The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, by Mateo Jarquin, The University of North Carolina Press, 336 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 978-1469678498
Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War, by Eline Van Ommen, University of California Press, 312 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0520390768
Sandinistas: A Moral History, by Robert J Sierakowski, University of Notre Dame Press, 338 pp, $35, ISBN: 978-0268106898
Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, by Jonathan Blitzer, Picador, 544 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1529039313
After a few years of near misses when I lived in Nicaragua, working as a foreign correspondent during the Sandinista revolution, I finally met Daniel Ortega in the corner of the bar of the Moyglare Manor hotel in Kildare on a Friday morning in the middle of May 1989. He was wearing his olive green uniform, sipping decaffeinated coffee. His self-contained, mild demeanour suggested that the notoriety which followed him was the business of others (later on that trip to Ireland he would be complimented for his choice of a sweater depicting a Galway scene in a gift shop by an ingenuous American tourist unaware that this friendly face had appeared on the cover of Time magazine billed as ‘The Man Who Makes Reagan See Red’). Ortega was no Fidel Castro – his speeches were dull and ponderous, never inspiring – but in the 1980s he became a minor world figure, the head of a revolutionary government that aroused curiosity, sympathy and support throughout the world as it defended itself against the United States. His lack of charisma allowed him to appear open-minded and undogmatic. With Gorbachev already scaling back Soviet commitments to revolutionary regimes in what was then still known as the Third World, courting western European governments had become increasingly important to the Sandinistas. Ortega had just had an encouraging lunch with Charlie Haughey and was about to be served tea in Michael D Higgins’s house. Despite enduring a lecture from Mrs Thatcher, he was pretty sanguine that things were turning out well. He was about to receive millions of dollars in aid from European governments and he was sure the Sandinistas would win the elections due in February 1990: all the polls were telling him this. The United States was finally coming around to accepting a revolutionary government in Nicaragua that it had spent nearly ten years trying to overthrow. But it turned out he had only about nine months left in power, at least in his primary iteration as an idealistic revolutionary.
As we sat there having coffee looking out at the Kildare pastures beyond the window, the world was changing at a rapidly accelerating pace. Within a month the Communist Party had been voted out of power in Poland; in six months the Berlin wall had fallen and the velvet revolution was getting under way in Czechoslovakia. By then, what the Sandinistas represented appeared to be hopelessly out of date. An American journalist I knew who had interviewed Fidel Castro in Havana had asked him when they finished to sign a dollar bill and, in a pale imitation of this stunt, I asked Ortega to sign my notebook. There was his elegant, looping script on the yellow page of the notebook I disinterred from a box in the attic where it had lain undisturbed for years.
Now the signatory is seventeen years into a second career as Nicaragua’s venal, elected dictator. In recent years he has violently repressed challenges to his regime, killing hundreds of protesters; jailed prominent opponents who might have stood against him in the election three years ago, and shut down any institution likely to criticise him, from newspapers to foreign NGOs. Reports about his rule only appear sporadically in the world’s newspapers. Nobody cares about Nicaragua now. At least not in the sense of imaginative engagement with a small, impoverished country which a guidebook of the 1980s could describe as being ‘poised on the cutting edge of history’. Why did it once seem so vital?
The country from which the Sandinista revolutionaries emerged to worldwide prominence at the end of the 1970s bore some resemblance to the profile of Ortega’s Nicaragua today: obscure, oppressive and, to those who might have taken a passing interest in what went on there, dominated by a ludicrously extravagant family dynasty, a caricature of a corrupt Latin American dictatorship. From the 1930s Anastasio Somoza García had used the National Guard, created during twenty years of American occupation, to consolidate his hold on power. He had murdered Augusto Sandino, who had become a national hero for fighting the US marines in the northern mountains. Over the following decades, the Somozas acquired dozens of the biggest farms, the meat factories where the cattle were slaughtered and the dairies where milk was pasteurised, the sugar mills, mines, the national airline and cement factories. They controlled all the illegal businesses too – brothels, gambling dens and home-distilled liquor. The elder Somoza, assassinated in 1956, had once described Nicaragua as his personal ranch. There was coercion, but there was also populism. The Somozas were, pushing irony to the limit, bosses of the Liberal Party and possession of a membership card opened up access to all kinds of government services. At election time beer and liquor flowed. When paternal largesse didn’t work the National Guard was deployed to torture dissidents. But it was also a of vehicle for social mobility enabling peasants to escape a life of boredom and hard work. To be a National Guardsman meant acquiring shiny boots, a crisp uniform, regular meals, opportunities for graft and some kind of social status and respect eliding into impunity.
