls. "I thought of kidnapping some of them to investigate, but I decided to wait and see. It became clear over time that they're neutral people who watch out for the rights of all Nicaraguans."
     Part of what convinced Repollo was witnessing how the activists willingly risked their lives to protect the former combatants. He recalls how Alvir, during one tense showdown with government troops, switched hats and coats with the Contra commander in an effort to protect him. Such courage was something the war-hardened rearmados could understand.
     The obviously religious character of the groups has also won them maneuvering space in the middle of violent conflict. Most peace commissions have five members, including at least one evangelical pastor and one Catholic delegate of the word. "Religion played an important role in the pacification of this zone," says Captain Pablo Briton, the army's commander in Nueva Guinea. Briton credits the peace commissions with "making the region stable again."
     This work of peacemaking at the grassroots is one of few places in Nicaragua where religious tensions between Catholics and evangelicals are overcome. "We put religious differences aside so we can protect the community, defend life and everyone's human rights," says Martínez. "Peace doesn't have political or religious colors."
     Some church leaders don't like the commissions. Alvir says a few conservative evangelicals oppose working for peace because they believe it hinders the return of Christ. And Roman Catholic officials have at times suffered from "religious suspicion," according to Martínez, one of many Catholics who resisted considerable pressure from church authorities to withdraw from the ecumenical commissions and instead support a separate network of committees that provides information to Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the archbishop of Managua. Obando's committees, notoriously anti-Sandinista, only report complaints. Martínez says the ecumenical commissions operate proactively, trying to resolve conflicts before they flare into violence. "Our job is to perceive beforehand . . . problems with the government that, if not heard, can become obstacles to reconciliation," he says. "Then what we do is help people be heard by the authorities."
     As part of this proactive approach, the commissions host regular workshops to discuss human rights and nonviolent conflict resolution. The commissioners then serve as "multipliers" of this knowledge in their home communities.
     A comparison of two different war-torn regions provides ample evidence that the commissions have succeeded in constructing a basis for peace. The area around Nueva Guinea, where peace commissions were formed in the late eighties, is relatively peaceful these days. The northern province of Jinotega, however, has been torn by uninterrupted bloodshed. Not surprisingly, the first peace commissions in Jinotega weren't formed until 1990. By 1993 there were only three, and by 1995 there were 24 active commissions. Today there are 53 peace commissions in Jinotega province, and although years behind the Nueva Guinea commissions, they've taken a key role in negotiating with several groups of rearmados.  
     A team from the Organization of American States (OAS), known here as the International Aid and Verification Commission (CIAV), was charged with monitoring government compliance with the peace process and insuring protection for former combatants. The CIAV should have helped Chamorro learn from her mistakes and make peace. Yet grassroots activists think the CIAV's approach was too top-down and bureaucratic and its employees too well paid. "They thought they were the only ones with the capacity to resolve conflicts," Martínez says. "They didn't pay much attention to community groups because they were supposedly the chosen ones, picked internationally to do this work."
     CIAV staff became well-known for working bankers hours and driving air-conditioned vehicles. Martínez recalls one 1992 incident in Nueva Guinea when a standoff between former Contras and Sandinista police turned bloody late one night. "We were there at the start while those of the CIAV were sleeping. They had to look for us to find out what happened."
     Until this year, the OAS repeatedly renewed the CIAV's mandate despite the lack of measurable progress toward completing the mission's mandate. Some activists suspect the international observers just haven't been trying. "If the conflict ends, they're out of a job," reasons Alvir.
     When Arnoldo Aleman took over as Nicaragua's president on January 10, he seemed in no hurry to deal with the rearmados. The president sent new negotiators to talk with leaders of the 500-member Frente Norte 380, a group composed almost exclusively of former Contra fighters. Palma complained the new government negotiators were "businesspeople, friends of Aleman, who didn't know the situation here in the mountains. That broke the rhythm of the negotiations."
     After going nowhere for months, on May 30 the talks finally produced an agreement, and Aleman and seven Frente Norte commanders signed a document that on the surface appeared similar to Chamorro-era accords. The government promised land, credit, and yet another amnesty. The rearmados didn't have to disarm immediately, however, leading some observers to worry that Aleman is slyly trying to convert the former Contras into a paramilitary band that could be used to violently counteract public opposition from the Sandinistas, who in April carried out a successful national strike against the government. Núñez, who worries that the treaty gives the ex-Contras "tacit authorization to form parallel institutions to the army and police," called the accords  "a pantomime and a public propaganda act" designed to convince foreign capitalists that Nicaragua is a stable environment for new investment.
     Despite the May 30 accord, the work of the peace commissions is likely to expand in coming months and years. Where law enforcement personnel are unable to control rising delinquency, the peace commissions have stepped in. According to Palma, communities around the northern town of Bocay complained for months last year about crimes committed by a band of rearmados headed by Pablo Negro, a former Contra commander. Police officers were afraid to enter the area. So peace commission members tracked down Pablo Negro and persuaded him to control his troops. Pablo Negro went one step further and started turning over suspected criminals that his troops captured. In the first two months of this year, he turned over eight suspected rapists and kidnappers to police officials who entered the zone escorted by peace commission leaders.
     CEPAD President Gustavo Parajón, who has shepherded the commissions from the beginning, says there is "a grand absence of the government in many rural communities," leading the peace commissions to become, in essence, the local government. The commissions are growing in number and work, according to Parajón, as the government reduces services in the countryside. Nicaragua's $6 billion foreign debt is one of the highest in the world in per capita terms or in relation to gross domestic product, and the Aleman administration has demonstrated a complete willingness to follow the prescriptions of international lenders. Such measures include cutting remaining government services even further.
     As the role of the commissions steadily expands, peace activists have their work cut out for them. In Yolaina, for example, a war-scarred village an hour away from Nueva Guinea by horse, there are no police to keep order. So it's the local peace commission that mediates land conflicts, domestic disputes, and contested inheritances. It's the peace commission that supervises community health work. It's the peace commission that investigates crimes, taking proposed settlements in writing to an overworked judge in Nueva Guinea who stamps the papers, making the commission's decision legally binding.
     "We solve problems without force," says Ramón Andrade, coordinator of the Yolaina commission. "Our best weapon is our tongue."