Revolution And Counterrevolution In Nicaragua

Thomas W Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comprehensive overview of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, this book offers an interdisciplinary study of the domestic and foreign challenges that faced the Sandinista government during its ten years in power. Based on extensive research in Nicaragua during the revolution, the essays examine important aspects of both the revolution and the U.S.-orchestrated counterrevolution that brought it to an end. After an introduction to the historical background of the revolutionary period, contributors offer an overview of specific groups and institutions within the revolution, such as women, grass-roots organizations, and the armed forces, and provide a balanced assessment of Sandinista public policy and performance in such areas as agrarian reform, health care, education, and housing. The impact and implications of the contra war, financed by the United States, are also analyzed, as well as efforts made over the years to promote a negotiated peace.

One
Introduction

THOMAS W. WALKER

From the late 1970s through 1990 the tiny republic of Nicaragua was the focal point of inordinate attention by the U.S. government and, hence, the U.S. media. That a poor, underdeveloped country of only a few million people could command such attention from the world’s leading superpower may seem—and probably was—absurd. But what was happening in Nicaragua was unusual. A traditional “pro-American” dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was overthrown on July 19, 1979, by a mass-based insurrectionary movement. That movement then proceeded to implement pragmatic but sweeping changes in social, economic, political, and foreign policy. As perceived by conservative policymakers in Washington, those changes were a threat and a challenge to U.S. hegemony in Central America, “our backyard.” In less than two years, the United States would be engaged in an undeclared surrogate war against the upstart state. The U.S. obsession with Nicaragua would ultimately subside only in 1990 when—after the destruction of the Nicaraguan economy and the death of nearly 1 percent of the populace—a desperate Nicaraguan electorate would vote to end the revolutionary experiment and replace it with a regime endorsed and sponsored by the United States.

In order to understand what happened in Nicaragua in that period, it is necessary first to examine the history of revolution and counterrevolution in Latin America. In addition, the Nicaraguan experience of the 1970s and 1980s must be set in its historical and national context.

Revolution and Counterrevolution

As the term is commonly used by social scientists, “revolution” is a process of rapid social, economic, and political change, which normally results in a restructuring of the relationship between classes. Revolutions usually involve some physical violence and lead to a significant outflow of émigrés consisting of both individuals from the former privileged class and others whose lives are disrupted by the turmoil of change taking place.

If one uses this definition in examining the history of Latin America, one quickly concludes that, contrary to popular belief, Latin America is not very revolutionary. Though extralegal changes in government such as coups d’état have been common in twentieth-century Latin America, few have led to any serious attempt at a reordering of social and economic structures. Generously, we might include seven cases in the revolutionary or proto-revolutionary category: Mexico, 1911–1940; Guatemala, 1945–1954; Bolivia, 1952–1964; Cuba, 1959 to date; Peru, 1968–1975; Chile, 1970–1973; and Nicaragua, 1979–1990. Of those real or would-be revolutions, five eventually died, were crushed, or were transformed into nonrevolutionary systems before significant social and economic change could be completed. As this book was going to press, the Nicaraguan revolution was in a state of dynamic limbo. Only the Cuban revolution was still unambiguously alive.

Given the low success rate of revolution in Latin America, one might wonder why insurgencies and other attempts to begin the revolutionary process were constantly taking place throughout the region. The answer seems to be that nothing else appeared to be working either, if by “working” one means producing an alleviation of the miserable condition of the majority poor of Latin America. There seems to have been something structurally wrong with most Latin American social, economic, and political systems, something that was causing the rich to get richer and the poor, poorer. Described as “dependency” by some scholars, the system plaguing Latin America was one in which the resources and means of production were controlled by, and benefited, a relatively few citizens who worked in symbiotic relationship with foreigners to produce products destined in large part for foreign markets.¹ This pattern was visible whether the political form was liberal democracy (Colombia and Venezuela from the late 1950s on), one-man dictatorship (Paraguay under Stroessner or Haiti under the Duvaliers), or military rule (Brazil from 1964 to the mid-1980s and Argentina from 1966 to 1983).

It would seem that the privileged classes, which dominated the media, controlled the military, and had the de facto backing of the United States, were simply unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to redress the structural imbalances that were holding the majority in poverty. As long as that situation persisted, socially concerned nationalists would likely continue to risk their lives in insurrectionary activities aimed at bringing about revolutionary change, no matter how dismal the prospects for success.

It is clear that both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries learn from history and from each other. In the twentieth century, from the Mexican revolution through the Nicaraguan revolution, the tactics and strategies of both sides evolved considerably. Though I cannot discuss this dialectic process in detail here, I can give some idea of what I mean.

First, one can see the learning dialectic present in the evolution of twentieth-century techniques of rebellion and counterinsurgency. The Mexican revolution came to power in 1911 when conventional combat between pro- and antirevolutionary cacique-led armies resulted in an overall revolutionary victory. It was not until the late 1920s that Nicaraguan patriot Augusto César Sandino would develop—by trial and error—the classical techniques of rural guerrilla warfare. These included small hit-and-run attacks, ambushes, and the cultivation of friendly relations with the rural population.