In the 1960s the Nicaraguan economy was thriving for those who could get a foothold in it. Coffee and bananas were the traditional export crops, but thousands of peasant farmers were cleared off their lands to grow cotton and raise cattle for the American market. The upper classes tolerated the Somozas’ greed as long as they were doing well and it seemed not to matter that half the population were living in poverty. Banks and electricity appeared in the country towns and a McDonalds arrived in the capital, Managua. The Somozas were long detested by their neighbours in Central America but they were steadfast American allies. A memo prepared by the State Department for President Truman in 1952 noted that Anastasio Somoza’s ‘desire for personal gain is very great’ but also that ‘The Fourth of July is celebrated enthusiastically throughout Nicaragua’. The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 was launched from Nicaragua; Luis Somoza, who had succeeded his father as president, asked the exiles to return with a hair from Fidel Castro’s beard. The Somozas and their cronies mimicked the Miami lifestyle, with cocktail parties by the pool where they showed off their command of tough-guy slang in English, enormous fridges in their kitchens and gigantic televisions in their bedrooms. When a new airport was opened in Managua the tomatoes, lettuce and celery on offer from the buffet were flown in from Florida. Many Americans had forgotten about their Central American ally and were jolted into alarm when the overthrow of the second Anastasio Somoza, known by his nickname Tacho, became a real possibility in 1978. Mateo Jarquin quotes an exchange at the Senate Foreign Relations committee:
Senator John Sparkman: How long has the Somoza family been in power?
Assistant Secretary of State Viron P Vaky: It is something like 40 years.
Senator Sparkman: How long?
Senator Clifford Case: How did they get in in the first place?
Asst Secretary Vaky: I think we helped them get in. His father was installed after the Marines left in the early 1930s.
Tacho believed the US would always support him if the alternative was a Marxist regime. The fear of another Cuba was why John F Kennedy described Latin America in the early 1960s as the most dangerous area of the world. At the time a traveller in Latin America remarked that only two figures were known everywhere throughout the region, the Virgin Mary and Fidel Castro. For Kennedy, fame was not the Cuban leader’s most threatening achievement: he had also inspired a belief that his revolution and defiance of the United States could be emulated. ‘For the first time,’ the now right-wing Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa recalled of his rebellious youth, ‘we thought that revolution was something possible in our countries.’ Che Guevara published Guerrilla Warfare, a manual showing how heroic guerrillas, armoured by willpower and clear-headed tactics could defeat seemingly unbeatable armies and seize power. As the Jesuits had once spread the word of God, the Cubans took to spreading revolution knowing that, as Fidel said, if the whole of Latin America was ‘in flames’ the US would not be able to bear down on Cuba. Che talked about creating many Vietnams, but the attempts he inspired ended in ignominious failure in one country after another as peasants shunned the guerrillas and the oligarchies and their militaries fought back, strengthened by American weapons and training. Finally, Che himself took to the battlefield and failed too, in Bolivia in 1967, executed after his capture by local troops trained by the Americans, his body displayed on a table in a remote rural hut, a simulacrum of Christ taken down from the cross. A year later the CIA was confident that the momentum for revolution in Latin America had petered out.
Somoza must have felt the same. The Frente Sandinista, founded in 1961 and combining the myth of Sandino with Marxism, appeared to be one of Che’s failed revolutionary projects. Most of its original leaders were jailed or killed in skirmishes with the National Guard. In the mid-1970s small bands of guerrillas were in the mountains, barely surviving. Their leaders had spent time in Cuba but had not been granted an audience with Castro; the KGB dismissed their prospects of ever being a threat. They clashed constantly about the best strategy for a revolution: to stay in the mountains or to make an alliance with anti-Somoza forces in the city. Somoza’s survival strengthened his appeal for the United States – he was the kind of dictator the Americans clung to after the Cuban revolution. The National Guard had the highest ratio of US-trained officers in Latin America (‘Tacho’ Somoza was himself a graduate of West Point).
