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The leftist Sandinista political movement became internationally prominent and the topic of considerable controversy following the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979. The organization most commonly associated with Sandinista ideas is the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN, Sandinista National Liberation Front), which began as an armed revolutionary movement opposing the dictatorship of the Somoza family. Upon the overthrow of the dictatorship in 1979, the FSLN became Nicaragua's governing party, ruling until 25 February 1990 when it was defeated electorally by a coalition of other political parties. The FSLN remains the country's leading political opposition to the current governing Liberal Constitutionalist Party (PLC).
The FSLN was formally organized on July 23, 1961 by Carlos Amador Fonseca, Tomas Borgé Martinez and Silvio Mayorga. It took its name from Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934), a leader in the country's nationalist rebellion against the United States military occupation of Nicaragua in the 1920s and early 1930s until his assassination by the U.S.-created Guardia Nacional (National Guard) enabled Somoza to seize control of the country.
Inspired in part by the Cuban revolution, the FSLN tried with little success to organize guerrilla warfare against Somoza in the 1960s. In the 1970s, it began to attract significant support from the country's increasingly politicized peasantry and from other sectors of the population in response to the dictatorship's brutality and corruption, especially after the earthquake that leveled Nicaragua's capital city of Managua on 23 December 1972. The earthquake killed 20,000 of the city's 400,000 residents and left another 250,000 homeless. Somoza's National Guard stole much of the international aid that flowed into the country to assist in reconstruction, and Managua was never rebuilt.
During the long struggle against Somoza, the FSLN's leaders internal disagreements over strategy and tactics were reflected in three main factions:
The Movement for National Liberation (1961-1979)
On 10 January 1978, the assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who edited the anti-Somoza newspaper La Prensa, sparked a broad uprising against the regime, with the Sandinistas leading a combination of general strikes, urban uprisings and rural guerrilla attacks that increasingly demoralized the National Guard. Despite an overwhelming superiority in arms and ruthless tactics that included the aerial bombardment of Nicaraguan cities, Somoza's army disintegrated and he fled the country on 17 July 1979. Two days later the Sandinistas entered Managua and were greeted by huge crowds as national liberators.
The Sandinistas inherited a country in ruins, with a debt of US$1.6 billion, an estimated 50,000 war dead, 600,000 homeless and a devastated economic infrastructure. To begin the task of establishing a new government, they created a Junta of National Reconstruction comprised of five members -- Sandinista militants Daniel Ortega and Moises Hassan, novelist Sergio Ramirez Mercado (a member of "the Twelve"), businessman Alfonso Rebelo Callejas, and Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the wife of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. The preponderance of power, however, remained with the Sandinistas and their mass organizations, including the Sandinista Workers' Federation (Central Sandinista de Trabajadores), the Luisa Amanda Espinoza Nicaraguan Women's Association (Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza) and the National Union of Farmers and Ranchers (Unión Nacional de Agricultores y Ganaderos).
Sandinista ideology reflected a broad spectrum of opinion ranging from revolutionary Marxism to Christian liberation theology. Upon assuming power, their political platform included the following:
By 1980, conflicts began to emerge between the Sandinista and non-Sandinista members of the governing junta. Violeta Chamorro and Alfonso Robelo resigned from the governing junta in 1980, and the governing role of the Sandinistas became obvious. Allegations spread among critics that the Ortega clique were planning to turn Nicaragua into a Communist state like Cuba. Simultaneously, the U.S. administration of Ronald Reagan began organizing remnants of Somoza's National Guard into guerrilla bands known as "Contras" that conducted terrorist attacks on economic and civilian targets. During the Contra war, the Sandinistas arrested suspected Contras and censored La Prensa as well as other publications that they accused of collaborating with the U.S. and the Contras to destabilize the country.
Unlike the Cuban revolution, however, the Sandinista government practiced political pluralism throughout its time in power. A broad range of new political parties emerged to take advantage of freedoms that had not existed under Somoza. Following promulgation of a new constitution, Nicaragua held national elections in 1984, in which Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramirez were elected president vice-president, and the FSLN won a large majority of seats in the new national assembly. Although several opposition parties boycotted the election and it was denounced by Reagan as "a sham," it was endorsed as free and fair by numerous international observers.
Upon assuming office in 1981, U.S. President Ronald Reagan accused the FSLN of supporting Marxist revolutionary movements in other Latin American countries such as El Salvador. His administration began financing, arming and training the remnants of Somoza's National Guard to launch raids into Nicaragua from their camps in Nicaragua's neighboring countries of Honduras (to the north) and Costa Rica (to the south). The U.S. also attacked Nicaragua economically, imposing a complete trade embargo and disrupting shipping by planting underwater explosive mines in the Nicaraguan harbor at Corinto.
