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Augusto Cesar Sandino was an early 20th century fomenter and practitioner of Latin American revolutionary idealism against American cultural and economic domination. Although Sandino received some degree of support and recognition from the Soviet Union, his struggle was not strictly one of ideology. Sandino strived to advance the rights and freedoms of his fellow Nicaraguans that he believed were subservient to the interests of rich American industrial and agricultural interests.
Born in 1895 in rural Nicaragua, Sandino was galvanized by the circumstances of the 1927 intervention by United States Marines that tilted the balance in Nicaragua’s Constitutionalist Wars in favor of the entrenched conservative landowning elite. Sandino himself assumed the leadership of the liberal forces and achieved remarkable success against repeated attempts by the US Marines to defeat and apprehend him. By the early 1930s and with the Great Depression sapping the will of the US government to continue, US forces were withdrawn from Nicaragua.
By this time, Sandino had emerged as an inspirational focus for all Latin Americans who felt that the United States was an exploitive and imperialistic power. He was the head of an internationally recognized revolutionary movement against the prolonged American occupation of Nicaragua .Taking shelter in remote areas, Sandino’s faithful waged a clandestine war against the US Marines and their local collaborators, both Liberal and Conservative, working to eject the traitorous vendepatrias (country-sellers) and restore sovereignty to Nicaragua. And, in 1933, his rebels succeeded — a civilian president took office following a smooth election, the last Marines withdrew, and a new era of peace and political stability seemed imminent
On February 21st 1934 Augusto Sandino attended a banquet held by the new president of Nicaragua to celebrate the end of a decades-long civil conflict. Presumably, Sandino felt confident that his movement’s success had secured him a degree of influence in the recently reunified nation. After all, he was visiting the presidential palace to further negotiate the terms of an ongoing ceasefire that the new government had eagerly endorsed. What he had not considered was the threat of a homegrown despot, embodied in that era by Anastasio Somoza, an American ally who commanded a domestic paramilitary the despised National Guard closely aligned with the Marines
Sandino passed through the gate of President Juan Bautista Sacasa’s Managua palace in the company of several associates, including his brother Socrates. Somoza’s National Guard, promptly intercepted their vehicle. The Guardsmen took the revolutionaries to a crossroads, bound their hands, and shot them each in the head. And we know that a detachment of National Guardsmen under the command of one Rigoberto Duarte — whose son would serve in the government of conservative president Arnoldo Alemán (1997–2002) — took Sandino’s corpse to a poor neighbourhood in Managua and buried him in wet dirt and sewage. No one knows for certain what happened to the body, the more common tale is a dark and sour one: it holds that the assassins decapitated the slain revolutionary and, on Somoza’s orders, sent his head to the Marines as a gesture of friendship and goodwill.
Whatever happened that night, the murder had immediate effects on the country. The National Guard launched a massive offensive against Sandino’s loyalists, annihilating what remained of his movement just as it was poised to begin a radical experiment in decentralized self-government in the agrarian Río Coco region. Then the militia began to operate with impunity throughout the country; soon their power outstripped that of President Sacasa’s civilian government. Two years after Sandino’s murder, the National Guard deposed Sacasa and installed Anastasio Somoza, inaugurating a brutal family dictatorship that would endure for more than forty years. A new era had come about, but it was precisely the future Sandino’s sympathizers had most feared.
In 1936 Anastasio Somoza published a book called The True Sandino, which was later republished in 1974, when a revolutionary movement named after Sandino’s insurrection threatened the power of Somoza’s son. For many years this was the only book about Sandino available in Nicaragua. But Somoza’s “true Sandino” was a caricature of the rebel leader, a boogieman devised to vandalize the memory of the Segovia insurgency and to prevent Sandino’s reputation as a folk hero from taking hold. Throughout, Somoza characterized Sandino’s fighters as a “ruthless band” of criminals, fallen under the spell of a pagan Bolshevik with an appetite for carnage. Predictably, Sandino appeared as the antithesis of all things Nicaraguan — if Nicaragua was Catholic, liberal, and calm, Sandino became apostate, radical, and ruthless. How Ironic then a similar strategy is now being used to demonise the Socialist president of Nicaragua Daniel Ortega, and portray him as a dictator in the mould of Somoza. Forgetting the inconvenient truth that it was Daniel Ortega and the FSLN, who brought Democracy to Nicaragua in the 80s, then lost three elections in the 90s. The world was happy to again ignore Nicaragua and the corruption of the neo Liberal government’s of the 90s. Only again to start demonising the FSLN after Ortega’s victory in 2006, The political establishment outside of Nicaragua struggles with the fact, that Ortega and his wife Rosario (The elected Vice President) have done well for Nicaragua something even the IMF ( hardly a bastion of Socialist ideology) has acknowledged
Somoza’s smear campaign more or less succeeded, for a time. By the 1960s, however, young Nicaraguans saw an opportunity for popular mythmaking on a national scale. One of these, a bespectacled librarian named Carlos Fonseca, went on to form the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1963. His writing helped restore Sandino as a symbol of popular liberation. Sandino’s name and image have since become ubiquitous in Nicaragua. But the prolonged tug-of-war over his memory has created a fog around his specific political orientation, a haziness only intensified by his maddeningly eclectic personal ideology. In 1979, Sandino may be said to have received his revenge when the Sandinista National Liberation Front led by Daniel Ortega overthrew Somoza’s son, at that time the dictator of Nicaragua. Today, Managua’s Augusto C. Sandino International Airport celebrates the man who remains an inspiration to Nicaraguan and Latin American patriots.
Last night Comandante Omar Cabezas and his wife Giuditta took me on a tour of where Sandino was murdered. The place is now Parque Nacional Historico Loma de Tiscapa with a wonderful view of Managua. As we strolled around late in the evening, we went off the tourist pathway only to stumble upon sculptor Socrates Martinez working on this amazing sculpture of Sandino and his wife Blanca Stella Arauz Pineda. Socrates has been working on this for the last four months, the fact he is creating this only meters from the spot where Sandino was murdered gives a soul to this powerful work of art. Out of this clay model, they make a mould that will be filled with concrete for the finished work to be put on display and Socrates will keep me posted of the progress.