He seemed to be safe until 1972, the year McDonalds opened its doors in Managua. On the day before Christmas eve an earthquake destroyed the centre of the city, killing at least 6,000 people and leaving most of its inhabitants homeless. Somoza’s description of his own experience that night – it was ‘like we were in a cocktail mixer’ – betrayed the solipsism of his charmed life. The National Guard, charged with keeping order during the curfew he imposed, indulged in unrestrained looting. In the months afterwards, when the relief money flowed in, Somoza stole it and funnelled reconstruction work to his own companies while indulging in shameless land speculation as new building proliferated on the edge of the shattered city.
The upper classes, who had tolerated his avarice, grew weary. The assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a longstanding opponent of Somoza and crusading editor of La Prensa in January 1978 set off a popular uprising. That night crowds set fire to the premises of a company Somoza owned which took blood from the homeless and shipped it abroad as plasma. The sons and daughters of the upper classes – including Chamorro’s sons and daughters – were outraged by Tacho’s rule and their parents’ complicity in his crimes and many began clandestine work for the Sandinistas. By September 1978 there were uprisings in several cities and the guerillas became the military spearhead of an insurrection. Somoza responded viciously, sending tanks and planes to bomb neighbourhoods where the Sandinistas were strong.
The sense of an improvised revolution was captured in the colour photographs of Susan Meiselas: a young man in a beret bearing a striking resemblance to Che Guevara caught in the act of launching a petrol bomb in a Pepsi bottle with his right arm while holding a rifle in his outstretched left hand; others with bandanas covering their faces firing from behind barricades of the hexagonal bricks with which Somoza had repaved Managua after the earthquake. It was as if the Sandinistas could count on the whole country to fight the National Guard, a collective repudiation of their corruption and brutality. There was euphoria in the day-to-day organisation of resistance. Mothers ran safe houses for wounded combatants while their sons fought in the streets. ‘We were all one family,’ an activist recalled. The Americans failed to persuade Somoza to resign so that they could prevent the Sandinistas taking power. But as the Sandinistas converged on Managua, taking over one town after another, Somoza fled in the early morning of July 1979, clearing out the Central Bank reserves to ease his exile in Miami. Two days later the victorious guerillas arrived in Managua. Meiselas captured an image of the insurgents on a truck making its way through a vast crowd towards the ruins of the cathedral where young men in shirtsleeves were hanging from the belltower.
‘The greatest scandal of the Cuban revolution,’ Sartre wrote after visiting Havana in 1961 ‘isn’t that it expropriated the plantations but that it brought children to power.’ The young men and women surrounded by euphoric crowds in Managua in July 1979 conveyed an image of sheer joy and national unity, a picture postcard of what a revolution should look like. That day the novelist Sergio Ramirez, a member of the new revolutionary junta, ran into Régis Debray, Che’s interpreter-in-chief, who had written that revolutions were no longer possible and shouted: ‘We did it!’ It seemed to be the real thing, the displacement and annihilation of a dominant class with the overwhelming support of the people. In the months after the victory Ramirez and Daniel Ortega ran the country from rooms in the Intercontinental Hotel; their bodyguards slept in the corridor and they gave interviews to journalists in the lift on their way down to breakfast in the cafeteria. Meeting the muchachos, as the young revolutionaries became known, brought tears to the eyes of the Mexican president, López Portillo: he told them the world was watching them because they had the possibility of bypassing the historic errors of the Mexican and Cuban revolutions, an extraordinary burden of expectation for a country so poor and obscure. Reactions by visitors to post-revolutionary Managua were similar to George Orwell’s account of his experience of arriving in Barcelona in December 1936. Dazzled by the revolutionary posters, the shoeshine boxes painted red and black and the absence of deference, Orwell was overwhelmed by the sense of change. ‘In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist.’ For Orwell, as for converts to Nicaragua it was the feeling which counted. ‘There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’
Command of a victorious army and overwhelming popular support convinced the young revolutionaries that everything was possible. Their naivety was demonstrated by one of the most bookish and photogenic of the commandantes, Jaime Wheelock, who declared to his comrades that they should ‘declare socialism immediately’. But caution prevailed and they followed Fidel Castro’s guidance to avoid the errors made in Cuba such as taking over all the small businesses. Above all he advised that they should hide their Marxism. So they emphasised Sandino instead of Lenin: when asked by visiting observers whether they were Marxist-Leninists they replied, ‘We are Sandinistas.’ This was not entirely subterfuge. There was continuous tension between the idealism born during the insurrection and adherence to ideology. They never marched the whole way to Cuban orthodoxy. Especially in the early days they carried off a democratic style – no one seemed afraid of guns slung over the shoulder of the long-haired guerillas who rode the buses or sipped sugary drinks from plastic bags at street corners like everyone else. We wondered how much they really believed in the Marxist rhetoric; flashes of pragmatism and flexibility suggested it was half-hearted.
