Sandinistas

Robert J. Sierakowski

Description

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.

Conventional accounts cast the Somoza government as a brutal regime that “maintained law and order through control of the National Guard, a well-trained force thanks to the occupation of the United States Marines earlier in the twentieth century.” However, I contend, rather than the imposition of “law and order,” the longevity of the Somoza regime was due precisely to its willingness to countenance criminal disorder. In this way, the Nicaraguan government differed greatly from the brutally efficient 1970s military dictatorships of South America. Some scholars have insisted that unlike these institutional and ideologically-oriented military dictatorships, the Somozas’ “sultanistic” and personalistic regime remained isolated from society and, thus, structurally prone to popular upheaval. Historians Jeffrey Gould, Victoria González-Rivera, and Knut Walter have definitively refuted the claim that the Somozas ruled solely through political repression. In their work, they demonstrate how the Somozas at strategic moments mobilized working-class support via clientelism and populist appeals to campesinos, organized laborers, and women, while negotiating power-sharing pacts with wealthy political adversaries in the private sector. Despite these important revisionist accounts, however, we still lack a clear understanding of the local dynamics that allowed the dictatorship to perpetuate itself in power for so many decades.

Like the legendary symbol of Sandino, the Somoza dictatorship (1936-79) itself also dated back to the period of United States military occupation of the 1920s and 30s. Following the U.S. Marine Corps’ 1927 invasion of the country—their third intervention since 1909—the North Americans organized and armed a new military and police force, the National Guard of Nicaragua. The U.S. later handpicked a relatively obscure military officer, General Anastasio Somoza García, to serve as the first Nicaraguan commander of this constabulary force. With the Americans’ withdrawal in 1933, Sandino negotiated a provisional peace treaty with the Nicaraguan government. In an act of betrayal, General Somoza had the unarmed rebel leader treacherously assassinated the following year. With his major challenger for national power eliminated, Somoza soon carried out a coup against the elected president and began ruling as the country’s strongman in 1936. After two decades of personal dictatorial rule, he too was assassinated in 1956 by a young poet in the city of León. Following his murder, Somoza García was succeeded in power by his sons Luis and Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Throughout the long decades of Somocista family rule, government policies overwhelmingly benefited large landowners with access to state resources, many of whom came to serve as caciques (political chieftains) at the regional level. These landowning families benefited at the expense of the peasant families whose land they dispossessed and whose wages were kept down with the aid of state repression. In parallel, the Somozas constructed a loyal popular base among the poor by offering social mobility and impunity to its military and its civilian agents to engage in widespread small-scale illegal activities. In this way, the GN—the very institution responsible for policing—fostered an entire underground “amoral economy” based upon male sociability, vice, and criminality, including prostitution, gambling, and alcohol sales. These illegal practices helped link middling local agents, many of whom owned bars (those I call “cantina caciques”), to the Somoza regime and the GN. Though consumers were overwhelmingly male, a significant number of women who demonstrated loyalty to the regime controlled the trade at the community level. When the time came for one of the regime’s sham elections, this web of local operatives publicly dished out cash, food, and copious hard liquor to campesino and working-class Nicaraguans who duly cast their vote for Somoza.

The regime could also rely on the security forces to repress any political threat. Historians have often analyzed the National Guard in its structural role as a ballast for the Somoza family and a proxy for U.S. interests in Central America. My work moves beyond previous approaches by closely examining for the first time the role played by average soldiers, many of them recruited from among the impoverished indigenous peasantry of the Segovias. Ironically, in search of social mobility, the country’s poorest peasants came to fight, kill, and die in defense of the Somozas and other elite families that dominated the government. By considering the machista internal culture of the National Guard, which gave free reign to abusive masculine behavior, we gain great insight into both the nature of the regime and the widespread backlash it provoked.

Far from “order, peace, and social stability” (as Somoza put it), I show, the GN fostered only a veneer of stability, while chaotic disorder increasingly defined much of everyday life. During the years of Somoza rule—and well before the rise of guerrilla warfare—the nation was one of the most violent in the world. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, for example, the country’s homicide rate was often only surpassed by Colombia and Mexico. Between 1964 and 1967 (at which point the Somoza regime stopped providing data to the United Nations), Nicaragua took the lead with the world’s highest homicide rate. This disastrous rise in crime and murder was recognized even by the dictatorship’s primary international sponsors. A U.S. Embassy employee wrote in 1967 that the GN was “no good at all as policemen. Law and order is non-existent in Nicaragua… it is officially recommended that one carry a gun if one go out of the city of Managua.” American experts three years later continued to sound the alarm regarding rising levels of violence, writing that, “Murder and aggravated assault appear to be the major criminal threat in all parts of the country… There has been an increase in geometric proportions of common crime of an increasingly brutal character… A very large proportion of the population regularly go armed.”

