In its center lies the village of Las Praderas, the principal place of the community of Santa Maria de Pantasma with about 40,000 inhabitants in the province of Jinotega.
The assault was condemned as a "criminal action" by the Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United Nations in a letter to the UN Security Council, calling it "barbaric and inhumane" and is still seen as a symbol of Contra atrocities.
[1] Some have hypothesized that the crater at Pantasma was formed when a large meteorite struck into the Tertiary effusive layers of the volcanic mountains in the north of Nicaragua.
[2][3] The circular shape of the crater, the skew of its floor according to the spacious mountain slope and its apparently arbitrary situation supports the thesis of a meteorite impact.
The authors estimated the Central American strewn field to encompass portions of Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize, and southern Mexico.