Those techniques, adapted by Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Ché” Guevara in Cuba and given the name rural foco (focus) war, helped bring about the success of their revolt in 1959. However, the United States, learning from the Cuban experience, quickly began a program of counterinsurgency training and support for Latin American military establishments; that assistance helped foil several subsequent foco efforts, including ones by Ché in Bolivia and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, both of which were crushed in 1967.

There then followed a brief flurry of interest in, and experimentation with, urban guerrilla warfare as advocated by Spanish ex-patriot, Abraham Guillén.² Involving selective assassination, propaganda, and sabotage, this technique was quickly discredited when major practitioners such as Carlos Marighela in Brazil, the Tupamaros of Uruguay, and the Montaneros in Argentina were destroyed by bloody U.S.-backed programs of urban “counterterror” implemented by the military regimes of those countries.

The 1979 victory of the Sandinistas was the product of a very pragmatic combination of rural and urban techniques with one new twist, the mass-based urban insurgency. Having taken stock of this experience, however, the United States refined the techniques of “counterterror” to block any repetition of what had happened in Nicaragua. In February 1980, for instance, U.S. Charge d’affaires James Cheek instructed the governing Christian Democrats of El Salvador to institute what was euphemistically called “a clean counter-insurgency war,” in which civil rights would be severely curtailed and Salvadoran security forces, already known for their savagery, would be accorded even greater leeway in dealing with “subversives.” During the next decade, more than 70,000 civilians would be slaughtered by government security forces and associated “death squads,” but in the long run El Salvador would be “saved”—at least for the time being—from a much-feared “leftist takeover.”³

The learning dialectic is also present in what happened after revolutionary groups had come to power. On the one hand, revolutionaries in this century learned a number of techniques for the consolidation of power and the successful implementation of change. On the other, counterrevolutionary forces—particularly the United States—perfected techniques to destabilize revolutionary governments, make them appear inept, and ultimately cause their downfall.

One of the things that revolutionary governments learned over the decades was that if “revolution” is, indeed, to be “revolutionary,” it must immediately embark on social programs designed to improve the human condition of the previously exploited majority. These would include projects and legislation designed to advance public health, education, housing, and equitable food distribution; agrarian reform; the protection of rural and urban workers; and an effort to resurrect and nurture authentic national culture. Such programs are important not only for their intrinsic human impact but also because they provide opportunities for popular participation and tend to build a social base for the revolutionary system.

Another closely related lesson of history is that it is very important to support and encourage the formation of mass or grass-roots organizations. Such neighborhood and interest organizations have a variety of useful functions ranging from (1) providing the voluntary organizational infrastructure and labor needed for the relatively inexpensive implementation of social programs; (2) facilitating the learning of new, more socially responsible values; (3) serving as a vehicle for genuine democratic grass-roots participation; (4) facilitating information and demand “feedback” from the people to their government; to (5) organizing vigilance against inevitable counterrevolutionary activities. Where such organizations flourished (Cuba and Nicaragua), the revolutionary systems were reinforced and invigorated—at least for a while. Where they were weak or nonexistent (Bolivia and Peru), the revolutionary systems quickly perished.

Moreover, revolutionary governments learned much about economics. By the 1970s, the problem of dependency was painfully apparent to most Latin American intellectuals. What was not clear was what to do about it. On the one hand, the middle-class “revolutionary” governments of Bolivia in the 1950s and early 1960s had turned to the West for financial assistance and, hence, had been forced to accept and implement the monetarist formulas of the International Monetary Fund. The regressive social consequences of doing so had driven a wedge between the revolution’s potential social base and its middle-class leadership and had led to a quick demise of that revolutionary experiment. On the other hand, Cuba’s forced isolation from the West and its radical turn to a command economy had led to another series of problems, including lack of innovation and low productivity. By 1979 it was clear that although the problem of dependency could not be ignored, it would have to be dealt with in new and creative ways.

Meanwhile, the forces of counterrevolution—notably the U.S. government-had been perfecting techniques for destroying revolutionary experiments. Some of the many devices were,, legal and aboveboard; others were not.⁴ Covert devices—usually employed by the CIA—included planning assassinations; instigating dirty tricks; inventing and disseminating “black propaganda”; funding or bribing opposition groups (church, labor, press, party); training and arming surrogate native “rebel” forces; and carrying out selective acts of sabotage, often in the name of these “freedom fighters.” More-overt activities took the form of official warnings or expressions of displeasure; diplomatic moves aimed at isolating the target regime; and a variety of devices designed to cause economic collapse (such as the cutting off of U.S. trade and aid relationships, pressure to restrict the flow of funding from multilateral lending agencies, the use of travel bans to curtail tourism).

Often the particular combination of techniques employed appeared to be chaotic, ad hoc, and poorly thought out. The amateurish and comical surrogate invasion of Guatemala in 1954 succeeded only through bluff and because the regular Guatemalan army was not loyal to the elected president. Having “succeeded” on that occasion, the United States then mounted the ill-fated surrogate invasion of Cuba in 1961. The latter failed, not, as some have argued, because President Kennedy refused to provide sufficient air cover, but because fewer than 2,000 surrogate troops—no matter how well armed or protected—simply cannot overthrow a mass-based revolutionary government.