For the first time in Nicaraguan history a government was prepared to make the needs of the poor majority a priority. A national literacy campaign sent thousands of city kids into the mountains to live with humble farmers in conditions they had never experienced while teaching them the basics of reading and writing using textbooks that infused everyday language with revolutionary meaning. Within a few years they tripled the number of medical centres and reduced infant mortality by a third, an achievement hailed by UNICEF as ‘one of the most dramatic improvements in child survival in the developing world’. Somoza’s vast lands were confiscated and turned into state farms. Peasants were promised parcels of land when the big ranches were broken up. Banks and foreign trade were nationalised. But most of the economy remained in private hands. The Sandinistas committed themselves to political pluralism and a mixed economy. In the first few years there was impressive growth and signs of recovery. The socialist governments in power in much of Western Europe saw Nicaragua as a new model for developing countries, a final apparition of the elusive third way between American capitalism and Soviet communism. François Mitterrand, the president of France, scoffed about American alarm over Marxists in power in their backyard. ‘How can we not understand popular revolt? It’s not about Communist subversion but the refusal of misery and humiliation.’ Spanish prime minister Felipe González said Nicaragua should be a symbol and that the Sandinistas had no right to fail.
But for all their pragmatism and seeming originality the Sandinistas still revered their Cuban forebears and depended on their example to learn how to be revolutionaries in power. Murals of fallen Sandinista heroes were rendered in the same style as wall paintings of the Castros in Havana. The slogan Patria Libre O Morir (Free Homeland or Death) was only a slight tweak on the Cuban Patria o Muerte. And the teaching method of the literacy campaign repeated the ideological pedagogy pioneered in Cuba, where the letter ‘f’ in the alphabet was illustrated by the words ‘Fidel’ and fusil (rifle). The uniforms of the top nine commandantes were designed by Castro’s tailor in Havana; when they addressed rallies some even tried to imitate Fidel’s speech mannerisms and gestures. It was a mark of distinction among senior Sandinistas to show up to meetings accompanied by a Cuban adviser. The revolutionaries briefly and half-heartedly promoted the idea of the ‘New Man’, Che’s ideal of the revolutionary citizen motivated by moral drive not material reward, but there was very little appetite in Nicaragua for utopian reinvention.
The essence of the Sandinista outlook was their understanding of themselves as the vanguard of the revolution. Many people had taken part in the uprising against Somoza but only a tiny minority were considered to possess a sufficiently revolutionary character. The leadership was passionate about ‘the people’ – Todas las armas al pueblo! (All Arms to the People!) was a slogan daubed on walls – but they had little trust in their acumen. Arguing against immediate elections, Jaime Wheelock said the Sandinistas didn’t need a Congress to tell them what problems the workers and peasants needed solving. Another commandante, Bayardo Arce, judged that ‘the people do not have a real awareness of national reality’. Frightened by how close they came to fratricide during the 1970s over strategy, the nine commandantes – three from each of the factions which had vied for dominance – maintained a veneer of taciturn unity while squabbling over power and prestige out of public view. (Daniel Ortega played a long game and he eventually won.) Matters like the size of the military escort for their shiny Toyota four-wheel-drives became an index of how much prestige a commandante enjoyed. The sympathetic Swedish prime minister Olof Palme told them after a visit in 1983: ‘Be careful. You are losing touch with the people.’
