Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
The Revolution and the People: How the Sandinistas Gained and
then Lost the Support of Nicaraguans
Word Count: 5,496
When the Sandinistas (FSLN) came to power in Nicaragua in 1979, they did so
with the backing of the vast majority of the country’s politically literate poor, as
well as a large proportion of the middle classes – from which most of the
Sandinistas themselves emanated. They were particularly popular with students –
their movement having originated in the universities – on good terms with the
Catholic Church and even COSEP (the Association which represented private
business interests). Though there were many sceptical observers – not least among
the Catholic bishops and the landowning classes – internal opposition to the
Sandinistas, in the early days of the revolution, was generally rather reserved.
There is no doubt, in other words, that they had the support of the majority of
Nicaraguans.
There were two overriding factors behind the healthy initial support enjoyed by
the revolutionaries. First, by the end of the 1970s, virtually the entire nation was
united against the Somoza dynasty which had ruled the country for half-a-century.
Second, Nicaraguan history was a bit like an epic, the main theme of which was
national sovereignty, and this happened to be the chief principle of Sandinismo,
inscribed in its very name. Naturally, the movement had mass appeal.
When, in the early 1960s, Carlos Fonseca and Thomas Borge founded the
Sandinista movement, they were moved by two influences: one ideological and
the other historical. The ideological influence was Marxism-Leninism. Fonseca
had authored what became one of the movement’s classic early texts, Un
Nicaraguense en Moscu (A Nicaraguan in Moscow), a paean to the wonders of
the Soviet Union,1 which he had visited as a student representative of an earlier
Nicaraguan communist movement.
The historical influence was the anti-imperialist tradition, which went right back
to the writings of Nicaragua’s most famous son, the poet Ruben Dario. Dario had
been influenced by the epics of Homer and Virgil, and of his contemporary,
Victor Hugo, who penned the greatest revolutionary drama in modern fiction, Les
Miserables. Dario absorbed the French idea of liberty, which in the political
context of his homeland was inseparable from sovereignty, because liberty was
imperilled by the interference of a powerful neighbour, the United States, and
sovereignty was its safeguard. He wrote a somewhat prophetic poem addressed to
Theodore Roosevelt2 –
You are the United States
you are the future invader
1
2
See Berman [1], In Nicaragua, Mother Jones vol. 11 (9), Dec 1986, 22-3
Dario, R. tr. Applebaum, Stories and Poems, (London: Dover, 2003), 150-151
1
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
of the native America that has indigenous blood
that still prays to Jesus Christ and that still speaks Spanish
– and expressed a fear that was ubiquitous among Latin American writers at the
time, in the statement that: “if in these verses there is a political feeling, it is
because that feeling appears universally. And if you find lines to a well-known
president it is because they express the protest of an entire continent. Tomorrow
we may all become Yankee Americans.”3 The feeling certainly would become
universal in Nicaragua after the United States displaced the nationalist president
Jose Zalaya in 1909, embarking upon an occupation of the country which would
last for more than two-decades.
It was during those decades that Augusto Cesar Sandino would found his guerrilla
movement, intent on removing the US marines from the country. But after
Sandino’s assassination, the short-lived government of Juan Sacasa, to which
Sandino had pledged his loyalty, would begin to come under gradual and
sustained attack by the first member of the Somoza dynasty, Anastasia Somoza
Garcia.
Somoza Debayle, with whom most of Nicaraguan society lost patience during the
1970s, was the son of Somoza Garcia. The elder Somoza had been commander in
chief of the National Guard (a gendarmerie created by the United States to keep
order during the occupation) when, in 1934, Sandino was murdered. It was
probably the Guard which murdered Sandino, and it was probably by the order of
Somoza Garcia.
