Some truth emerges in reporter's book on contras

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By AUCIELLO With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua, by Christopher Dickey. Simon and Schuster, 327 pp., $18.95.

Last December, Nicaraguan contra leaders published a self-flattering article in The New York Times Op Ed page which purported to outline their political goals.

We are for freedom, justice and democracy in Nicaragua, said the contras. Our revolution against Somoza has been kidnapped by the Sandinistas and betrayed, handed over to the Russians and Cubans, they said. And by the way, those human rights abuses that have been reported in the newspapers?—regrettable lapses only.

If such talk came only from the contras themselves, there would be little reason for alarm. But the anti-Sandinista forces are backed by the U.S. government-Reagan Republicans setting the line, the Democrats following suit. And with such support has come the virtual contra-ization of the press.

Christopher Dickey's book is not the antidote to the daily obsequiousness of the press. He, too, is infected by it. But in him the reporter and ideologue are at odds, and from this conflict some truth emerges. These days it is something to be grateful for.

Dickey's exposure of the contras' meth -ods, and what such methods reveal of their goals, will be a shock.

"Tigrillo hangs people"

"Human rights abuses" is not the issue. This term is far too mild and misleading to describe the brutality of the contras. Intimidation, beatings, robbery, destruction of homes and livelihood, rape, torture and murder-these atrocities are the conscious policy of the contras.

Dickey recounts a contra leader's description of one of his field commanders, Tigrillo, or little tiger— "you cross the river with him and he becomes a tiger. He hangs people. He rapes. He shoots people who don't obey him. I once saw one of his soldiers challenge him and he pulled out his Girl wounded by contras the type of man who first joined the Guard-the men who constitute the backbone of the contras today.

Consider Nicaragua before the July 1979 revolution. A peasant who could look forward only to a life of grueling work and poverty joins the National Guard of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Now he is a man with a gun, feared and obeyed. He receives benefits, privileges. The sergeant dreams of becoming an officer, handing out rewards and punishments, controlling greater numbers of men, deciding life and death.

Dickey describes one group of National Guardsmen who escaped to El Salvador: "They had no money to buy a milpa [small farm] and, anyway, no desire to farm the land of another country. If they had wanted to be farmers, after all, they would not have gone into the Guardia....All they really knew how to do was fight, and the territory they knew how to fight in was Nicaragua."

The Guardsman is transformed into a contra and, in what seems to him to be self-defense and survival, he becomes a vampire, spilling blood in order to live. Or, as a contra leader explained to Dickey, "there are people who learn to kill and who love it."

unravel the myths Last year alone Congress voted those people $27 million in "humanitarian aid," enabling them to continue their war against Nicaragua.

Perhaps "With the Contras" will make it harder for the United States to perpetuate that war. Yet the book has many weaknesses. Dickey relies too heavily on contra sources and is often willing to accept their point of view. Many contra criticisms of the Sandinistas go unchallenged.

And the style of the book poses its own problems. The narrative technique, which lends an air of truthfulness to the entire text, is belied by the biased sources meticulously listed in the 42 pages of notes. Without checking these notes the reader can be misled.

Early in the book, for instance, we seem to be side-by-side with Eden Pastora, the famed Commander Zero, in the last month of the insurrection against Somoza. In this flattering account Pastora triumphs, not only over the National Guard, but over the bureaucratic incompetency of the Sandi -nistas as well. Turning to the notes, we find the sole source for this "information" is Pastora himself in an interview given two years after he took up arms against the Sandinistas and became the uneasy ally of the contras.

Despite these drawbacks, Dickey's Contra chief "Suicida" and cronies unravels her tale of incest, racism, brutal captures a sense of what the war is like. "With the Contras" covers a wide terrain. Dickey reports from the battlefields in El Salvador and Nicaragua, details the machinations of contra leaders in Miami and Honduras, eavesdrops on policyplanning meetings in Washington, D.C., and describes the maneuvering of the CIA throughout Latin America.

Dickey does not succeed in all he has undertaken. His biases are a hindrance. But the information he has unearthed is sig -nificant.

This book will help unravel the pretensions, myths and lies that the United States has fostered about the contras. For that reason alone, "With the Contras" deserves to be read.

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