Nicaraguan Relations with the Nonaligned Movement (original) (raw)
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The Sandinistas and Nicaragua since 1979
Choice Reviews Online, 2012
Since independence in 1821, Nicaragua has traveled a troubled political road. 2 Although none of the five Central American republics has had an uneventful past (no nation anywhere has), Nicaragua's has been notably violent and unstable. Its first four decades of independence were marked by nearly continuous civil war between Liberals from León and Conservatives from Granada. That cycle of violence ended only in 1858, after a dictatorship imposed by William Walker, a US mercenary brought in by the Liberals to aid their cause, was defeated by the massed armies of the other Central American states. Then came Nicaragua's golden age, when it was known as the Switzerland of Central America. The treinteno (thirty years of Conservative rule) brought stability to the country through a pact among regional elites, but it also carried with it a certain political and economic stasis. As often happens in pacted political systems, the emerging elite of cafeteleros (coffee growers from around Managua and from the mountains in the country's center), who wanted a share of political power commensurate with their economic importance, needed a revolution to get it. José Santos Zelaya was a Liberal caudillo who ruled from 1893 to 1909 and returned Nicaragua to strongman rule. Not only did he dominate national politics, but like his predecessors in other countries, he sought to make himself the suzerain of all Central America. This naturally disquieted Washington, especially when Zelaya, having failed to win the interoceanic canal for Nicaragua, offered German and Japanese interests the rights to develop a competitor to Panama. The result was a US-backed revolution mounted by the Conservatives. Zelaya fell, but Nicaragua entered another cycle of civil warfare that lasted until 1927. Further, from 1910 to 1934, the United States maintained a contingent of marines in Nicaragua, almost continuously. It was to fight this frankly imperial presence that Augusto César Sandino, a Liberal general in the civil war, refused a peace brokered by Washington and took to the hills to wage guerrilla war. 3 From 1927 until 1934, when the United States withdrew its troops, Sandino fought the marines and the Nicaraguan National Guard, a new national military force that the United States had established in Nicaragua as a way to put an end to party-based civil wars. In 1934, Sandino was invited to Managua to meet with then-president Juan Bautista Sacasa. However, the national guard intercepted the guerrilla leader and executed him, supposedly on the orders of the guard's commander, Anastasio Somoza García. By 1936, Somoza had ousted Sacasa, his wife's uncle, and then succeeded in being elected president. Thus began forty-three years of family dictatorship that ended only when another guerrilla force bearing Sandino's name brought down the Somoza dynasty.
Cold War History, 2018
This paper seeks to understand the construction of a broad alliance between the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a socialist inspired guerrilla group, and various Latin American liberal and authoritarian governments, mainly Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba, between 1977 and 1979. I will seek to understand the construction of this unusual partnership, as well as the deep conflicts and mistrust that existed between the parties during the revolutionary upheaval in Nicaragua. This process will be examined by analysing the way Cold War politics and Latin American regional tensions shaped the events leading to the Sandinista revolution. This paper tells the story of how some Latin American countries sought to avoid radical change and ended up supporting a revolution instead. It will study the reasons why Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica ended up supporting the Sandinista National Liberation Front against the wishes of the United States. In doing so, they built a new political paradigm that envisioned the end of the bipolar conflict. The article will further show the impact of the Carter Administration's policy of nonintervention, and later on multilateralism, and its profound impact on the Nicaraguan regional crisis. Of particular importance will be the study of the process of radicalisation of Venezuela, Panama, and Costa Rica in the context of an increased attempt by the American government to exercise non-intervention in Latin America, and the gradual, and in a certain way reluctant, involvement of Cuba in the crisis. The purpose of this work is to study how these dynamics fostered the decomposition of the bipolar paradigm in inter-American relations and the creation of a new political configuration in the region. The history of the American government's involvement in the Nicaraguan Revolution has been extensively studied by historians. 1 However, the United States was only one of the actors in the revolutionary drama. While the non-interventionist desire of the United States
Preface & Introduction to Sandinista Nicaragua's Resistance to U.S. Coercion
Sandinista Nicaragua's Resistance to U.S. Coercion: Revolutionary Deterrence in Asymmetric Conflict, 2017
How was the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua able to resist the Reagan Administration’s coercive efforts to rollback its revolution? Héctor Perla challenges conventional understandings of this conflict by tracing the process through which Nicaraguans, both at home and in the diaspora, defeated U.S. aggression in a highly unequal confrontation. He argues that beyond traditional diplomatic, military, and domestic state policies, a crucial element of the FSLN’s defensive strategy was the mobilization of a transnational social movement to build public opposition to Reagan’s policy within the United States, thus preventing further escalation of the conflict. Using a contentious politics approach the author reveals how the extant scholarly assumptions of international relations theory have obscured some of the most consequential dynamics of the case. This is a fascinating study illustrating how supposedly powerless actors were able to constrain the policies of the most powerful nation on earth.
