Conflict In Nicaragua

A Multidimensional Perspective

Jiri Valenta

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367154110
• eBook ISBN: 9780429719264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The issue of Nicaragua arouses political passions, those that we see expressed almost daily in the newspapers of Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Few issues are more divisive within the politics of certain countries, and the evolution of the Nicaraguan drama threatens to drive a wedge between countries that are friends, allies, and par

Part One
Roots of the Crisis

Chapter One
The FSLN in Power

Jiri Valenta and
Virginia Valenta

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) toppled the regime of Nicaraguan dicatator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979. Yet even today the FSLN—its road to power, its political complexion and orientation, and its objectives—remains the subject of heated debate. Some still argue that the Sandinista regime is a nationalistic, nonaligned, although radical, Third World government. Others emphasize the Marxist-Leninist overtones characterizing its seizure and consolidation of power, its foreign relations, and its efforts to introduce socialism to Nicaraguan society. The topic is of more than academic interest, for the Sandinistas’ increasingly repressive rule has engendered domestic opposition as well as external involvement in the affairs of Nicaragua both by those who support and by those who oppose the regime. This raises fears that the conflict may intensify and spill over into neighboring countries.

In attempting to fathom the nature of the Sandinista regime, we address the following questions: What factors brought about the FSLN insurgency? How did the Front conceive of itself, and what specific road did it follow to victory? To what extent has the FSLN become a Leninist-oriented party? What instruments of control does the FSLN have at its disposal, and how are they employed in dealing with opposition to the regime? What is the nature of relations between Sandinista Nicaragua and the USSR, Cuba, and other communist states? What are the major objectives of the Sandinista program, and what policies has the FSLN employed in efforts to transform Nicaraguan society? In considering these questions, we have drawn from a wide range of FSLN publications and documents, and materials from elsewhere in Central America, from Cuba, and from the Soviet Union; from documents seized in Grenada in autumn of 1983; and from interviews with leaders of the Nicaraguan opposition as well as current and former FSLN members.

The Revolutionary Environment

Nicaragua’s geography, history, and socioeconomic conditions all have provided a rich medium for guerrilla warfare. The most significant geographic feature bearing on Nicaragua’s history is its close proximity to the United States. Policymakers in the United States traditionally have considered Nicaragua strategically important and therefore have been inclined to intervene, directly and indirectly, in Nicaraguan affairs to protect perceived strategic interests. One concern was the possibility that a foreign power other than the United States might build a trans-isthmus canal on Nicaraguan rather than Panamanian territory. American interventionism has given rise to a certain degree of “Yankeephobia,” tempered by feelings of considerable attraction between the two people. Within Nicaragua, the lightly populated northeastern mountains have been the customary place of refuge for guerrilla bands, whether the nationalist forces of General Augusto César Sandino in the late 1920s or the FSLN in the 1960s and 1970s. Sandino’s Army for the Defense of National Sovereignty, recruited mainly from the Nicaraguan peasantry but bolstered by volunteers from elsewhere in Latin America, conducted guerrilla operations from 1927 to 1933 against the U.S. Marines, whose return to Nicaragua in 1927 followed similar Marine interventions in that country dating back to 1909.

Despite a subsequent recasting of his image by the FSLN, Sandino was neither a Leninist nor a Marxist nor a socialist; nor was he a pro-Soviet “antiimperialist.” Principally, Sandino wanted to expel the U.S. Marines; after they left Nicaragua in 1933, he actually made peace with the Nicaraguan government. True, the Comintern attempted to exploit Sandino’s struggle and bring him into the communist fold through his private secretary, Augustin Farabundo Marti, founder of El Salvador’s Communist party. But Sandino broke all Comintern connections in 1930 and dismissed Marti from his staff, a “betrayal” denounced by the Comintern.¹

Nevertheless, the FSLN leadership later revived and refurbished the image of Sandino, making him the embodiment of their “antiimperialist” revolution. The FSLN’s founding father, Carlos Fonseca, and FSLN leaders such as Sergio Ramirez rescued Sandino’s writings from oblivion, and Ernesto Cardenal embellished the Sandino myth with the poem “Horn O” (“Zero Hour”), which recounts Sandino’s death in 1934 at the hands of Anastasio (“Tacho”) Somoza’s National Guard. Fonseca, who was also an FSLN historian, blended the image of antiimperialist, revolutionary Sandinism with the legacy of the famous Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario, whose words appear on the back cover of the FSLN platform of 1977² (see Appendix A).