Much of the violence of the Somoza years was not political in essence but instead social and interpersonal. Many homicides were the product of conflicts between men of all ages armed with machetes and pistols in rural areas, particularly in quarrels over family feuds, women, plots of land, and cattle. Widespread access to aguardiente or guaro (cane alcohol) at local cantinas, political rallies, elections, and religious festivals only added further fuel to the fire. Although the government kept no official statistics, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and rape were also widespread and correlated with popular perceptions of family breakdown. While alcohol and quotidian violence had long been salient features of the country’s social landscape, under Somoza, they came to play a central role in the regime’s operations on the level of cities, towns, and villages. Partly as a result of the official encouragement of both vice and male sociability, Nicaragua in the late 1960s had the highest rates of hard-liquor consumption (three times as much as El Salvador or Guatemala) and alcoholism in all of Central America. The atmosphere fostered during these years would also provide the context for the grassroots movements for social and moral regeneration that later coalesced around the FSLN.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

1. State of Disorder: Vice, Corruption, and the Somoza Dictatorship

2. Burning Down the Brothels: Moral Regeneration and the Emergence of Sandinismo, 1956-1970

3. Persecuting the Living Christ: Guerrillas, Catholics, and Repression, 1968-1976

4. They Planted Corn and Harvested Guards: Somoza’s National Guard and Secret Police at the Grassroots

5. A Crime to be Young: Families in Insurrection, September 1976 - September 1978

6. How Costly is Freedom!: Massacres, Community, and Sacrifice, October 1978 - July 1979

Epilogue: Whither the Revolution? Nicaragua and the Sandinistas since 1979

Bibliography

Sujets

• Political Ideologies
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Revolutionary
• Military
• Latin America
• Central America
• SS Central America

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268106911
• Langue: English

Extrait

SANDINISTAS
ROBERT J. SIERAKOWSKI
SANDINISTAS
A MORAL HISTORY
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Names: Sierakowski, Robert J., 1983– author.
Title: Sandinistas : a moral history / Robert J. Sierakowski.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037145 (print) | LCCN 2019037146 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268106898 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268106928 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268106911 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Nicaragua—Politics and government—1979–1990. | Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—History. | Nicaragua— History—Revolution, 1979—Moral and ethical aspects. | Nicaragua— Politics and government—1937–1979. | Nicaragua—Social conditions. | Nicaragua—Politics and government—1990-
Classification: LCC F1528 .S54 2019 (print) | LCC F1528 (ebook) | DDC 972.8505—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037145
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037146
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
Dedicated to my mother and father, John and Margaret Sierakowski, my siblings, Chris Sierakowski and Cindy Tamburri, and their wonderful families
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
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 Whither the Revolution? Nicaragua and the Sandinistas since 1979
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS Map 1. Map of the Republic of Nicaragua, with political divisions during the Somoza period. Departments of Estelí and Madriz shaded. 6 Map 2. Map of the departments of Estelí and Madriz during the Somoza period. 7 Figure 1.1. Anastasio Somoza Debayle campaign rally in Somoto, Madriz, May 2, 1974. Courtesy of Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro américa. 37 Figure 1.2. Diputado René Molina Valenzuela provides fertilizer for the Guasuyuca Cooperative in Pueblo Nuevo, Estelí. Novedades , May 21, 1968. 41 Figure 3.1. Padre Julio López conducts a baptism in the rural community of Las Ruedas, 1980. Courtesy of María Jesús Úbeda Herrera. 103 Figure 4.1. Soldiers of the Guardia Nacional parade in Managua, 1978. Courtesy of Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica. 131 Figure 5.1. Estelí residents observe damage left by a rocket fired by the National Guard at the Pensión Juárez following the insurrection, September 26, 1978. Photograph by F. Escobar. Courtesy of Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica. 182 Figure 5.2. Aerial view of the physical destruction of several blocks in Estelí following the September 1978 insurrection. Photograph by Berríos. Courtesy of Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica. 186 Figure 5.3. FSLN Comandante Francisco Rivera in the mountains above Estelí with children in a guerrilla encampment. Courtesy of Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centro américa. 189
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Researching and writing this book has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life and much of it was thanks to the hundreds of Nicaraguans who gave so willingly of themselves to bring this project to fruition. From rural hamlets to provincial towns to the archives of Managua, I experienced great warmth, charity of spirit, and selfless openness to my efforts to document their country’s experiences. As a foreigner, from a nation whose historical treatment of Nicaragua has been largely negative, these innumerable interactions of support taught me much about the character of the people, which doubtlessly shined through in the dark era that I was researching. It also provided a lesson as to how all of us in the United States could and should treat those who come from abroad to our country. Given the caliber of the human beings I encountered on a daily basis, I have no doubt that Nicaragua will find its way through its current difficulties to a better and brighter future.
This work owes everything to the women and men who opened their homes and their hearts to a stranger in Estelí, La Trinidad, Condega, Pueblo Nuevo, El Regadío, La Montañita, Santa Cruz, Somoto, San Lucas, Cusmapa, Palacagüina, Yalagüina, Telpaneca, Totogalpa, and Ocotal. In particular, I would like to recognize the family of Otilia Casco Cruz and Anastasio Rivas Cruz, who provided hours of conversation, meals, and a place to sleep in El Regadío when I was first beginning this project. Waking up in the early hours of the morning to the crisp mountain air, a cool misty drizzle, and the smell of freshly made warm tortillas and sweet coffee is a moment that encapsulates my experiences doing fieldwork.