Many leading Sandinistas could think very imaginatively about how to conduct their tactical battle with Ronald Reagan and the success of their international diplomacy confirms their flair for improvisation. So it is strange that in the 1980s they were also able to believe, in a way that might have been plausible when Sputnik was launched, that capitalism was dying and the USSR was the future. When Boris Yeltsin visited Managua in 1988 he told them that perestroika would strengthen Soviet power and they believed him. Daniel Ortega’s powerful brother, Humberto, who headed the army, had great respect for Marxist manuals and Soviet textbooks. These guides confirmed their belief that their stunning victory meant that they could, in an often repeated phrase, ‘call the shots’ or impose ‘the rules of the game’ on their middle class allies who had helped them get rid of Somoza. The market would be tamed and the old church hierarchy rendered impotent. The manuals told them that there were certain classes whose destiny was to be crushed as the revolution was consolidated: to many of the Sandinista leaders businessmen and bishops were the fossils of the old order in the process of being dismantled. They could walk side by side with their class enemies until it suited them to destroy them. As the revolution came under pressure from the United States the delicate balance which had united the guerillas and the broad class alliance in overthrowing Somoza was shattered. Loyal moderates were denounced as enemies once they voiced any criticism; economic shortcomings were attributed to deliberate sabotage. The Sandinistas paid a heavy price for alienating the classes that they might have been better to bargain with. In retrospect this was a fatal miscalculation.
In Central America the obvious recourse for defeated politicians seeking redress was to head to the United States. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the region was a training ground for American imperial ambition, with regular intervention by the marines to ‘restore order’. The overthrow of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954 for confiscating land belonging to United Fruit was a warning the Cubans heeded; the Nicaraguans were only too aware of the Bay of Pigs invasion as well. Just like the Guatemalan and Cuban exiles before them, disaffected Nicaraguans found a ready audience in the United States for their grievances against left-wing governments. A nucleus of the old Nicaraguan National Guard regrouped in in Miami. Ronald Reagan arrived in the White House in 1981 promoting a new cold war. Jimmy Carter had ‘lost’ Nicaragua and now there was the prospect of another revolution in El Salvador, where the guerillas looked to be on the brink of success. Presenting Central America through the lens of a revived domino theory, hardliners in the Reagan administration saw an opportunity for a ‘rollback job’ in Nicaragua. ‘I want to be the first guy to reverse a Communist revolution,’ Eliot Abrams, Reagan’s supercilious lead official on Central America, declared. For Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, the mission was to end American self-loathing and guilt post-Vietnam and post-Watergate and banish the notion that had grown during the Carter era that the US must restrain its use of power. Nicaragua, she said, was now ‘the most important place in the world’ only because a brief and deluded notion of overthrowing Castro was abandoned. It would be easier and cheaper to squeeze and choke Nicaragua. Months before Argentina invaded the Falklands, the CIA director, William Casey, met General Galtieri and agreed that the Argentines would train the National Guard exiles and the US would provide money and weapons. The contras were in business.
American policy was utterly cynical. The overblown rhetoric – Nicaraguans were condemned to ‘endless dark’ in a ‘totalitarian dungeon’ – was regularly exposed by visitors to Managua, among them Conor Cruise O’Brien who in a long piece in The Atlantic described a nationalist revolution in which Marxism was a subordinate current alongside liberation theology. Casey could not even pronounce Nicaragua. The contra leadership were corrupt and brutal and never came near overthrowing the Sandinistas or taking territory. They failed to achieve international legitimacy and in fact increased the allure of the Sandinistas for standing up to a bully. An adviser to the US army chief of staff described the contras as a bunch of killers; the CIA agent supervising them said Reagan referred to them as ‘the CIA’s vandals’. But the strategy did succeed in transforming a rural rebellion into full-scale war.
