Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia

Development and Culture in the Modern State

Daniel Chavez

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780826520470
• eBook ISBN: 9780826520494
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The history of modern Nicaragua is populated with leaders promising a new and better day. Inevitably, as Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia demonstrates, reality casts a shadow and the community must look to the next leader. As an impoverished state, second only to Haiti in the Americas, Nicaragua has been the scene of cyclical attempts and failures at modern development. Author Daniel Chavez investigates the cultural and ideological bases of what he identifies as the three decisive movements of social reinvention in Nicaragua: the regimes of the Somoza family of much of the early to mid-twentieth century; the governments of the Sandinista party; and the present day struggle to adapt to the global market economy.

For each era, Chavez reveals the ways Nicaraguan popular culture adapted and interpreted the new political order, shaping, critiquing, or amplifying the regime's message of stability and prosperity for the people. These tactics of interpretation, otherwise known as meaning-making, became all-important for the Nicaraguan people, as they opposed the autocracy of Somocismo, or complemented the Sandinistas, or struggled to find their place in the Neoliberal era. In every case, Chavez shows the reflective nature of cultural production and its pursuit of utopian idealism.

CHAPTER 1

A Tale of Three Utopias and One Dictatorship

The political ascent of the Somoza family and its consolidation of power in the government of Nicaragua from 1934, the year of the death of Augusto C. Sandino, until the ousting of the third and last member of the dynasty in 1979 delimits one of the most important periods of modernization of a Central American nation carried out under the auspices and influence of the United States. The continual support of a military family in power—sometimes reluctant or tacit, other times very active—is a classic example of the blunt and costly ways in which United States governments of the twentieth century conducted foreign relations with the republics of the isthmus and other Latin American nations (Grandin 2006; Rouquié 1984: 141; LaFeber 1993: 83).

Ever since the short adventure of William Walker, the American filibusterer, in Nicaragua and Costa Rica (1855–1857), and the first interventions by the US Marines in favor of the liberal governments of the late nineteenth century, the implanting of “a civilizing process” was supposedly the intent of the Pax Americana. Its associated rhetoric resembled the rhetoric previously used to justify the bloody massacres that resulted in the occupation of the Philippines after the Spanish American War of 1898 (cf. Grandin 2006: 24–25; Pike 1992; D. Rodríguez 1993: 176, 258–62).¹ From that watershed point in history when the new imperial ambitions of the United States became clear, some elite groups of Nicaragua and other Latin American nations purposefully, if not enthusiastically, embraced the social and economic views proposed and sanctioned by the nascent neocolonial power (Grandin 2006: 13).

After the long stay of the Marines from 1912 until 1924 and then from 1927 to 1933, the building of a constabulary force, the Guardia Nacional—supposed to share the same principles that regulated the Marine Corps—was the “legacy” for the consolidation of an era of “civilization and progress” in Nicaragua. Thus, the Guardia Nacional was expected to become the primary guarantor of both national stability and American interests in Nicaragua (Rouquié 1984: 141; Walker 1991: 22). Somoza García, the first head of this military body, would continue to receive the support of diverse American governments. True, contemporary scholarship has highlighted the nuanced and intricate process of legitimizing Somoza García’s regime, but this does not diminish the fact that the dictator was periodically shored up, tacitly supported, or mildly tolerated by successive American administrations (cf. Clark 1992: 139–57; Millett 1977: 203).

Three Competing Utopias, Only One Dictator

By February 1, 1934, the Nicaraguan political scene seemed to be heading in a good direction with conflicts deescalating and the foreseeable inauguration of a new era of peaceful reconstruction (Gobat 2005: 246; Millett 1977: 148). With the agreements signed between Augusto C. Sandino and the Managua government, the formal withdrawal of the substantive part of the Marines in 1933, President Sacasa in power willing to make good on the conditions of the armistice, and the Nicaraguan elites hoping for an end to the protracted violence of the previous two decades, all signs pointed to the beginning of an era of relative stability. Reading through the documents and writings circulating in the different newspapers, journals, and leaflets of the era, one can detect the traces of at least three different utopian projects, not all of them fully formed, and not necessarily opposite or mutually exclusive. Two came from the elite, one from Sandino.