This project would have been impossible without the guidance of the various academic mentors I have had over the years. My undergraduate advisor at Tufts University, the brilliant Peter Winn, first sparked my love of Latin American history and a deep appreciation for the experiences and role of the region’s everyday people. At the University of California, Los Angeles, I could not have asked for a better dissertation advisor than Robin Derby, an academic innovator with a huge heart and a boundless intellect. She provided encouragement, constructive criticism, and steadfast support during challenging moments. Not only did she carefully guide me through the research and writing process, but she also taught me to expand my horizons and take on new roles inside and outside of the classroom.
I carried out my research in Nicaragua thanks to the generous support of the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship and to the Graduate Summer Research Mentorship grant provided by UCLA. While in Nicaragua, I was based at the Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American History (Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, IHNCA) at the Central American University (Universidad Centroamericana, UCA) in Managua. Headed by Margarita Vannini, the IHNCA houses a treasure trove of historical documentation and a staff of caring professionals. I remain grateful for the daily assistance I received from María Auxiliadora Estrada, Lissette Ruiz, Annabelle Jerez, and María Ligia Garay. During my early days in Managua, the younger cohort at UCA—Victor Daniel Rodríguez, Allinson Somarriba, Karelia Mendoza, and Carolina Mercenaro—made me feel at home, whether by sharing a lunch in the archive or attending the Agüizotes festival in Masaya.
At the General Archive of the Nation (Archivo General de la Nación, AGN) located in the former National Palace, I am appreciative to the staff of Luis Latino, Ivania Paladino, Aracelly Ramos, Evelia Rivas, Teresa Castro, Mauricio Flores, and Allan Vargas. At the Nicaraguan Army’s Center of Military History (Centro de Historia Militar), the knowledgeable archivist Soraya Sánchez was an invaluable resource and consummate host while I conducted research on the base.
My first day in Estelí I gained the help and friendship of César Álvarez and Catriona Knappman, who—sight unseen—helped me situate myself, find housing, attend a housewarming fiesta, and begin research the very next day. In Managua, I am grateful to the relationships I formed through the NGO Witness for Peace (WFP) with Rachel Anderson, Kevin Glidden, Galen Cohee Baynes, Brenda Molina, and Gustavo Flores Molina. The WFP house was not only a space of recreation but also of important conversations. My Bello Horizonte housemates, Luis and Annie Barberena, and also Jorge and Robeyra Raudez (whose wedding I attended in Boaco), taught me much about Nicaraguan life and culture. Patricia Lorente, whose family lineage runs deep in Santa Cruz, Estelí, provided a link between the north and Managua. While in Cusmapa, Las Sabanas, and Estelí, my participation with the Fundación Fabretto brought me into contact with committed and supportive people, such as Octavio González, Jordi de Miras, Nuria Roig Vicens, Claudia Nadal, Peter Schaller, Anajhensi Gutiérrez, Mariela Robles, Zenia Ramírez, Geneli Quiroz, Francys Vindell, and Wilmer Lagos Reyes.
At UCLA, Geoffrey Robinson and Kevin Terraciano played integral roles in the development of my project, while seminars with Bill Summerhill, Herman Ooms, Michael Salman, Lynn Hunt, César Ayala, Bonnie Taub, Ana Maria Goldani, and Edward Telles proved formative experiences. In Los Angeles, I benefited greatly from the intellectual support and cordiality of fellow graduate students, such as Xochitl Flores-Marcial, Melanie Arias, Pablo Sierra, Molly Ball, Ben Cowan, Brad Benton, Liz Jones, Mir Yarfitz, Dana Velasco Murillo, Diana Schwartz, Aaron Olivas, and Miriam Melton-Villanueva. Writing my dissertation, I also had the opportunity to spend time with Gil Joseph’s excellent cohort of graduate students at Yale University, including Jennifer Lambe, Erika Helgen, and Marian Schlotte