Foreign donations, largely from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, enabled the Sandinistas to resist the contras throughout the 1980s. Credits for oil, equipment and food kept the economy going as normal sources of finance were choked by the Americans. A man once approached our table in a restaurant thinking we were from Eastern Europe to show us a Bulgarian tractor manual. East German experts trained Nicaragua’s secret service, which succeeded in preventing the contras getting a foothold in Managua. Soviet helicopter gunships were decisive in the war in the countryside.
But equally important was the network of civilian supporters that that the Sandinistas cultivated in the United States and Europe. American visitors were the most numerous and the most important because they had direct influence on Congressional votes on aid for the contras. Senators, singers and actors arrived, as part of delegations or independently, to investigate the revolution. ‘At times, Managua felt more like Manhattan,’ an American journalist wrote of her time there in the 1980s. All international visitors were taken on a predictable tour of sights and personalities of the revolutionary paradise. The Intercontinental Hotel, which had survived the earthquake, Los Antojitos, the restaurant opposite, where giant parrots squawked through your meal, and Fr Ariel Molina’s church in the Barrio Riguero for the celebration of a liberation theology Mass before walls covered in murals of Sandino and Sandinista martyrs and a depiction of the murder of a nine-year-old boy from the neighbourhood by the National Guard during the insurrection. The same stories and gossip repeatedly circulated among international visitors fascinated with the opaque glamour of the commandantes. Several featured the minister of the interior, Tomás Borge, one of the personalities regularly made available for visitors. A founder member of the Frente Sandinista, tortured and beaten in prison under the Somoza dictatorship, Borge was regarded as the most radical of the commandantes; he liked to tease his guests with his collection of hand-carved crucifixes and the grenade on his coffee table in his office. ‘We have no obligation to let other political parties exist,’ he would tell guests. ‘That we do shows our good will.’ Besides the revolutionary tourists many Americans with skills worked in hospitals, built houses or taught in schools. An engineer, Ben Linder, was shot dead by the contras while working on a water project in the north. Daniel Ortega gave the eulogy at his funeral service, invoking Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War: ‘For whom do the bells toll here in Nicaragua? For Benjamin Linder.’
The Sandinistas saw their revolution as part of a series of similar permanent revolutions across what was then known as the Third World. But theirs was the most successful in attracting interest and solidarity. Thousands came from abroad to pick coffee but cost more to feed, house, transport and protect them than the value of the coffee beans their inexpert hands could pick. Often their sense of their own importance outweighed their usefulness. Bayardo Arce was annoyed to discover when he arrived with a delegation in the Netherlands that they were expected to meet activists rather than important government officials and travel in a red Peugeot 304 rather than a black Mercedes. Solidarity groups, van Ommen writes, ‘disillusioned with the lack of revolutionary progression in their own countries projected their hopes, dreams and political ambitions onto Nicaragua’. A frequent observation was how refreshing and direct Nicaragua’s leaders were compared to Western politicians, a comparison made by Salman Rushdie in his account of a visit facilitated by the Sandinistas, The Jaguar Smile. While largely approving of what he was allowed to see, Rushdie kept being tripped up by moments of doubt: the interpreter who asked if there were really labour camps in the Soviet Union, the writer who shared his sense of profound solidarity with the Provisional IRA. ‘The tendency to dismiss their opponents out of hand,’ Rushdie observed, ‘could land the Sandinistas in some trouble.’ This was generally of no concern to many solidarity activists, who showed little curiosity about the politics of the commandantes or, worse, regarded any questioning of what was happening as anti-Sandinista. For these people, mobilisations of Sandinista mobs intended to quell opposition were always spontaneous while any anti-Sandinista protest was always manipulated.
