A short history of the Sandinista Revolution and subsequent civil war

Here in Northern Nicaragua, the Contra War of the 1980s left a particularly profound scar. “La guerra" (the war) is very much a part of people’s historical memory—something they experienced intimately, remember vividly and talk about often. It has therefore been key both to my understanding of Nicaraguan history broadly speaking, and the individual Nicaraguans with whom I am living and working—their political allegiances in particular.

Most Americans know of the Sandinista Revolution and the subsequent Contra War. Less known is that for 40 years prior to the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, Nicaraguan people lived under the U.S.-backed, brutal and corrupt dictatorship of the Somoza family, who used their power singularly and illegally to amass tremendous amounts of property and wealth. It was against this backdrop of repression, and out of a radical student movement, that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) (Sandinista National Liberation Front) emerged in the 1960s. Their main objective was two-fold: to oust the Somoza family from power and to reject further U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, which, since the nation’s independence in 1838 and especially since the start of the twentieth century, had brought only violence and entrenchment of poverty to the majority of Nicaraguans. 

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Sandinistas, with the help of the Catholic Church, organized, gathered support for their cause, and waged war against the Somoza regime and the National Guard—a group formed by U.S. Marines in the 1920s that had been the violent sustaining force of the Somoza regime—eventually culminating in the fall of Somoza and the Sandinista’s historic victory, el triunfo, in July 1979. Declaring their commitment to the country’s poor majority, the Sandinistas began sweeping health and education reforms, most notably the hugely successful national literacy campaign. (Less popular was their agrarian reform, poorly conceived or executed or both depending on whom you ask, a topic I'll pursue in a later post.)

Amid the polarizing climate of the Cold War, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan decided that Nicaragua’s new “communist” regime constituted a direct threat to U.S. security. The Reagan administration pressured Sandinistas to cut ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba and to not assist the guerrilla army in El Salvador, but the Sandinistas, as a guiding principle, were committed to alter the course of Nicaraguan politics by not subverting to the demands of Washington; thus they refused to negotiate, in the name of a Nicaragua free from foreign intervention. 

After failed attempts to bully the Sandinista regime, Reagan and CIA director William Casey began orchestrating covert operations designed to overthrow the Sandinistas—organizing, training and funding former Guardsmen in Florida to form a rebel army which came to be known as the Contras. In 1982, the Contras, in a CIA-sponsored attack, blew up two bridges in northern Nicaragua, signaling the start of what was to become a nearly decade-long bloody civil war.

Because the Contras were stationed in base camps throughout southern Honduras, albeit secretively and illegally, their guerilla military attacks and human rights abuses against civilians affected primarily the rural northern departments, including Madriz, where I now live. Rural campesinos lived amid the violence, facing daily Contra attacks on their villages, homes, farm cooperatives, clinics and schools.

In 1983, the Sandinistas, confronted with a strengthening Contra force and desperate for more defense, enacted a compulsory military draft for all men over the age of 17. Families who could afford to do so packed up and left the country, or sent their sons abroad. Thousands of draftees, mostly poor teenagers from rural areas, including most of the men in this community, were sent to the northern hills to fight. People here in El Riito talk about hearing bombs and gunfire go off in the not-so-distant hills, worrying for their sons. Everyone knows someone who died at the hands of the Contra rebels. All four sons of the older couple I live with were sent to war. 

As war raged through the Nicaraguan countryside, life in the city was deteriorating in other ways. While largely unaffected by military conflict, living conditions were declining rapidly; there were shortages in food, transportation, water, electricity, phone service, and other basics. Between money spent on the war, the government’s attempt at control of the private sector and overall atrocious misjudgment and mismanagement, the economy had collapsed. 

The Sandinistas, amid the chaos of the war, were unable to pursue the reforms they had sought, namely freeing the poor majority from decades of mistreatment and neglect. Rather than acknowledge that their vision for the new Nicaragua was not actually shared by all Nicaraguans, they responded with increasing authoritarianism, including censorship of the press and repression of legitimate political opposition, alienating some citizens who previously supported the revolution.

Despite growing disapproval in Congress and among the American public, and a third amendment to the Boland Amendment in 1984, which prohibited any further form of U.S. aid to the Contras, the Reagan administration forged ahead, continuing to supply them with aid and weapons, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. While Reagan lauded the Contras as noble “freedom fighters,” critics of the war considered the contras U.S. mercenaries rather than a legitimate, Nicaraguan opposition force. In my opinion, the contras were neither extreme. At its inception, the group was composed of former Guardsmen who had committed terrible abuses under the Somoza regime, and directly organized by the U.S., but by the mid-1980s, as Sandinista totalitarianism escalated, the counter-revolutionary forces had diversified into a broad coalition of anti-Sandinistas, including several hundred Miskito Indians who had been forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands on the Atlantic Coast.

  

The Iran-Contra Scandal served as a major blow to the Reagan administration’s support of the Contras, as it was made public around the world that the administration had conducted illegal arms sales in Iran, and used the profits to continue covert funding of the Contras. With the halt of U.S. funding, the Contras were doomed; in 1988 the Sandinistas and Contras finally agreed upon a peace accord. Most fighting ended, but it was not until 1990, when Sandinista rule came to an end with the defeat of Daniel Ortega, and electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro, that the Contra officially disbanded and the war was officially and finally over.

The Contra War had resulted in absolute economic devastation to an already poor country and more than 300,000 Nicaraguan casualties.

Many Nicaraguans rightly consider the Reagan administration, and U.S. imperialism more broadly, at fault for the Contra war that wreaked havoc in Nicaragua for a decade. Without U.S. backing, the conflict never would have reached such heights. Nevertheless, it was a fratricidal war, fought between Nicaraguans. And it left them deeply and bitterly divided. 

References:

Kinzer, Stephen. 2007. (1991). Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.