From the ranks of the political elites, encouraged by the forces of occupation, emerged two visible and partially triumphant national projects. On the one hand, Somoza’s will to power had a decisive militaristic and authoritarian vision and counted on the support of some members of the liberal and conservative forces, but, more important, it relied on the backing of the United States political and military leadership to implement a process of accelerated Americanized modernization. On the other hand, some conservative sectors that initially supported Somoza and agreed on the positive role a strong leader could play felt an aversion to the Americans and were philosophically opposed to the models of commercialist, antitraditional, pragmatic conceptions of society associated with the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States. In this latter group, the young ranks of the traditional conservative families, founders of the Nicaraguan literary avant-garde, had a vision of their own: a government of Hispanist, Catholic, elitist, antidemocratic, agrarian, and nationalist restoration.

The third competing utopian project came from a world apart from, and yet so close to, those represented by the elite groups. The writings, manifestos, letters, and communiqués out of the Segovian sierras in northern Nicaragua that had been translated and disseminated across the Americas and Europe contained the visionary concepts and dreams of Augusto C. Sandino. His writings and those of his supporters presented the proindigenous and propeasant, deeply nationalist, theosophic, Latin Americanist, and communitarian blueprints for a new nation and a new American continent and were read closely by groups across classes, ideologies, and nations (Grossman 2006; Walker 1991: 21; Wünderich 1995: 130–42). Sandino was considered by many in Nicaragua, and on both sides of the Atlantic, as the first line of resistance against the economic and ideological advances of the United States in the Americas (Belausteguigotia 1985: 216–28; De la Selva 2009: 598; Selser 1986). In this particular ideological aspect, in their common desire to revive the true roots of nationality and their common anti-Yankeeism, members of the conservative avant-garde group were also distant admirers of Sandino, even though one of them, Manolo Cuadra, chose to enroll in the Guardia Nacional and fought against the popular army led by Sandino (Gobat 2005: 240; M. Cuadra 1942).

Despite these imagined or sought-for blueprints for a new society infused with utopian discourse on all sides, the main political actors in Nicaragua were not ready for a concerted peace. The prospects for negotiation among these three possible models of social and material reconstruction were brutally shattered on February 21, 1934, when Sandino, following a dinner offered in his honor by President Sacasa, was detained (unbeknownst to the civil authorities) by a squad of the Guardia Nacional and summarily executed along with a small group of his men. That same night at a different point in Managua, his brother Sócrates Sandino was also arrested and shot dead by the Guardia (Wünderich 1995: 310–12; Walker 1991: 26). In the next months, without the leadership of their charismatic commander, the remaining groups of Sandino’s men—scattered, demobilized, and demoralized—were systematically hunted down and massacred by the Guardia (Wheelock Román 1985b: 93; Wünderich 1995: 313).

After the assassination of Sandino and the elimination of the last bastions of resistance, the symbolic legacy of his vision became a residual and lingering horizon of utopian discourse—albeit politically neutralized in the short term. It would reemerge with unprecedented force three decades later (Grossman 2006). Meanwhile, in the period 1934–1936, many in Nicaragua and abroad understood that the brutality applied to end the Sandinista struggle would unnecessarily prolong the tensions among sectors of the peasantry for decades to come. Sandino’s ideas acquired then a growing spectral quality that would come time and again to haunt the regimes of the Somozas for the next forty-two years. His figure was frequently invoked to underline the Guardia Nacional as a symbol of usurpation, as the most palpable everyday proof of the nation-building process forcefully imposed by the American occupation of 1927–1933.