The war sucked resources from the economy to pay for defence and by the end of the 1980s Nicaragua had the highest inflation rate in the world. But the Sandinistas had also hugely increased their vulnerability to US pressure through their own policies. Land reform was one of their signature promises and it should have gone down well with peasants who had supported and fought for the Sandinistas to rid the country of the National Guard. They wanted a competent state that would be less corrupt and thus less interfering. Their experience was the opposite. The Sandinistas tried to push the peasants into co-operatives and fix prices for basic foodstuffs. The army placed roadblocks on the edge of towns to discourage selling on the black market but it flourished anyway and depressed prices removed the incentive to produce. They overlaid the countryside with a model of class war which saw small peasants and middlemen as antagonistic; they were blind to how the system of class harmony enabled the market in food to function smoothly. Peasants complained that the Sandinistas ‘turned everything upside down’. Officials and soldiers who came from the city had no idea how actual country people lived, sneering that they had not been to school or visited Managua. Their condescension was reciprocated with satire. ‘We didn’t understand their ideas,’ one farmer later commented. ‘Us country people are sometimes backward.’ When the war was over the commandante Henry Ruiz asked one of the contra leaders why they had taken up arms against a revolution that promised to liberate the countryside. “Well, you were going to expropriate me weren’t you?” the contra replied. The contra leaders may have been corrupt, living on American money and abusing and killing recruits in their camps along the Honduran border but the mid-level commanders, reasonably prosperous coffee farmers and small ranchers, some of whom had fought to overthrow Somoza, genuinely believed in a narrative of a revolution betrayed. They found support among peasants who blamed the Sandinistas, not Ronald Reagan, for bringing the war to the mountains. Internationally, the battle between Nicaragua and the United States was presented as a David v Goliath contest but as the writer Giaconda Belli pointed out, to the peasants of northern Nicaragua the Sandinistas represented Goliath.
The clearcut defeat of the Sandinistas in the elections in February 1990 was a shock, not only to Daniel Ortega, who had been so confident as he toured Ireland a few months before, but to the thousands of solidarity activists. Even in areas where the contras had committed atrocities, the Sandinistas lost by big margins to Dona Violeta Chamorro, the widow of the newspaper editor whose assassination had started the revolt against Somoza. She had exhorted Nicaraguans to set their watches to ‘the hour of freedom’ a reference to the collapse of communist regimes all over eastern Europe. Exit polls revealed that what Nicaraguans wanted more than anything was to stop the war. They believed that with the Sandinistas in power there would never be peace with the United States.
For the activists who had trekked to Managua, Nicaraguan history came to a full stop with the shock of defeat. It seemed at first that the Sandinistas would leave a foundational legacy: a democracy and a strong left opposition to keep intact the major gains of the revolution, potentially one of the strongest left-wing democratic parties in Latin America. Soon, however, Ortega’s will to power split the party. The enigma of his diffidence and earnestness was an advantage as he drove out those who wanted to build a social democratic party. It took him seventeen years of deals with former foes, the church and the business sector to become president again. He has remained there since 2007, transforming the state into the private fiefdom of his family and his cronies. Nicaragua was one of the first of the illiberal democracies of the twenty-first century. There is nothing left of the revolution save the hollow slogans of a long-gone era. Now the protesters chant, while they are being shot by paramilitaries: ‘Ortega y Somoza son la misma cosa’ (Ortega and Somoza are the same thing). The idea that revolutionaries would naturally use power wisely took a long time to die in Latin America. Henry Ruiz, who had watched Ortega become first among equals among the Sandinista commandantes has been frank about their naivety. ‘We are the people most responsible for the fact that Daniel Ortega is where he is, all of us who fought against the Somoza dictatorship … and then little by little allowed this man to ensconce himself in power … Yes, we are guilty, some more than others.’
Rather than being an experimental cradle of revolution, Central America is now solely viewed through the lens of migration. In trying to win support among Americans for the contras in the 1980s Ronald Reagan had raised the prospect of hundreds of thousands of migrants heading for the US if ‘the spread of communism’ was not stopped. Billions of dollars were spent propping up the military regimes in Honduras and El Salvador, in addition to the money spent on the contras. When peace came in the early 1990s the money from Washington dried up. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans continued to stream northwards fleeing gang warfare, political repression and droughts caused by climate change. In the US they are caught in the constant tension between the massive demand for low-paid labour and nativist backlash exploited by Trump that sees Latino immigrants as an alien invasion. Rollback is still a dream.
1/10/2024
Maurice Walsh is the author of Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923. He is working on a book about Graham Greene and the twentieth century.