By the 1980s, however, indirect strategies for the destruction of enemy regimes had undergone considerable refinement. Indeed, a whole school of thought concerned with “low-intensity conflict” had come into being and was very much in vogue among the cold war policy planners and advisers of the Reagan administration. The multifaceted low-intensity conflict employed against Sandinista Nicaragua will be described in great detail in Part 3 of this book.

Background

Located at the geographic center of Central America, Nicaragua is the largest country in the region. Even so, its 148,000 square kilometers of territory make it only slightly larger than the state of Iowa. And its population of 3.7 million (in 1989) was a scant 27 percent greater than Iowa’s 2.8 million. Given Nicaragua’s low population density, abundant natural resources (good land, timber, gold, petroleum), access to two oceans, and long-recognized potential as a site for a transoceanic waterway, one would expect Nicaraguans in general to be prosperous. In fact, however, when the Sandinistas overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, the social conditions of the majority of Nicaraguans ranked that country with the two or three most backward of Latin America. The explanation for this apparent paradox lies in Nicaraguan history-one of the most unfortunate of the hemisphere.

Two major factors had combined to produce this situation: elite irresponsibility flowing out of a highly unequal social system and endemic foreign intervention or manipulation. The inegalitarian nature of Nicaraguan society has its roots in the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century. In contrast to events in neighboring Costa Rica, where the Spaniards either killed or expelled the Indians, the conquerors of Nicaragua drastically decimated, but did not completely destroy, the native population. As a result, in Nicaragua there was an underclass of nonwhites who could be used as virtual slaves in the income-concentrating economic activities of the European minorities. In Costa Rica, the Europeans had no ethnically distinct underclass to exploit. Thus, over the centuries, Costa Rica developed the relatively more egalitarian society that gave birth in the twentieth century to liberal democracy, whereas Nicaragua and the other Central American countries to the north—with which it shared sociohistorical characteristics—produced a chain of elite-run dictatorships. Although the natural resources of the country were exploited by the elite to produce export products to generate wealth for its members, the human condition of the bulk of the population actually declined as the country’s rulers used law and brute military force to promote their already lopsided class advantage. In Nicaragua, the last of these income-concentrating regimes were those of the Somoza dynasty—Anastasio Somoza García (1937–1956), Luis Somoza Debayle and puppets (1956–1967), and Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1967–1979). By the time Anastasio Somoza Debayle (with a net worth estimated well in excess of U.S. $500 million) was finally overthrown, the poorer 50 percent of his country’s people were struggling to make do on a per capita income of around U.S. $250 per year.

Parallel to, and often intimately connected with, this story of elite exploitation was a long experience of foreign intervention and meddling. During the colonial period, the Spaniards on the Pacific Coast and later the British in the Atlantic region exercised control over what is now Nicaragua. Although Spanish rule in the west came to an end in 1822, the British were finally expelled from the east only in the 1890s.

Decades before, the Americans had also begun meddling in Nicaraguan affairs.⁵ In the 1850s, a U.S. filibuster, William Walker, briefly imposed himself as president of Nicaragua and actually won diplomatic recognition from Washington. Later, in 1909, the United States encouraged and assisted the minority Conservative party in overthrowing Liberal nationalist president José Santos Zelaya. Subsequently, to keep elite pro-American governments in power, U.S. troops occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1925 and from 1926 to 1933. In return, these client regimes signed treaties giving away Nicaragua’s right to have its own transoceanic waterway (which would have meant competition for the U.S. canal in Panama) and relinquishing its claims to San Andrés and other offshore islands (which Colombia demanded in apparent compensation from the United States for its involvement in engineering the independence of the Colombian province of Panama in 1903). During the second occupation, the United States created the Nicaraguan National Guard to preserve pro-American stability. After the U.S. troops departed, the National Guard’s first Nicaraguan commander, Anastasio Somoza García, wasted little time in creating a pro-American dictatorship, which, with abundant U.S. assistance, was to last until 1979. By the time the dynasty was finally overthrown, its National Guard—one of the most corrupt and exploitative military establishments in the hemisphere—was also the most heavily U.S.-trained in all of Latin America.⁶

Not surprisingly, the centuries-old themes of elite exploitation and foreign meddling produced numerous incidents of grass-roots or nationalist resistance. Several heroic Indian leaders resisted the Spanish conquistadores. Centuries later, in 1881, thousands of Indians lost their lives in the War of the Comuneros in futile resistance to the seizure of their ancestral lands by Nicaraguan coffee planters. In 1912, Liberal nationalist Benjamin Zeledón lost his life after leading an unsuccessful revolt against the U.S.-imposed Conservative regime. From 1927 to 1937, Augusto César Sandino led a long guerrilla campaign to liberate his country from both the U.S. occupiers and the client regime they had imposed. Though his effort was partially successful in that it forced the United States to withdraw its troops, Sand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• Part I Groups, Institutions, and Power
• Part II Government Policy
• Part III The Counterrevolution
• Part IV The Search for Peace
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• About the Book
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index