If geography and the Sandino legend gave form and enthusiasm to the FSLN insurgency, socioeconomic underdevelopment and political repression were its major catalysts. From Spanish colonial masters, the country inherited a rigid class stratification. An authoritarian political culture in which democratic traditions never had an opportunity to take root was maintained, first, by a privileged minority consisting of export-oriented land owners and, from 1927 on, by the National Guard under the control of the Somoza family. The conservative hierarchy of the Catholic Church constituted yet another pillar of authoritarianism in nominally democratic Nicaragua.

The oppressive rule of the Somoza dynasty established conditions favorable to revolution, as did, to a lesser extent, Nicaragua’s subservient client relationship with the United States. All three Somozas were adept at cultivating U.S. support and were eager to play the role of U.S. proxies abroad, even during the Korean and Vietnam wars, when Washington declined their offers of help. During his lifetime, the first Anastasio Somoza (“Tacho”) ruled Nicaragua through a National Guard whose corruption he encouraged; by coopting the ruling Liberal party, friendly businessmen, and landlords; and by skillfully manipulating domestic opposition. He was succeeded by his son Luis, who presided over a relatively peaceful Nicaragua in the 1950s and 1960s, when modernization and economic growth were the basis for an expanding middle class.

The dynasty began to disintegrate in the 1970s under Luis’s brother and successor, Anastasio (“Tachito”) Somoza, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. As Régis Debray observes, “The [Sandinist] Front’s best ally… was Somoza himself.”³ Corrupt like his predecessors, Tachito lacked their adeptness in political manipulation. This was evident in his handling of the aftermath of the Christmas earthquake of 1972, which killed 10,000 Nicaraguans. Relief funds were shamelessly misused, while downtown Managua lay in shambles. Somoza’s continued exploitation of the Nicaraguan economy for his personal benefit, his contrived reelection in 1974, and his blatant disregard for the people’s basic social needs further undermined the regime’s legitimacy, antagonized a majority of the population, and sowed the seeds of revolution.

The Road to Power

After the FSLN’s 1979 victory, it was fashionable in the United States and Western Europe to view the revolutionaries as nationalists or, at worst, confused socialist radicals. Careful examination of the evidence suggests, however, that from its founding, the FSLN has been led by dedicated, Leninist-oriented revolutionaries with long-standing ties to the Cuban and (to a lesser degree) Soviet Communist parties. Although the Front experienced various ups and downs, including near-extermination in the early 1970s, it eventually surmounted existing factional struggles and reemerged as a Leninist-oriented “vanguard,” that is, an elitist organization under a largely unified command operating according to the vertical ruling principles of Leninist democratic centralism. Willing to form alliances with a diversity of anti-Somoza elements, the pragmatic FSLN consistently exploited Somoza’s errors and, with international support (particularly from Soviet-backed Cuba), succeeded in transforming its fledgling guerrilla struggle into a successful popular insurgency.