The elder Somoza then began to form tactical political alliances with former
presidents and used the Guard to help him to replace government officials with his
own supporters. Eventually, Somoza forced Sacasa out, and the murderer of the
great anti-imperialist, Sandino, consolidated his presidency in 1936, employing
the relic of US interference, the National Guard, to maintain both order and
power.4
The lesson taken from this history by the early Sandinistas, Borge and Fonseca,
was that Nicaragua’s destiny would be decided by the conflict between
imperialism – of which the Somoza’s (still supported by and subservient to the
United States) were the result5 – and sovereignty. As Omar Cabezas would write
in his memoir, Fire from the Mountain, the struggle for sovereignty was “the true
paternity of all our history.”6 Sovereignty was represented by the great national
poet, Dario, of whose memory, in an essay of 1974, Fonseca would lament the
ignorant abuses ascribable to “North American cultural aggression.”7 And it was
also represented by Sandino, who had been labelled as “el hijo de” (the son) of
Dario’s poem, To Roosevelt8 by the nationalist poet Pablo Cuadra. Cuadra was a
3
In Crow, J. The Epic of Latin America 4th ed., (California UP, 1992), 693
See Walker, T. Nicaragua: The land of Sandino 3rd ed., (Oxford: Westview, 1991), 19-25
5
From the memoir of Sergio Ramirez: “The Somoza dynasty was nothing more than a
continuation of the same military intervention… With the revolution’s triumph in 1979, it was
Sandino who returned, and when Somoza fled, he represented the last marine leaving.” Adios
Muchachos, (Duke UP, 2012), 93-4
6
Cabezas, O. tr. Weaver, Fire from the Mountain, (London: Johnathan Cape, 1985), 221
7
Whisnant, D. Ruben Dario as a focal cultural figure in Nicaragua, Latin American Research
Review vol. 27 (3), 1992, 30
8
ibid, 31
4
2
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Sandinista without the Marxism, who was imprisoned by the elder Somoza in
1937 but would later become an enemy of the revolution, describing the FSLN in
the 1980s as “no Sandinistas at all.”9
In spite of the differences in opinion which would arise between some of
Sandino’s admirers, such as Cuadra, and the revolutionaries who would come to
power in 1979, it was still Sandino who gave their movement its name. And the
support which the Sandinistas would receive when they ascended to power in
1979 had a lot to do with this. (Salman Rushdie witnessed the mass enthusiasm
which could be harnessed by Sandino’s rallying-cry: “at the end of public
meetings a platform speaker would invariably call out ‘Patria libre!’ to which the
crowd would roar back, rather spookily if you hadn’t shared their history…, O
MORIR!’”10) They spoke in the name of Sandino as the triumphant victors who
appeared to be crowning a glorious end to the epic which was twentieth century
Nicaraguan history; the epic which was written, if only in spirit, by Ruben Dario.
Sovereignty had been reclaimed in 1979, seventy years after the United States had
snatched it away.
It is easy to see how the Sandinistas were able to claim to a receptive audience
that history was on their side. It was, however, also necessary that history should
turn definitively against the second son of the Somoza dynasty, Anastasia Somoza
Debayle. This began to happen in the early 1970s.
In 1972, Nicaragua’s capital, Managua was rocked by an enormous earthquake
which destroyed most of the city. That the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa
observed the “vast ghostly spaces”11 which characterised the capital when he
visited it in early 1985 was testament to the lack of energy expended by Somoza
in attempting to rebuild it. But not scorning the luckless inhabitants of the city, it
was Somoza’s betrayal of the private sector which likely had the greater impact
upon his eventual demise.
