Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Nicaraguan Revolution was an armed conflict in Nicaragua that lasted from 1961 to 1990. It encompassed the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in 1978-1979 and the subsequent Contra War of the 1980s. The conflict is considered one of the major proxy war battlegrounds of the Cold War, involving support from the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was founded in 1961 by Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomás Borge Martínez, along with other student activists at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua in Managua. Amador served as its first General Secretary and had previously worked on a newspaper called Segovia that was critical of the Somoza family.
The Somoza regime collapsed in July 1979 after a FSLN military offensive that seized control of all of Nicaragua except the capital, Managua. Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned on the 17th of July 1979 and fled to Miami. The FSLN entered Managua on the 19th of July 1979, ending over four decades of Somoza family rule that had begun in 1937.
The Sapoá Accords, signed on the 23rd of March 1988 in the Nicaraguan town of Sapoá near the Costa Rican border, marked the beginning of the peace process in Nicaragua. The talks were mediated in part by Soviet ambassador Vaino Väljas. The Contra War formally ended the following year after the signing of the Tela Accord and the demobilization of both Sandinista and Contra armies.
The Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign, known as the Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización, used high school and university students as volunteer teachers and claimed within five months to have reduced the national illiteracy rate from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent. In September 1980, UNESCO awarded Nicaragua the Nadezhda K. Krupskaya award in recognition of the campaign. Subsequent literacy campaigns in 1982, 1986, 1987, 1995, and 2000 each also received UNESCO recognition.
The Contras were anti-Sandinista armed forces that began forming along the Honduras-Nicaragua border as early as 1980-1981. Many of the initial Contra recruits were former members of Somoza's National Guard who had gone into exile in Honduras. They received covert support from the United States under President Reagan, who signed National Security Directive 17 on the 17th of November 1981 authorizing that backing. The 1987 Iran-Contra affair exposed the extent of secret U.S. support for the Contras.