Somoza, too, misjudged the FSLN and its leadership. To him, it “all began” in 1963, when the FSLN stepped up its activities in the northeastern mountains of Nicaragua.⁴ Yet an organized Leninist party in Nicaragua actually dates back to June 1944 when the Nicaraguan Socialist party (Partido Socialista Nicaragüense—PSN) was formed. In deference to Stalin’s wartime strategy of a united front, the PSN supported the Somoza regime, partnered as it was with the United States in the antifascist alliance.⁵ Carlos Fonseca, a co-founder of the Sandinistas, was at that time active in Nicaragua’s Socialist Youth, the PSN’s student arm. In addition, both Fonseca and his friend Tomás Borge were exposed to Marxist works in Guatemala during the tenure of leftist Jácobo Arbenz (1953–1954), and they organized a communist group among university students in the Nicaraguan city of León. Fonseca formally joined the PSN in 1955. Both men, as they later recounted, were unhappy with the weak and conservative PSN leaders,⁶ who still regarded Sandino as a petty bourgeois nationalist, although there is no evidence of open criticism by Borge or Fonseca of the Soviet foreign policy line that informed PSN positions. On the contrary, Fonseca assented to the Soviet line when, under the auspices of the PSN, he attended the Sixth World Youth Festival in Moscow in 1957. He remained in the USSR four months after the festival had adjourned. (Borge was incarcerated in Nicaragua at this time.) After his Russian sojourn, Fonseca revealed his pro-Soviet views in A Nicaraguan in Moscow, which naively describes the USSR as a state with a free press and total freedom of religion.⁷

The success of the 1959 Cuban revolution seemed to validate and strengthen the Fonseca-Borge criticism of the nonviolent strategy of the PSN. In June 1959, Fonseca was joined by dozens of Nicaraguans and Cubans in an effort to organize armed struggle in Nicaragua’s central region, close to Honduras. Although this effort failed, both Fonseca and Borge afterward visited Cuba. Fidel Castro and Ernesto (“Che”) Guevara encouraged them to return to Nicaragua in 1960 in order to organize a guerrilla struggle modeled on Fidel’s July 26 Movement. The PSN publicly disclosed Fonseca’s would-be secret return, however, an action that led to his arrest and expulsion from the country.⁸

By now thoroughly disenchanted with the “pacifist line” of the PSN, or what they termed the “old Marxist sector,”⁹ Fonseca, Borge, and Silvio Mayorga, another friend and former PSN activist, met in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1961 to create a guerrilla organization modeled on Castro-Guevara lines. Originally, the organization was simply the National Liberation Front (FLN); the Sandinista label was added in 1962. Not all the early FSLN members were communists or even Marxists; for example, Rigoberto Cruz and Colonel Santos López, both survivors of Sandino’s army, were included not for their ideology but for their knowledge of guerrilla tactics. Reduced to a few dozen members in the struggle with the National Guard during the Rio Coco (1963) and Pancasán (1967) campaigns, the Front remained throughout the 1960s a small force without mass support. Like Guevara in his last Bolivian campaign of 1967, the FSLN discovered how difficult it is for middle-class, university-educated men to gain the support of peasants in a highly stratified social environment. In the mid-1960s, the Front attracted primarily students, including Daniel and Humberto Ortega, sons of a veteran of Sandino’s army.

Faced with the meager results of their romantic revolutionary efforts, FSLN leaders began to look for a more realistic strategy. Fonseca, in particular, called for “a clearly Marxist-Leninist ideology.”¹⁰ As for tactics, by 1969 the movement had developed a new program—“a very important qualitative leap,” as Humberto Ortega would later call it—based on the concept of Guerra Popular Prolongada or GPP (Prolonged Popular War), which foresaw and supported a protracted rural insurgency similar to the long guerrilla wars that preceded the victories of revolutionaries in China and Vietnam. The main strategic objectives of the FSLN were a military takeover and the establishment of “a revolutionary government based on a worker—peasant alliance.” The new government would “eliminate foreign policy submission to Yankee imperialism” and “support authentic unity with the fraternal peoples of Central America” by coordinating “the efforts to achieve national liberation” in the reg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• A Comment on the Crisis in Central America
• PART ONE Roots of the Crisis
• PART TWO Internal Dimensions of the Crisis
• PART THREE Regional Dimensions of the Crisis
• PART FOUR International Dimensions of the Crisis
• PART FIVE Conclusions and Appendixes
• APPENDIXES
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Glossary
• Index