Graffiti of a Nicaraguan survivor: war doesn't just disappear with the signing of a peace treaty and the onslaught of reconstruction efforts. To understand the true cost of any armed conflict, we must first consider the lingering effects of war one, five, ten, or twenty years from its official end

Humanist, May-June, 2005 by Michelle Bargo

They killed you and they didn't tell us where they buried your body, but since then all our land is your tomb.

Or let's say you came back to life in each inch in which your body is not.

They thought they killed you with an order "fire."

They thought they buried you, but what they did was bury a seed.

IN MANAGUA, NICARAGUA'S crumbling capital city, artistic, political, and cultural graffiti adorn many of the otherwise bare structures. More revealing than any textbook about Nicaragua could ever be, these artifacts are a window into the hearts and minds of the people that live in this nation.

After the corrupt Somoza dictatorship embezzled the foreign aid designated for rebuilding Nicaragua after the earthquake of 1972, that regime was overthrown by the Sandinista revolution in 1979. But the Sandinistas' Marxist philosophies were at odds with U.S. foreign policy, and in the 1980s the Reagan administration financially backed the Contras with the aim of ousting the Sandinista government, which was seen as a communist entity.

The Contra War wasn't a traditional war fought between two armies. The Contras admittedly had no real chance of overthrowing the military, so their goal became to usurp the Sandinistas by destroying the infrastructure and exacerbating the economic havoc that already existed in the embattled nation. This strategy also included the assassination of compassionate individuals who worked to minimize the effects of poverty and violence.

The Freedom Fighter's Manual, published and distributed by the CIA in 1983, is an eye-opening reflection of how the Contra War was fought. From time to time I doubt that this document is real and unearth my copy from the box where I keep it as physical proof that I haven't imagined it. Its pages, filled with light-hearted cartoon drawings, are touted as a "practical guide to liberating Nicaragua from oppression and misery by paralyzing the military-industrial complex of the traitorous Marxist state." Inside are instructions for damaging and destroying machinery, wasting natural resources, ruining vehicles, making Molotov cocktails, and wreaking havoc on the already decayed Nicaraguan infrastructure. The Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, released by the CIA in 1984, is even more gruesome, advising the assassination of officials and human rights advocates in detached language, using such words as neutralize, reduce, and replace.

My announcement that my final semester as an undergraduate would be spent abroad as a participant in Xavier University's Nicaraguan Service Learning Semester inspired many comments from my concerned family members, though not one was sewn with the tactful threads of enthusiasm.

"Why Nicaragua?"

"I'm sure you could find an excellent exchange program in Europe. France and Spain are incredible destinations for college students."

"It's not safe."

But I couldn't be discouraged. What my rebellious-young-woman stage lacked in experimentation with sex and drugs it made up for in adventures that were well outside the realm of my sheltered, Midwestern, "Leave-It-to-Beaver" upbringing. I was twenty-two, resolute, and already mentally packing my bags for Managua.

This isn't to say that I wasn't afraid, because I definitely was. Nicaragua was destitute and foreign, impoverished beyond my ability to comprehend. Not only did its history include frequent natural disasters but it had also endured civil war and political upheaval of epic proportions.

In retrospect, my family had good reason to be afraid for me to travel to Nicaragua; the country would open my eyes to realities that I was far too innocent to ever believe without firsthand experience. Once I came to understand that Nicaraguans were human beings, just like you and me, my capacity for empathy was awakened.

AFTER ARRIVING IN NICARAGUA our student group visited Granada, Matagalpa, Esteli, Masaya, and Leon. Everywhere we went, faded monochromatic photographs of boys and men with haunting, desperate stares covered the walls of the cities as tributes to the war dead. Their wives and mothers spoke with us, crying as they told their stories of life and death. The cost of Nicaragua's "cold war" in human lives was officially 60,000. But the true cost can never be known, as this nation hasn't yet recovered from its violent past, and the damage has persisted like a curse. It is present every minute of every day in the lives of modern day Nicaraguans.

At a Christian-based community meeting in Managua, the participants sang to us a poignant song and their voices echoed eerily in the sparsely furnished room. "It is not enough to pray," they sang, "because even the pilots were praying when they went off to bomb Vietnam" Yet, as U.S. citizens, we were met with only kindness and acceptance. We were never judged or mistreated. Our hosts embraced us and treated us like part of their community. Philosopher and psychiatrist Thomas Szasz wrote, "The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget." The Nicaraguans that we met gifted us with the truest forgiveness that I could imagine.