In the short term, for the hegemonic groups, the path for reconstruction appeared (deceptively) simpler, if not easier with fewer parties involved. The new political and objective conditions shortened the distance between the young conservative elite, and the political group coalescing around Somoza and his American-backed constabulary force. The young poets and inheritors of the conservative families already in the forefront of the literary and ideological debates, inspired by the politics and philosophy of the Action Française, and admiring the bold ascent of Fascism and authoritarianism in Italy, Germany, and Spain, saw in a possible Somoza García regime the touchstone for the installation of their dreamed neo-Hispanist, nationalist, and Catholic government of conservative restoration. Through the pages of their political and literary journals Vanguardia and La Reacción and in the pages of newspapers in Granada and Managua such as El Correo, El Diario Nicaragüense, El Diario Moderno, and La Prensa, with unrelenting aim—sometimes with viciousness, sometimes with humor and wit, but always with pernicious precision—the group of the avant-garde criticized and derided the tepid efforts of President Juan Bautista Sacasa and his allies to put in order the public affairs of Nicaragua in the aftermath of the American withdrawal and Sandino’s death (cf. Arellano 1986: 66).

The social and political promotion by his young conservative allies helped legitimize the still weak Somoza García. The chief director of the Guardia Nacional, backed by factions at the Partido Liberal Nacionalista, also applied his shrewd political manipulation to provoke and cajole the labor organizations so that, little by little, Somoza García was perceived by many in the country and in Washington as the only viable source of authority. In 1936, Somoza pushed President Sacasa—uncle of his wife, Salvadora Debayle—to resign; installed an interim president, Carlos Brenes Jarquín; and in 1937 ascended to power through a closely controlled election (Cole Chamorro 1967: 120–22).

On War and Literature, or, How to Build a Conservative Utopia in the 1930s and 1940s

Reviewing the historiography and the discourses about the nation of this period reveals that the ideological apparatus of the Nicaraguan state was organized around a particular interpretation of the key concepts of bourgeois liberalism and its ideals of modernization, albeit with dominant traits of an authoritarian and conservative power structure. For this period it is possible to condense the mythologies of development in the semiotic rectangle (see figure 2 on page 9).

I am proposing that each element of the rectangle (order, modernity, stability, violence) works as a focus of recursive messages and discourses that support the element at the top (development) which in its turn, stands as a temporary representation, a mirror image in the making of the idealized utopian conceptuality at the base (neutral utopian). The neutral utopian is the unrealized but desirable horizon, still to come, the dreamt-about society necessary to sustain the recursive edifice of utopian imagination. The discourses of each and every one of these foci can also be seen as syntagmatic strings of the “parole” that constitute the particular mythologies of development at the time. Since the symbolic phrases of this parole are constantly reproduced, added to, qualified, and equated with other phrases, public speech and the public performances of government representatives, the military, and the members of the hegemonic classes can also become signifiers in the everyday semiosis of power in the public sphere. This is to say, in many instances, through the parole of the myth of development, the figure in power becomes a signifier that embodies in her/his public persona the myths of progress and her/his public and governmental acts become their expression.

These semiotic associations might seem at first vague and loosely connected, but it suffices to scratch the surface of speech and of government rituals to reveal them as common practices and connotations, as the “natural” ways in which public power addresses its subjects in many of the ideologically polarized societies of the early twentieth century, and more specifically in the early years of the Somoza García consolidation of power. The possibility of investing leaders, especially dictators, with these symbolic qualities creates a second nature to their presence, and the public ends up accepting their qualities and represented persona as the embodied actualization of official rhetoric. The public reads leaders’ discourses printed and their figures photographed in the press, hears their voices broadcast on the radio during the 1930s, and later, sees their images featured in documentaries and television reports. These ways of equating the power and the body of the nation with the image and speech of the powerful in media (radio, journalism, and film) became central to the rise of the authoritarian and populist era in many Latin American regimes of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (cf. Martín Barbero 1993: 161; Fox 1997: 38, 54, 102).

In the academic research and historiography on Nicaragua, the excesses and abuses of power of the Somocista period (1937–1979) have received due attention (P. J. Chamorro 1980; Diederich 1981). However, a detailed analysis of the complicities and complexities of symbolic and concrete negotiations and the characteristic mythologies deployed through public speech and the symbols built by the founder of the dynasty and his heirs remains to be carried out (Walter 1993; Cole Chamorro 1967). Delving into such intricacies in the following pages, I present an analysis of Somoza García’s State of the Nation Address of 1941, followed by a commentary on the main tenets and mythologies held dear by the regime, and the specific utopian elements of early Somocista discourse. In the last part of the chapter, I contrast the conservative utopian perspectives prevalent in Somoza’s politics with the utopian discourse in the poetry and political prose of some of the central figures of the Nicaraguan literary avant-garde.

