Nicaraguan Revolution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nicaraguan Revolution lasted nearly three decades, from 1961 to 1990, and cost tens of thousands of lives before it was over. It began as a student movement in a university in Managua and ended with a democratic election that removed the very government the revolution had created. Along the way, it became one of the most contested proxy conflicts of the Cold War, drawing in the Soviet Union, Cuba, and the United States. What drove a small group of student activists to take on a family dictatorship that had ruled for over four decades? How did they survive long enough to win? And what happened when they finally did?

• 2. The Somoza Dynasty

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  After U.S. forces withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, following more than two decades of occupation during the Banana Wars, a family took hold of the country that would not let go for over forty years. The Somoza dynasty began with Anastasio Somoza García and passed to his eldest son Luis Somoza Debayle, then to Anastasio Somoza Debayle. From 1937 until 1979, they ran Nicaragua as a personal estate. The era brought economic development, but also deepening inequality, systemic corruption, and a military trained and shaped by the United States. Somoza Debayle himself was alleged, incorrectly, to have personally owned one-fifth of all profitable land in the country. Whether or not that precise claim held up, the family did control banks, ports, communications infrastructure, and vast tracts of land. The rural economy that surrounded the Somozas' modern Managua was described as nearly semifeudal, dependent on cotton, sugar, and other agricultural exports, with almost no other productive outputs. That concentration of power was the condition into which the three founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front were born.

• 3. The FSLN Takes Shape

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  In 1961, Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomás Borge Martínez gathered with other student activists at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Nicaragua in Managua and founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front, known by its Spanish initials as the FSLN. Amador, who served as its first General Secretary, had already worked on a newspaper called Segovia, which was broadly critical of the Somoza family. For most of the 1960s, the organization counted roughly 20 members. The early years were marked as much by failure as by ambition. A 1963 rural campaign in the northern Jinotega Department, known as the Raití-Bocay campaign, collapsed when guerrillas encountered the National Guard and were forced to retreat with heavy losses. A subsequent operation near the city of Matagalpa ended in disaster, and Mayorga was killed. Fonseca himself died in combat in November 1976. His death split the FSLN into three factions: the Maoist Tendencia GPP, the Marxist-Leninist Tendencia Proletaria, and the left-wing nationalist Tendencia Tercerista, which became the most popular. The Tercerista faction was led by Daniel Ortega, who would become the FSLN's General Secretary in 1984. Through all these setbacks, the FSLN drew support from students, peasants, and anti-Somoza factions, while receiving backing from Cuba under Fidel Castro, the socialist Panamanian government of Omar Torrijos, and the social democratic Venezuelan government of Carlos Andrés Pérez.

• 4. The Breaking Point

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  On the 10th of January 1978, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal was murdered. Cardenal was the editor of the Managua newspaper La Prensa and the founder, in 1974, of a broad anti-Somoza coalition called the Unión Democrática Liberal. His alleged killers were linked to the Somoza regime, and the response was swift. Riots broke out in Managua targeting the government. A Citibank employee named William Dewy, whose offices sat directly across from La Prensa, watched part of his own branch burn as crowds torched a nearby Somoza-owned bank. He later described the moment plainly: "It was clear to the U.S. business community that the Chamorro assassination had changed things dramatically and permanently for the worse." A general strike called for the 23rd and the 24th of January brought down roughly 80 percent of businesses in Managua and the provincial capitals of León, Granada, Chinandega, and Matagalpa. By that same year, the United States cut off aid to the Somoza government over its documented human rights violations, which had included torture, rape, extrajudicial killings, and press censorship. On the 22nd of August 1978, a Sandinista unit led by Éden Pastora seized the National Palace during a legislative session, taking 2,000 hostages. Pastora demanded money, the release of Sandinista prisoners, and a platform for the Sandinista cause. After two days, the government paid $500,000 and released certain prisoners. By June 1979, the FSLN controlled every part of Nicaragua except the capital. On the 17th of July, Somoza Debayle resigned. Two days later, on the 19th of July, the FSLN entered Managua.