Somoza owned a number of construction companies, and he decided that the
contracts for the scant reconstruction efforts which were to be made would go to
them. The earthquake, for Somoza, was not a disaster but an opportunity to further
enrich himself.12 As Sergio Ramirez, who would later become Daniel Ortega’s
vice-President, recalled in his memoir, Adios Muchachos: “The earthquake that
destroyed Managua… caused a severe split within the dictatorship because
Somoza had completely taken over the reconstruction business, unaware that his
greed lost him one of his principle allies, private enterprise.”13
The Superior Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) would instigate three strikes
against Somoza’s regime in 1974,14 a trend which would continue until the time of
the revolution. The earthquake appears to have been the major catalyst which
begat the trend, and there was no turning back after the assassination of Pedro
Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of Nicaragua’s main newspaper, La Prensa, when
9
In Berman [2], A Child of his Century, New Republic vol. 226 (7), 2002, 26
Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 20
11
Vargas Llosa, In Nicaragua, New York Times Magazine, April 28, 1985
12
He also diverted millions in international aid into his own bank-account, angering (among
others) the US. See Anthony, A. The Fallout (London: Vintage, 2007), 64
13
Ramirez, 53
14
Vargas Llosa (1985)
10
3
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
COSEP called for “an unprecedented national strike.”15 As Ramirez explained:
“Joaquin’s death had convinced everyone of the need for cooperation… A group
of young businessmen headed by Alfonso Robelo… formed the Democratic
Nicaraguan Movement (MDN), which later became a breeding ground for FSLN
collaborators.”16
Meanwhile, influenced by the liberalising influences of the Second Vatican
Council, some of the Catholic clergy had begun to rebel against the conservative
impulse to protect the church, which between the mid-thirties and the late-sixties
had meant staying on the right side of the Somoza family. Instead, they became
motivated by what they saw as the true Christian mission, which was
championing the needs and rights of the poor. It was becoming obvious to some
that the needs of the poor were in direct conflict with the exorbitant regime of
Nicaragua’s most wealthy family, especially after the earthquake.
The bishops were for the most part more instinctively conservative than the clergy
but one in particular, Obando y Bravo, who became Archbishop of Managua in
the early 70s, was particularly vociferous in his criticism of Somoza. He openly
chastised Somoza’s response to the earthquake, having already refused the gift of
a Mercedes Benz from him. Later, the campaign of torture and murder which
followed the Chema Catillo raid would sicken the clergy and the bishops (it was
priests who were at the forefront of the effort to document Somoza’s human rights
abuses at that time).17
As the Church became more forthright in its opposition to Somoza, it was the
Sandinistas who came to benefit. After the FSLN had managed to reconcile the
ideological differences between its own factions, or tendencies, and incorporate
other opposition groups into a united front against Somoza, support for the
Sandinistas became an almost necessary corollary to opposition to the
dictatorship. Obando had already given an interview in which he argued that
violent revolution was permissible as a last resort against tyranny, and members
of the clergy, such as Ernesto Cardenal, had been engaged in clandestine
revolutionary activities, when the Episcopal Conference, which was held in Leon
in June 1979, issued a pastoral letter justifying the insurrection.18
It wasn’t until well after the Sandinista victory, however, that the bishops would
release their most incredible statement on Sandinismo, demonstrating that, if only
for a fleeting moment, they were prepared to support not only the revolution but
the advent of socialism in Nicaragua. The Pastoral Letter of November 17th, 1979
was entitled “Christian Commitment for a New Nicaragua.” Astoundingly, the
draft document had been written by Gustavo Gutierrez, perhaps the most famous
exponent of Liberation Theology (in its most Marxian variant). It stated:
Today, in our country, we are experiencing an exceptional opportunity to witness and
announce the kingdom of God. It would be a serious betrayal to the Gospel to allow this
15
Ramirez, 117
ibid, 120
17
For my account of the Catholic Church in the revolution I have relied chiefly upon: Williams, P.
‘The Catholic Hierarchy in the Nicaraguan Revolution’, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol.
17, No. 2 (Nov., 1985)
18
See Ramirez, 130
16
4
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
challenging moment of implementing the preferential option for the poor pass us by,
whether due to fear or mistrust…19
If socialism means, as it should mean, giving pre-eminence to the interests of the majority
of the Nicaraguans and following the model of a nationally planned economy with
progressively more participation of all the people, we have no reason to object. 20
Internationally, the Sandinistas also enjoyed healthy initial support. The Carter
government had been instrumental in the fall of Somoza21 and was a tentatively
friendly to the new regime. Meanwhile, among western political progressives, the
Sandinista revolution was welcomed as a triumph for liberty over tyranny
(represented by Somoza). Unlike a number of the “third-world” regimes which
were competing at the time for the support of the Western left, such as the
theocratic one in Iran, the fascistic one in Iraq, and the nationalistic one in
Zimbabwe, Sandinismo had evolved as part of a genuine liberation struggle and
had a political programme which appeared to be truly progressive.22 The ghastly,
sanguinary purges which accompanied the respective ascensions of the Ayatollah
Khomeini and Saddam Hussein were absent in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas
inspired hope and optimism in an enormous international audience of wellwishers.
Though the United States would become aggressively hostile to the revolution
after Reagan’s election in 1981, much of the Sandinistas’ international backing
would last throughout the 1980s. This, perhaps, obscured the fact that, inside the
country, the euphoria of 1979 didn’t actually last for a very long time. The 1990
election defeat stunned the international audience, but it was not only them who
had failed to notice the Sandinistas’ declining support. Daniel Ortega himself
could not believe that he had lost to Violeta Chamorro.23 There is a reason why
the Sandinista leadership was as blind as its international supporters to its
impending defeat. It can be explained by a quarrel between two novelists: Salman
Rushdie and the slightly more perceptive Mario Vargas Llosa.
When Vargas Llosa visited Nicaragua in 1985 he noted that he had already
garnered a reputation among Latin American intellectuals as a right-winger: “For
reasons that elude me, anyone defending freedom of expression, free elections and
political pluralism in Latin America is known as a right-winger.” The Peruvian
novelist’s eventual article on Sandinista Nicaragua was highly critical, and when,
shortly afterward, Salman Rushdie visited the country and authored a book which
was barely critical at all, he chided the “right-wing” Vargas Llosa for those
criticisms:24
He had written… with such skill about the importance of supporting the democratic process
in Latin America… He justified his support for… governments of the right in his native
Peru by saying that he preferred ballots to bullets; that a flawed democracy was infinitely
better than no democracy at all.
19
ibid, 130-131
Reprinted in Carney, P. To be a Revolutionary (Harper & Row: San Francisco, 1987), 431
21
For US condemnations and action against Somoza see Ramirez, 122 and 152-3 and Carter’s
tolerance of Sandinistas, 96
22
Rushdie, for instance, was complimentary about the constitution. 92-3
23
See Ramirez, 198
24
Rushdie, 49
20
5
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Peru was a flawed democracy of the right. Nicaragua was a flawed democracy of the left. If
democracy were really Vargas Llosa’s goal, then Nicaragua, according to his own declared
principles, was exactly the sort of state he ought to be supporting, and fighting to improve.
Vargas Llosa had recounted, in his article, something which Sergio Ramirez had
said to him: ''I suppose you know the motive behind the wining and dining by the
Sandinistas and the reactionaries. We all want you to say nice things about us in
your article and bad things about the other side.''25 International public opinion,
the Sandinista’s believed, was crucial to the success of the revolution, and they
were probably right. But it became so crucial to them that they began to overlook
Nicaraguan public opinion. Upon visiting a “People’s Church” Vargas Llosa
observed that more than half of the attendees were North American visitors, and
they were the people rushing to get photographs with Commander Thomas Borge,
who had accompanied the novelist on his visit. Most Nicaraguan Catholics,
Vargas Llosa quoted Obando y Bravo (whose enthusiasm for Sandinismo had
certainly died by this point), were “loyal to the bishops and the pope.”26 These
were the little things that Rushdie failed to notice.
The British novelist did, in his little book, admit to one or two misgivings,
especially about the censorship of La Prensa.27 But when he visited a market and
he heard some of the grumblings against the Sandinistas, he noted that whilst
“many foreign observers… had used this moaning as a sign that people had turned
against the Sandinistas”, he “found things to be rather different:28
The FSLN was attacked all right, until you asked: what should the government do? Should
it talk to the Contra, should it make accommodation with the US, should it sue for peace?
The answers to those questions were in an altogether different tone: no, no, of course they
can’t do that.
