Sandanista Human Rights abuses:
Lacking support from the population in that part of the country, Sandinista troops committed their most controversial activities (as far as human rights are concerned) on the Atlantic Coast, including the forcible relocation of 8,500 Miskitos from their land and the destruction of up to 100 villages, activities which led to charges of genocide at the time. They also killed and imprisoned several indigenous people suspected of Contra collaboration. On two separate occasions in 1981 and 1982, Sandinista troops committed massacres in which approximately (UNHCR Report) 34 Miskito Indians died. However, Sandinista supporters claim this pales in comparison to the deaths attributed to the Contras. [3]
The greatest human right violation of the Sandinistas during the Contra War was the usage of Russian tactics to combat the Contras, resulting in the death of thousands of young Nicaraguan conscripts. The Sandinistas used their batallions consisting of 600 conscripts in three waves of 200 to attack Contra positions. These batallions would be ordered to attack machine-gun nests in the hope that by the third wave the Contras would run out of bullets and be overrun. Nicaragua, a country with just about 3 million inhabitants, could not afford the luxury of losses in ratios of 20-to-1 as Russia did with the Germans in WWII and the North Vietnameses against the Americans.
Another tactic used by the Sandinistas was the indiscriminate shelling of towns recently captured by the Contras, an action which was viewed by many as "punishment." This Sandinista practice resulted in the Reagan Administration issuing orders to the Contra to stop further capture of cities and to concentrate on a "wasting" war while the U.S. was outspending the Soviet Union into bankcruptcy, effectively curtailing the military support to the Sandinistas.
During the war Amnesty International and other groups reported that political prisoners in Sandinista prisons, such as in Las Tejas, were beaten, deprived of sleep and tortured with electric shocks. They were denied food and water and kept in dark cubicles that had a surface of less than one square metre, known as chiquitas ("little ones.") These cubicles were too small to sit up in and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista
