Ricardo Chavira Chicano

This is an excerpt from chapter one of my book. It offers historical context to today’s border crisis. We Were Always Here: A… by Chavira, Ricardo (amazon.com) 

Desperately, the heavily armed guerrillas and I scaled a steep, verdant hill in northern Nicaragua. In withering afternoon heat, the very fatigued twenty-seven rebels, my colleague and
I pressed on at a grueling pace, often slipping and stumbling on loose soil. For the last hour, the muffled boom of
Nicaraguan military artillery told the fighters their enemies were close. Vastly outnumbered, the guerrillas had to keep
moving.
The group’s mustachioed 29-year-old commander, Alfa, looked over his shoulder, his face tightened in fear and anger.
“They are bombing where we just were. If we don’t hurry and get out of here, they’ll be on top of us.”
Alfa and his young, American-trained and -armed Nicaraguan peasants were Contras, that is contrarrevolucionarios, or counterrevolutionaries. They were locked in a three-year-old war with the leist Sandinista government.
The group included two women combatants, photographer Bob Nickelsburg and me. Both Bob and I were on assignment
for Time magazine.
Weeks earlier, Alfa and his fellow combatants had engaged in a raid from their Honduran base into Nicaragua’s
Nueva Segovia Department, blowing up electrical power lines, mining roads, fighting Sandinista troops and murdering two civilian government collaborators. Now, on Good Friday, 1984 the Contras were again in Nueva Segovia being
chased by insurgents with murderous intent. The rules of this war dictated that captured fighters were immediately executed.
I was terrified yet focused on returning to the safety of the Honduran border, some twenty miles to the north. Strangely, I was struck by the improbability of my dire situation. I thought of the great physical, intellectual and emotional distance I had traveled to be at this torrid, dangerous spot in Nicaragua. To this day, I don’t understand why such thoughts came to me. My journey had begun some twenty-five years earlier as a poor Mexican boy in Southern California.