The Sandinistas were encouraged by this kind of credulity from their international
fans.29 They provided an echo-chamber to Sandinista claims that, but for US
aggression, the country would have become a paradise. And this meant that
instead of taking notice of the fact that one of the Contra groups was being led by
a former Sandinista, Eden Pastora,30 or that many of the revolution’s former
friends – Obando, Robelo, Chamorro – were now in the opposition, the FSLN
took a “Manichean” view by which anyone who didn’t support them was
considered counter-revolutionary.31 As Paul Berman wryly commented: “The
Vanguard of the people never noticed that the list of “CIA agents,” “oligarchic
elements,” “Somocista National Guards,” and “Agents of Imperialism” gradually
came to resemble an entity that could only be described, except by the
Sandinistas, as “the people.””32
25
Vargas Llosa (1985)
ibid
27
Rushdie, 47-48
28
ibid, 105
29
In Andrew Anthony’s memoir, documenting his gradual disillusionment with the left, he wrote
about volunteering in Sandinista Nicaragua. What he encountered among his fellow-travellers
reminded him of something Orwell wrote after the Spanish Civil War: “atrocities are believed in
or disbelieved in solely on the grounds of political predilection.” 73
30
Pastora headed the Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, a Contra group based around the Costa
Rican border. See Vargas Llosa (1985) and Berman [3], Why the Sandinistas Lost, in 50 Years of
Dissent (Yale UP, 2004), 220
31
Ramirez describes this outlook, 100
32
Berman [3], 219
26
6
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
When Sergio Ramirez came to make a full accounting of the reasons for the
FSLN’s defeat in 1990, it turned out that Vargas Llosa, not Rushdie, had probably
been closer to the truth. Ramirez laid bare the failures of Sandinismo in an
astonishingly frank chapter towards the end of his memoir.
One such: When they assumed power, the Sandinistas issued a decree giving them
the right to confiscate assets from the Somoza family and its accomplices in order
to redistribute land and property to landless peasants. But this wasn’t what
happened in reality:33
The expropriations were political in nature… There were Somocistas of every size on the
list of accomplices… This eventually caused a contradiction between the revolution’s
profile, destined to lift up the poor and bring down the rich, and the vengeance it exercised
against the Somoza system from top to bottom, even though there were people at the
bottom who had nothing more than a small farm, a bus, a store, a property lot, or their
home.
And expropriated land didn’t actually generally end up in the hands of the
peasants:34
When it was time to distribute lands… we distanced ourselves from the emotions that urged
us to transfer individual property titles to landless peasants… Instead, ideological
precautions prevailed, which led to the birth of the Agricultural Production Units (UPE).
These were, in other words, state owned and controlled cooperatives, which were
so hated by many of the peasants that some joined the Contras, or otherwise
“became their support base.”35 In some of the UPE cooperatives, Ramirez met
peasants who reported to him that they had been mistreated or even severely
tortured after being accused of being Somocistas.36 If these stories were, perhaps,
not quite material for a Nicaraguan Solzhenitsyn, Ramirez’s discovery that the
FSLN’s secretary in Pantasma had ordered executions was.37 The Sandinistas also
began to become so embarrassed by the negative reports from the nongovernmental Permanent Commission for Human Rights on their treatment of
political prisoners that they formed their own “human rights” group to downplay
such reports and emphasise Contra atrocities.38
Rushdie had been convinced by the argument that the war was to blame for all of
Nicaragua’s problems, and the war was being funded covertly by the CIA, so in
actual fact, it was the United States which was to blame for all of Nicaragua’s
problems.39 The paradigm which had existed since William Walker declared
himself President of the country in 1855, which had been explained by Dario and
Sandino, was still the dominant one: Nicaraguan history was still the history of
abuses against it by the US. The same line has been parroted by countless writers
and historians of the Sandinistas. Thomas Walker’s history, for instance, reads:
“Far from being a coterie of wild-eyed ideologues, the Sandinistas behaved in a
33
Ramirez, 164-5
ibid, 160-161
35
ibid, 161
36
ibid
37
ibid, 162
38
Miranda & Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction: New Jersey, 1994), 172
39
See Rushdie, 13
34
7
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
pragmatic and, indeed, moderate fashion throughout the nearly eleven years they
were in power”40
Sergio Ramirez, however, came to acknowledge that ideology was, in fact,
responsible for some of the Sandinistas most serious failings. The minister of
agriculture, Jamie Wheelock, he said, was a fantasist whose plans were never
made with “forethought for costs or profitability,” but to criticise his more than
ambitious modernisation efforts was considered a “heresy.”41 The government
began to print its own bills which led to devaluation and, “by the end of the
decade, Nicaragua had the highest rate of inflation in the world.”42
Ramirez’s sobering conclusion was that, “even without the war, the philosophical
essence of the model we sought to apply still would have led to economic
collapse.”43 And it seems quite obvious exactly where this economic model came
from.
