Few ordinary Americans still consider the contras, the Nicaraguan anti-Communist rebels of the 1980s, much of a hot topic. But American leftists, especially among the Democrats of Washington, D.C., haven’t forgotten them. The reappearance in George W. Bush’s administration of John Negroponte, Otto Reich, and Elliott Abrams—all distinguished veterans of Reagan-era Latin American policy—has resurrected some of the deranged anti-contra rhetoric we last heard in the 1980s.

In that discourse, the contras were stigmatized in every conceivable manner and virtually every forum. Editorial cartoonists portrayed them as "Frito Bandito" Latins, a caricature that would have brought lynch mobs to the doorsteps of the dailies had it been applied to, say, the Mexican Zapatistas. In Doonesbury, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau milked yuks from the fact that a contra commander called himself Comandante Quiche. That the Quiché
Indians of Central America are a powerful cultural symbol to indigenous peoples in the region was unknown north of the Rio Grande; it was easy to imagine the contra officer as a quiche-eating dilettante cruising through Washington power parties.

Generic atrocities and crimes were charged against the contras, with no detail forthcoming as to where or when the murders, rapes, and massacres of which they were continuously accused had taken place. Incredibly elaborate legends about drug dealing were spun out through endless embellishment to become common wisdom. And finally, the contras were smeared as mercenaries who had sold themselves for mon ey, commanded by fascist leftovers of the former Somoza dictatorship.

You can find a nice example of all this reheated rhetoric in the Washington Post’s recent review of a memoir by Ronald Radosh, which excoriated Radosh for supporting, almost two decades ago, those "terrorist" contras. But now in The Real Contra War, Timothy C. Brown, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, has delivered a blow for the truth perceived by Radosh and a handful of other non-Nicaraguans. From 1987 to 1990, Brown was the State Department’s senior liaison to the contras, and in the intervening years, he has immersed himself in an anthropological analysis of the indigenous culture of the peasants who served in the main contra force, the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense.

What he has learned is enlightening: The peasants’ defiance of the Sandinista regime reflected a conflict thousands of years old. This long, long war between the highland Chibcha and lowland Nahua Indians (a conquering offshoot of the Aztecs) began before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, and it continues today.

In The Real Contra War, Brown has chosen to play by the rules of anthropology rather than polemics. It was well known throughout the Sandinista dictatorship that the Marxists in Managua had provoked serious opposition to their rule from the Indians of the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast. But Brown is the first to demonstrate that the contra movement in north-central Nicaragua also reflected the ancient Indian desire to be left alone. The Nahuas, as a tributary of the totalitarian Aztec empire, built large cities, erected extensive hierarchies, and exported cocoa beans to Mexico, using slave labor.

The Chibchas lived on individual farms, with no state structure. The Nahuas were absorbed by the Spanish to form the lowland population of modern Nicaragua. The Chibchas learned Spanish and adopted Catholicism, but their psychology remained intact—and when the Sandinistas’
commissars, inspired by Castro’s Cuba, arrived to herd the descendants of the original Chibchas into collectives, their reaction was predictable. They rose up and fought back.

A few foreign observers of Nicaragua in the 1980s recognized that the majority of the contras had also opposed the Somoza dictatorship, with many of them—the most famous being the controversial Eden Pastora, or Commander Zero—having served in the Sandinistas’ ranks.

But most of them turned against the Sandinistas the instant they perceived the Stalinist drift of the new regime. Indeed, the main lesson of Brown’s The Real Contra War is that all foreigners got the contras wrong, at one level or another. "The Sandinistas and their sympathizers . . . viewed the [contras] as useful counterrevolutionary foils, the Americans may have seen them as convenient surrogates in a late Cold War skirmish, and [Nicaraguan] civilian politicians may have thought of them as useful stepping stones to power. But the peasants of Nicaragua’s highlands saw them as their shield against yet one more in a thousand-year-old string of attempts at subjugation by outsiders."