The U.S.-backed armed resistance to the Sandinistas in Honduras initially called itself the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance (ADREN) and was known as the 15th of September Legion. It later formed an alliance, called the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), which included other groups including MISURASATA and the Nicaraguan Democratic Union. Because of its opposition to the Sandinista revolution, the resistance became known as the "Contras" (an abbreviation of contrarevolucionaria). The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which oversaw the Contra operation, eventually admitted that the Contras "engaged in kidnapping, extortion and robbery to fund its operations," "engaged in the bombing of Nicaraguan civilian airliners and airliner hijackings as methods of attacking the Sandinista Government," as well as drug smuggling to finance their activities. [1] Throughout the Contra war of the 1980s, human rights groups including Americas Watch, Amnesty International, Witness for Peace and the Washington Office on Latin America documented numerous murders of civilians and other human rights violations by Contras, who avoided engaging the Sandinista army in favor of soft targets aimed at disrupting the economy and Nicaraguan society.
The Contra war unfolded differently in the northern and southern zones of Nicaragua. Contras based in Costa Rica operated in Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast, which is sparsely populated by indigenous groups including the Miskito, Sumu, Rama, Garifuno, and Mestizo. Unlike western Nicaragua, which is Spanish-speaking, the Atlantic Coast is predominantly English-speaking and was largely ignored by the Somoza regime. The costeños did not participate in the uprising against Somoza and viewed Sandinismo with suspicion from the outset. Lacking support from the population, Sandinista troops committed their worst human rights abuses on the Atlantic Coast, including the forcible relocation of 8,500 Miskito from their land as well as killing or imprisoning indigenous people suspected of collaborating with contras. On two separate occasions in 1981 and 1982, Sandinista troops committed massacres in which dozens of indigenous people were killed and buried in common graves. [1]
In the mid-1980s, however, the Sandinista government acknowledged errors in its dealings with the Atlantic Coast and successfully negotiated an end to the southern front of the Contra war. In fulfillment of the terms of that negotiation, the Nicaraguan National Assembly unanimously passed an Autonomy Law in 1987 that made Nicaragua the first nation in the Americas to recognize its multiethnic nature, guaranteeing the economic, cultural, linguistic and religious rights demanded by the indigenous groups of the Atlantic Coast.
According to Amnesty International, 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 meter, known as chiquitas ("little ones"). These cubicles were too small to sit up in and had no sanitation and almost no ventilation
On [[February 26], 1990, Nicaragua held its second national election following the 1979 revolution, and this time the Sandinistas lost to the United Nicaraguan Opposition, an alliance of 14 opposition parties ranging from the ultra-conservative business organization COSEP to the Nicaraguan Communist Party. UNO's candidate, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, replaced Daniel Ortega as president of Nicaragua.
After their loss, some of the Sandinista leaders held part of the property that had been nationalized by the FSLN government. This process became known as the piñata and was tolerated by the new government. Prominent Sandinistas also created a number of nongovermental organizations to promote their ideas and social goals, such as the Augusto César Sandino Foundation (FACS).
Daniel Ortega remained the head of the FSLN, but his brother Humberto resigned from the party and remained at the head of the Sandinista Army, becoming a close confidante and supporter of Chamorro. The party also experienced a number of internal divisions, with prominent Sandinistas such as Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramirez resigning to protest what they described as heavy-handed domination of the party by Daniel Ortega. Ramirez also founded a separate political party, the Movement for the Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS). In the 1996 Nicaraguan election, Ortega and Ramirez both campaigned unsuccessfully as presidential candidates on behalf of their respective parties, with Ortega receiving 43 percent of the vote while Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party received 51 percent.
Sandinista Rule (1979-1990)
The FSLN also created neighborhood groups, similar to the Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, called Sandinista Defense Committees (Comité de Defensa Sandinista or CDS). Especially in the early days following the overthrow of Somoza, the CDSs served as de facto units of local governance, distributing food rations, organizing neighborhood cleanup and recreational activities, and policing to control looting and apprehend remnants of the National Guard. During the subsequent Contra war, they also organized civilian defense efforts against contra attacks. Critics of the Sandinistas decried the CDS as a system of local spy networks for the government.Sandinistas vs. Contras
Prominent Sandinistas
Human rights organizations that have published reports about Nicaragua
See also