The journalist Paul Berman visited Nicaragua for Mother Jones magazine in early
1986, and he wrote a fairly tame article about the struggles that the revolution was
facing.44 But then, a few months later, he wrote another article,45 this time
examining the ideology of the movement, and he discovered that, for the most
part, the Sandinistas were really quite orthodox Marxists. And this mattered,
because the Sandinistas’ adherence to Marxist ideology explained why the
revolution was destined to fail.
Berman read Fire from the Mountain, Omar Cabezas’s memoir of his induction
into “the Church,” a codename for the FSLN. Cabezas’s had joined the Church as
a student at the university in Leon in the spring of 1968; the group had managed
to get their candidate elected Student Body President; thereafter, they had
organised study groups dedicated to Lenin, Marx and Che; and the members of
these study groups had gone out into the barrios and preached to the peasants and
the Indians. Cabezas then went up into the mountains: just like Sandino, forty
years before him. Berman was astonished. He himself had been a student radical
in 1968 and, as he recalled, “student leftists all over the world were dreaming a
dream in that era. It was about organising the university and leading the students
out to the proletarian streets… The dream was about going to the mountains like
Che and starting the guerrilla struggle.” Berman came to the realisation that
“backwater Nicaragua was the world centre of the new left.” It was where the
dream actually took place. “Fantasy elsewhere was reality in Nicaragua.”46
Berman noted that, like in the United States, the student rebellions in Nicaragua
had been rebellions not just against power in general, but against pre-existing
leftist and socialist movements; they were generational revolts within the left. In
the United States, the old guard of the socialist movement, represented by the
League for Industrial Democracy, were seen as too moderate by the rebellious
students, who created the more radical movement, Students for a Democratic
40
Walker, 41
Ramirez, 168
42
ibid
43
ibid, 170
44
Berman [4], Exploring Nicaragua's neighbourhoods: rocking chairs, roosters & revolution,
Mother Jones, Vol. 11 (2), (March 1986)
45
Berman [1]
46
ibid, 20-22
41
8
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Society. In Nicaragua, too, the Sandinistas emerged as a radical response to what
they considered to be the redundant Nicaraguan Socialist Party.
They created their partly mythological cult of Sandino, but became at the same
time yet more strident Marxists. Fonseca wrote a chronology of Nicaraguan
history which culminated with the arrival of ideas from the faraway Soviet Union.
These ideas, the movement promised its adherents, would liberate Nicaragua (they
were partly right). Ricardo Morales Aviles penned the FSLN’s first manifesto,
entitled Our Position and Our Principles, and it stated frankly: “We defend the
purity of revolutionary thought, of Marxism-Leninism.” Even Humberto Ortega,
of the supposedly non-Leninist tercerista tendency wrote a book arguing for the
centrality of Leninism in the education of the young.47
In September 1979, the FSLN produced what became known as the 72-hour
document, outlining the revolutionary project. Ramirez’s summary of the
document underlines that Marxist orthodoxy remained at the root of
Sandinismo:48
In full splendour of Marxist terminology, we declared that our objective was to achieve a
socialist society based on proletarian dictatorship, after a period of alliances with the
bourgeoisie… the very existence of the Government Junta was set forth as the first example
of those alliances, which would have to end sooner or later according to history’s
dialectical destiny.
In 1968, Cabezas was inducted into what was still a cult-like organisation, with
only a handful of die-hard true believers. He and his fellow students became true
believers, too. After reading Kapital and Marta Harnecker’s Principles of
Historical Materialism,49 their job was to school the peasants in the barrios in
class consciousness, which could be a thankless job:50
Looking out over the faces of the people, I saw the workers in their caps. They didn’t nod
yes and they didn’t nod no… their faces were impenetrable... More than once we had the
feeling that we weren’t getting anywhere, that the people didn’t understand, that it didn’t
matter to them at all. And dammit you wanted to pick up a stick and beat what you were
saying right into their brains.