Heirs of Sandino: The Nicaraguan Revolution and the U.S.-Nicaragua Solidarity Movement
Latin American Perspectives, 2009
The 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution and the Sandinista National Liberation Front's resistance of U.S. efforts to oust it from power inspired thousands of individuals from all over the world to support Nicaragua's struggle for self-determination. One of the most important constituencies to take up the Sandinista cause was a significant portion of the U.S. public. What moved this collection of individuals and organizations to join a movement to oppose their own government's policy and often even identify with the Sandinista cause? To date Latin Americanists have neglected this movement and the role that Nicaraguans, both in their home country and in the United States, played in its rise and success. A transnational approach to the movement's origins and its relationship to Nicaraguan revolutionary social forces allows one to understand it as it really was: a transnational social movement in which U.S. and Nicaraguan citizens acted together for a common purpose.
Opposition in Nicaragua: Between Pact-Making and Confrontation
2009
The main thesis of this article is that a contradictory pattern has emerged in Nicaragua that rests on the uneasy coexistence of both pact-making and confrontation in the relationship between government and opposition. Such a pattern is found to be the single most important obstacle on the way towards a fully consolidated democracy in Nicaragua. The pacts between the Sandinista party (FSLN), in power since 2007, and one of the two liberal parties (PLC) has debilitated Nicaragua’s representative institutions, undercut both vertical and horizontal constraints on the executive leadership and weakened both the opposition forces and the legislature where opposition parties hold a majority of seats. This legacy of pact-making combines with a presidential system which generates significant challenges to Nicaragua’s democracy. The article uses an explanatory framework derived from the neoinstitutionalist theory that connects the deficiencies of democracy to the workings of presidentialist systems. Three main problems are identified: the tendency of presidentialism to generate plebiscitarian leadership contrary to representative democracy, the potential of presidents to abuse executive powers and the uneasy coexistence of presidentialism with a multiparty system. The last point is illuminated by comparing Nicaragua to the most similar case of El Salvador.
2011
In 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) overthrew the US-sponsored dictatorship that had ruled the Central American Republic Nicaragua. The revolutionaries were Marxists, and they worked together with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The USA funded a civil war against the new government and maintained an economic boycott of the country, which crippled it severely. In 1990, the FSLN then lost the presidential elections to a US-friendly alternative. In 2006, José Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the same Sandinista who ruled in the 1980s, was elected president of the country and ended thereby 16 years of neoliberal rule. Or did he? 40% or more of Nicaragua's population call themselves Sandinista, but since the 1980s the meaning of what a Sandinista is has changed. Nicaraguan history is a difficult terrain and very little has been written for a foreign audience since 2006. This book tries to explain the economics and main political conflicts of the past century, as well as how Nicaraguan history is talked about by Nicaraguans today and how the "Sandinista revolution" is understood during the new period of Sandinismo which started with the electoral victory of 2006. Through the stories of many individual Nicaraguans, the book tries to give some insights into the large amount of ways especially Sandinistas currently involve themselves in politics, trying to improve Nicaraguan daily life.
Sandinismo y pragmatismo político. Generaciones militantes en Nicaragua 1979-2016
2017
La politica nicaraguense ha sufrido cambios abruptos en las ultimas cuatro decadas, el Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) inicio una revolucion por la via guerrillera, durante sus 10 anos en el poder enfrento una guerra interna que dividio al pais entre los propios sandinistas y la contrarrevolucion, finalmente en 1990 fue alejada del poder por un resultado electoral adverso. Se trata de cambios vertiginosos en la politica y en su militancia, mismos que hicieron regresar al FSLN al poder en 2006 despues de 16 anos de gobiernos liberales. Este articulo busca comprender la evolucion en la militancia sandinista, analizar algunas de las continuidades y rupturas entre los mismos militantes y los cambios discursivos del partido en los ultimos anos, ello por medio de una serie de testimonios a ex combatientes del FSLN desmovilizados entre 1990 y 1993.
A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism? Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution
List of illustrations v Notes on contributors vii Introduction: exceptionalism and agency in Nicaragua's revolutionary heritage 1 Hilary Francis 1. 'We didn't want to be like Somoza's Guardia': policing, crime and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 21 Robert Sierakowski 2. 'The revolution was so many things' 45 Fernanda Soto 3. Nicaraguan food policy: between self-sufficiency and dependency 61 Christiane Berth 4. On Sandinista ideas of past connections to the Soviet Union and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 87 Johannes Wilm 5. Agrarian reform in Nicaragua in the 1980s: lights and shadows of its legacy José Luis Rocha 6. The difference the revolution made: decision-making in Liberal and Sandinista communities Hilary Francis 7. Grassroots verticalism? A Comunidad Eclesial de Base in rural Nicaragua