The year 1941 is crucial for the consolidation of Somocismo in the political and economic arena. With the co-opted structure of the Nationlist Liberal Party (Partido Liberal Nacionalista or PLN) in his hands, Somoza effectively seized power in 1937, but by April of 1941, seven years had passed since the killing of Augusto C. Sandino, and the Guardia Nacional had been refashioned to meet the needs and designs of its jefe director (director in chief) (Cole Chamorro 1967; Millett 1977: 198; Walker 1991: 27). The State of the Nation Address read before the National Congress on April 20, 1941, gives a detailed summary of the advances in governmental restructuring done in the previous two years and reveals the style of power that would define political life in Nicaragua for the next fifteen years. This document reveals the commitments and aspirations of the Somoza regime, describes its first achievements, and summarizes its material interests.

Furthermore, from what can be read between the lines of these rhetorical exercises, it is safe to assume that Somoza García and his advisors recognized the huge symbolic burden his government had in trying to quell the last remnants of Sandino’s communitarian and Latin Americanist utopia and trying to outshine the conservative republic imagined by his early collaborators in the avant-garde, repressed dissenters, who by 1941 were increasingly joining the ranks of the opposition. To achieve these rhetorical negotiations while still having the specter of Sandino and the dreams of the avant-garde in the background, the autocrat had many resources at hand. As noted by historians of the period, Somoza García was an adept manipulator of media for political and symbolic purposes (Whisnant 1995: 110–14). By 1941, Somoza had established a radio broadcasting system under the control of the Guardia Nacional and founded a newspaper Novedades—published from 1939 to 1979 to compete with the conservative La Prensa. More importantly, the Guardia Nacional had a system of full territorial surveillance using radio communications, garrisons in strategic points, and aerial reconnaissance (Hemeroteca 1993: 83; Millett 1977: 76; Somoza García 1941: 26–27; Walter 1993: 86). But in 1936, before these complex media tactics were fully formed, Somoza García published a book, El verdadero Sandino o el calvario de las Segovias (The True Sandino or the Calvary of the Segovias), in which he presented the actions of Sandino and his soldiers as deceptive and cruel acts committed by a horde of criminals under the guide of a delusional and hypocritical leader (Camacho Navarro 1991: 50–58). Designed to discredit and diminish the still lingering mythologies of Sandino’s struggle, this volume can be read as a rushed military and political memoir of the war years, built in a loose chronological and thematic order, using a variety of primary and secondary sources. The “facts” and “documents” supporting Somoza’s slanted version of recent history included articles from newspapers in Nicaragua, the United States, and the world; specially selected oral accounts and anecdotes of participants on both sides; military reports from the Marine Corps and the Guardia Nacional; and excerpts of Sandino’s letters and communiqués: all reconfigured and reinterpreted by the author as “evidence and proof” that debunks the “big deception” mounted by Sandino and the international press to support his reputation as the “General of Freemen.”

The most interesting element of this memoir is the abundance of photos of the atrocities and cruel deeds allegedly committed by Sandino and his men. The text is clearly appealing to a sensationalist reconsideration of the “undeserved” fame of the Segovian guerrilla:

Sandino declared he was fighting for the freedom of Nicaragua, however he enslaved her more every day, blinding the sources of revenue for the life of her children, halting agriculture, industry, commerce, the export of lumber, destroying mines, etc. All these weighing over the Nicaraguan people whose exhausted t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: A Tale of Three Utopias and One Dictatorship
• 2: Market Dreams and the Transnationalization of Nicaraguan Politics and Literature
• 3: The Lion in Tropical Winter: The Last Phase of Dictatorship and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Utopia
• 4: Nature, Gender, and Development in Sandinista Nicaragua
• 5: Cultural Warfare I: The Struggle for a Revolutionary Reader
• 6: Cultural Warfare II: Film Exhibition and the New Spectatorship
• 7: Democracy without Dreams: Neoliberalism as Technocratic Utopia
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index