Cabezas even talked about the “genesis of the new man,” “cleansed of bourgeois
defects.”51 In this distinctively Latin American version, where Marxist theory was
fused with the cult of Sandino:
The new man began to be born with fungus infections and with his feet oozing worms; the
new man began to be born with loneliness and eaten alive by mosquitos… That’s the outer
part, because inside, by dint of violent shocks day after day, the new man was being born
with the freshness of the mountains… an open, unegotistical man, no longer petty.
The new man, in other words, was a guerrilla, which explained the movement’s
affection for Che. Guevara was half-Marx and half-Sandino; a hybrid of
revolutionary socialism and guerrilla insurgency. He is the central figure in Fire
from the Mountain, lauded over and over again. And Fonseca’s biographer,
47
ibid, 22
Ramirez, 74-5
49
See Cabezas, 19
50
ibid, 46
51
ibid, 86-7
48
9
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Zimmermann, argues that his split with the old Nicaraguan socialist party was
inspired, above all, by the example of Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.52
Writing in the mid-eighties, Berman noticed that the Sandinistas’ ideological bent
was extremely important to the revolution. In part, it explained how the revolution
had been successful in 1979: “When the years of organising and guerrilla boldness
paid off and the barrios rose up against Somoza, Sandinista centralism lent the one
trace of military coordination that the people possessed.” For the FSLN:53
The [Leninist] doctrine worked politically too. Political movements in Nicaragua have
always tended to be personal machines for local caudillos. One leader, one party is the
norm. The contras show what it is like: all the power of the CIA can barely herd the contra
caudillos into the same corral. But the Sandinistas grew up with the ideas of Leninist
discipline and hierarchy, which taught them to collaborate for mutual goals… And by the
time Somoza had fled… they had shown themselves to be the only group in Nicaragua with
the leaders, the prestige and the authority to form a government.
But Berman then hinted at the Sandinistas’ impending troubles. He spoke to a
leader from the old Socialist Party. He, like the poet Pablo Cuadra, who attacked
the FSLN as phony Sandinistas, complained that they were a “middle-class
organisation,” without a trade-union base, which could never be the authentic
voice of the proletariat, demonstrating that opposition to the Sandinistas came
from every angle, and not just Contra terrorists. The old socialist leader also made
a proposal for how the Sandinistas might arrest the economic decline and at the
same time undercut the Contras and the CIA without surrendering:54
They should reorganise the kind of broad coalition that helped bring down Somoza. They
should put together a government of national unity including all the political parties…
Representatives from the non-Sandinista trade unions would sit in such a government, and
so would representatives of the big capitalist farms, making it easier to exact concessions
from both.
The problem with this vision is that it could never happen. “This formula struck
me,” wrote Berman,55
A government of national unity is the natural step to take when a country is deep in
trouble… But even as the socialist leader spoke, I realised that none of this was likely to
happen… The Sandinistas themselves could hardly take the necessary steps without a
revolution in their own thinking. For the Sandinistas have made clear that, in their eyes, the
Sandinista vanguard is the revolution is the Nicaraguan people is the government. The
health of the revolution and the power of the party are to them inseparable.
Berman’s analysis tarries with the aforementioned 72-hour document, as well as
the further admissions that Ramirez made in his memoir: “To the very end meant
all or nothing… A proposal for radical change needed radical power… It was also
an infinite power. You do not win an armed struggle to conquer power shortterm”
The chief reason for the Sandinistas’ election defeat in 1990, Ramirez posited,
was the continuation of the war.56 On this subject in particular, the goals of the
party and the hopes of the people were starkly opposed. The war touched the lives
52
Zimmermann, M. Sandinista (Duke UP, 2001), 8
Berman [1], 23
54
ibid, 26
55
ibid, 26-7
56
See Ramirez, 191-205.
