Sandinistas

A Moral History

Robert J. Sierakowski

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268106911
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country's rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime's complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal.

Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas' army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime's moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski's innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Comandante Francisco Rivera, March 1979, Centro de Historia Militar (hereafter CHM), Fondo Sonoteca 103.

2. “Contingentes a Jinotega; Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional habla de ‘zona liberada,’” La Prensa (hereafter LP), May 21, 1979.

3. “¿Por qué lucha el FSLN junto al pueblo?” Lucha Sandinista, June 1978.

4. Michael J. Schroeder, “Horse Thieves to Rebels to Dogs: Political Gang Violence and the State in the Western Segovias, Nicaragua, in the Time of Sandino, 1926–1934,” Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): 392.

5. Humberto Ortega Saavedra, “La insurrección nacional victoriosa (Entrevista por Marta Harnecker),” Nicaráuac 1 (May–June 1980): 30.

6. Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 131–38, 246–47.

7. Towns such as Jinotega and Ocotal, where Sandino and his men had been active, largely refused to support the FSLN during the upheaval of 1978–79; see Francis Pisani, Los muchachos (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1989), 27. George Black notes: “Old sympathies for Sandino did not prevent a percentage of peasants from being convinced Somocistas, while many were at least superficially under the sway of the dictatorship’s ideological control”; Black, Triumph of the People: The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua (London: Zed, 1981), 79.

8. Walter Raymond Duncan, Latin American Politics: A Developmental Approach (New York: Praeger, 1976), 49.

9. Similar terms that are used to describe the Somoza regime are “neo-­patrimonial” and “kleptocratic”; see Richard Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977); Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, 269; John A. Booth, “The Somoza Regime in Nicaragua,” in Sultanistic Regimes, ed. H. E. Chehabi and Juan José Linz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 131–52; Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 182. Many of these “state-centric” accounts implicitly argue that regime type and divisions between the state and national elites permitted the revolutionaries’ success. This scholarly tradition follows the work of Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

10. Jeffrey L. Gould, “‘For an Organized Nicaragua’: Somoza and the Labour Movement, 1944–1948,” Journal of Latin American Studies 19, no. 2 (1987): 353–87; Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Victoria González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

11. Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty; Richard Grossman, “‘The Blood of the People’: The Guardia Nacional’s Fifty-Year War against the People of Nicaragua, 1927–1979,” in When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 59–84.

12. Militaries have played the role of providing manhood to subaltern peoples throughout Latin American history. However, the notion of “proper manhood” varies widely, and the GN’s pattern differed greatly from the masculine “Prussian” soldier of the Brazilian military; see Peter M. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 69. The Mexican army during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was similarly identified with vice and violent masculinity. However, in response, middle-class reformers and military officers attempted to uproot “traditional behaviors” and impose “‘morality,’ a concept deemed essential to the progress and modernity of the nation,” an emphasis missing in Somocista Nicaragua; see Stephen B. Neufeld, The Blood Contingent: The Military and the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017), 22.

13. Between 1961 and 1967, the years for which statistics are available, there were between 23.1 and 30.9 homicides per 100,000 people each year; United Nations Statistical Office, Demographic Yearbook 1960 (New York: UN, 1960), table 19; United Nations Statistical Office, Demographic Yearbook 1966 (New York: UN, 1967), table 20; United Nations Statistical Office, Demographic Yearbook 1967 (New York: UN, 1968), table 24; Stuart Hunter Palmer, The Violent Society (New Haven, CT: College & University Press, 1972), 28–29; “Atribuyen a Nicaragua primer lugar violento,” LP, May 11, 1968.

14. Patrick Nicholas Theros, interview by Robert J. Alexander, Managua, June 26, 1967, Papers of Robert J. Alexander, reel 10, frame 841.

15. David R. Powell and Kevin B. Youngs, Report of the Public Safety Program and the Nicaragua National Guard, June 1970 (Washington, DC: Agency for International Development, 1971), 20–21.

16. Rodolfo Gutiérrez Pimentel, Alcohol y alcoholismo en Centroamérica: Informe de un estudio (San Salvador: Secretaría General de la Organización de Estados Centroamericanos, 1970).

17. As Elizabeth Dore and John Weeks put it, “The Sandinistas themselves, as well as most writers sympathetic with their cause, contextualised their struggle almost exclusively within a narrative of US imperialism”; Dore and Weeks, The Red and Black: The Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1992), 2, 25–28. Michel Gobat argues from a very different angle in that upper-class support for the revolution came from anti-­imperialist sentiment and “anti-bourgeois spirit” dating to the time of U.S. military intervention; Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 267–80. For more critical readings of the FSLN that center Marxism-Leninism rather than nationalism, see David Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, FL: Institute of Interamerican Studies, Graduate School of International Studies, University of Miami, 1984); Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas: The Party and the Revolution (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

18. The extent of nationalism in the revolutionary upsurge—as compared to the postrevolutionary period—has similarities to the classic debate between Alan Knight and John M. Hart over the nature of the Mexican Revolution. For instance, Hart casts the revolution as a “war of national liberation against the United States,” but Knight argues that (at least during the period of armed conflict) “the idea of a virulently nationalist popular revolution was largely a myth”; Hart, Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 320; Knight, “The United States and the Mexican Peasantry, circa 1880–1940,” in Rural Revolt in Mexico: U.S. Intervention and the Domain of Subaltern Politics, ed. Daniel Nugent (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 27.

19. Steven Palmer, “Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua,” Latin American Research Review 23, no. 1 (1988): 91–109. See also Donald Hodges, Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

20. Matilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 9.

21. Gould, To Lead as Equals, 294–95.

22. Ibid., 296.

23. Jeffrey L. Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 228–72.

24. Brown downplays the U.S. influence and counterrevolutionary atrocities to a fault, but Horton proves far more attune to foreign inte...

Table of contents

• Halftitle
• Title_page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgment
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• ONE State of Disorder: Vice, Corruption, and the Somoza Dictatorship
• TWO Burning Down the Brothels: Moral Regeneration and the Emergence of Sandinismo, 1956–1970
• THREE Persecuting the Living Christ: Guerrillas, Catholics, and Repression, 1968–1976
• FOUR “They Planted Corn and Harvested Guardias”: Somoza’s National Guard and Secret Police at the Grassroots
• FIVE “A Crime to Be Young”: Families in Insurrection, September 1976–September 1978
• SIX “How Costly Is Freedom!”: Massacres, Community, and Sacrifice, October 1978–July 1979
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index