• 5. Building a New State

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  Nicaragua in July 1979 was a country in ruins. The war had destroyed much of its infrastructure, and the 1972 earthquake had devastated the capital just six years earlier. Roughly 600,000 Nicaraguans were homeless, and 150,000 more were refugees or in exile, from a total population of 2.8 million. The new government declared a state of emergency. The United States sent $99 million in aid. Land and businesses belonging to the Somoza network were expropriated, courts were abolished, and workers were organized into Civil Defense Committees. The regime's declaration that "elections are unnecessary" drew criticism from the Catholic Church and other sectors. Land reform became the revolution's most visible domestic program. The Agrarian Reform Law, passed on the 19th of July 1981, laid out four categories of property: state, cooperative, communal, and individual. In 1985 alone, 235,000 acres were distributed to peasants, representing roughly 75 percent of all land distributed since 1980. During ceremonies that year, Daniel Ortega personally handed each recipient both a land title and a rifle. On the cultural front, the Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign recruited high school and university students as volunteer teachers. Within five months, the campaign claimed to have cut the illiteracy rate from 50.3 percent to 12.9 percent. In September 1980, UNESCO awarded Nicaragua the Nadezhda K. Krupskaya award for the effort. The Sandinistas also established a Ministry of Culture, one of only three such ministries in Latin America at the time, and created a publishing house called Editorial Nueva Nicaragua to distribute affordable editions of books most Nicaraguans had never had access to.

• 6. The Contra War

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  Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981 and immediately cancelled U.S. economic aid to Nicaragua. On the 6th of August 1981, he signed National Security Decision Directive 7, authorizing arms production and shipment to the region. On the 17th of November 1981, he signed National Security Directive 17, authorizing covert support for anti-Sandinista forces. As early as 1980-1981, opposition fighters known as Contras had begun gathering along the Honduras-Nicaragua border. Many of the first Contra recruits were former members of Somoza's National Guard who had followed him into exile in Honduras. A second front opened along Nicaragua's eastern coast and Costa Rican border, backed by the CIA. The Sandinista military budget swelled to more than half of the government's entire annual expenditure. A compulsory military draft, called the Servicio Militar Patriótico, was introduced. By 1982, Contra forces were carrying out assassinations of Nicaraguan government officials. By 1983, they had launched a major offensive. The CIA was simultaneously helping them mine Nicaraguan harbors to block weapons shipments. The human cost was enormous: the Contra War took tens of thousands of lives, and Amnesty International documented a pattern of abuses by the Sandinista government that included the disappearance of civilians after arrest, denial of due process, torture of detainees, and the killing of suspected Contra sympathizers. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated specific incidents, including an execution of 35 to 40 Miskito people in December 1981 and another of 75 people in November 1984. Meanwhile, the 1987 Iran-Contra affair put the Reagan administration at the center of a fresh scandal over its secret support for the Contras.

• 7. Elections and Peace

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  On the 4th of November 1984, Nicaragua held a general election. Of the 1,551,597 citizens registered in July of that year, 1,170,142 voted, a turnout of 75.4 percent. International observers declared the results free and fair. Daniel Ortega won 67 percent of the valid presidential vote. The Reagan administration called it a Soviet-style sham. The peace process that eventually ended the war moved on two tracks. The Esquipulas II Accord, signed in Guatemala City on the 7th of August 1987 by the five Central American heads of state, established a regional framework for national reconciliation, free elections, and the termination of all outside assistance to armed factions. It built on groundwork laid by the Contadora Group from 1983 to 1985. Then came the Sapoá Accords, signed on the 23rd of March 1988 in the Nicaraguan town of Sapoá, near the Costa Rican border. Soviet ambassador Vaino Väljas played a central role in mediating the talks, working from recent U.S.-Soviet agreements at a moment when the U.S. had no ambassador in Nicaragua, a gap that ran from the 1st of July 1987 to the 4th of May 1988. As the Soviet Union began pulling back its support for the Sandinistas, the government's options narrowed. The Contra War ended in 1989, following the signing of the Tela Accord and the demobilization of both armies. The 1990 election brought a different result: the UNO coalition, a broad alliance of fourteen parties ranging from liberal conservatives to pro-Moscow communists, defeated the Sandinistas. The FSLN would remain out of power until 2006.