53
10
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
of not only those on the Honduran and Costa Rican borders, the epicentres of
Contra violence, but, through Patriotic Military Service (SMP) [conscription], of
most Nicaraguans. Ramirez would refer to SMP as “the decade’s most traumatic
event.” In his 1985 article, Vargas Llosa had raised the issue in the context of the
town of Nagarote, which revealed the true extent of peasant opposition to the
notion of sacrifice for the revolution:57
Army recruiters - soldiers themselves - came to the village at dawn and battered down
doors in their search for deserters and draft dodgers. The villagers reacted violently,
fighting with fists and stones… The recruiters retreated, but they came back with ''turbas''
armed with truncheons. In the meantime, the villagers had torn up the paving stones and
built barricades in the streets. Nagarote was not pacified until midnight, after many
villagers had been wounded or arrested.
There is a school of thought, represented in this essay by Walker and Rushdie,
who blame the war’s continuation – and therefore the FSLN’s defeat – entirely
upon the United States. But Ramirez himself seems to have broken with that
school. He came to realise, after the fact, what most Nicaraguans had come to
realise by the time of the election. The Sandinistas, by dint of their revolutionary
obstinacy, would never have ended the war.
We were broadcasting an aggressive image of Daniel Ortega. He was welcomed in every
plaza by the war song “el gallo ennavajado” (The Fighting Gamecock)... There could not
have been a worse symbol… The exit polls clearly reflected the dominant feeling… 96
percent of voters were convinced that we would never be able to stop the war… We knew
from the polls how important peace was for the elections, but it was outweighed by the old
messianic sense of power that linked the idea of popular revolution, with all its ideological
baggage, to unconditional support from the poor.58
And, though Rushdie assumed, when he argued with the people in the Nicaraguan
market, that they would never have accepted settlement or negotiation with the
Contras, they demonstrated in the election booths that he was wrong.
57
58
Vargas Llosa (1985)
Ramirez, 196
11
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Bibliography
Anthony, A. The Fallout, London: Vintage (2007)
Berman, P. A Child of his Century, New Republic vol. 226 (7), 26-33 (2002)
Berman, P. “Notes on the Sandinistas,” Mother Jones, Vol. 11 (9), 20-27 & 53-54
(Dec., 1986)
Berman, P. Exploring Nicaragua's neighbourhoods: rocking chairs, roosters &
revolution, Mother Jones, Vol. 11 (2), 20-29 (March, 1986)
Berman, P. Why the Sandinistas Lost, in 50 Years of Dissent, ed. Mills & Walzer,
Yale UP (2004)
Cabezas, O. tr. Weaver, Fire from the Mountain, London: Johnathan Cape (1985)
Cabestrero, T. tr. Barr, R. Blood of the Innocent: Victims of the Contras’ War in
Nicaragua, Orbis: New York (1985)
Carney, P. To be a Revolutionary, Harper & Row: San Francisco (1987)
Crow, J. The Epic of Latin America 4th ed., California UP (1992)
Dario, R. tr. Applebaum, Stories and Poems, London: Dover (2003)
Debray, R. tr. Howe, Praised Be Our Lords: A Political Education, London:
Verso (2007)
12
Oscar Amadeus Clarke, Student No. 1349300: HISTM0052_2014, Modern Latin American
Revolutions, Assignment 1
Macaulay, N. The Sandino Affair, Duke UP (1985)
Miranda, R. & Ratliff, W. The Civil War in Nicaragua, Transaction, New Jersey
(1994)
Prevost, G. & Vanden, H. ed. The Undermining of the Sandinista Revolution,
London: Macmillan (1999)
Ramirez, S. Adios Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution, Duke UP
(2012)
Rushdie, S. The Jaguar Smile, London: Jonathan Cape (1987)
Vargas Llosa, M. In Nicaragua, New York Times Magazine (April 28, 1985):
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/04/28/magazine/innicaragua.html?pagewanted=11&pagewanted=all
Walker, T. Nicaragua: The land of Sandino 3rd ed., Oxford: Westview (1991)
Whisnant, D. Ruben Dario as a focal cultural figure in Nicaragua, Latin American
Research Review, vol. 27 (3), 7-49 (1992)
Williams, P. ‘The Catholic Hierarchy in the Nicaraguan Revolution’, Journal of
Latin American Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 341-369, (Nov., 1985)
Zimmermann, M. Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution,
Duke UP (2001)
The 72-Hour Document, tr. United States Department of State (1986):
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112005621898;view=1up;seq=1
13