A Review of The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History

One afternoon in 2014, driving along a dirt road that snaked through the countryside several hours outside of the Nicaraguan capital of Managua, I came across an ancient woman on foot, carrying a load of firewood on her back. I pulled up alongside her and asked her if she wanted a lift. She didn’t seem to comprehend at first, whereupon I explained that was offering her a ride to her destination. She smiled and shook her head. She would carry on walking, she said, but if I had some alms—she used that term, limosna, in Spanish—she’d accept them.  

Digging into my pocket, I came up with a large-denomination Nicaraguan cordoba note. It was worth the equivalent of about twenty U.S. dollars; I gave it to her. The old woman fondled the note, looked at it quizzically, and asked me what it was. I realized that she was totally illiterate and could neither read the numbers or the writing on the note. Knowing that many Nicaraguan farm laborers only earned about a dollar a day, I explained that the note represented a significant sum. The old woman nodded uncertainly. We spoke some more, and eventually I left, but as I drove away, I fretted that she still didn’t comprehend the note’s value and could be short-changed when she produced it to buy something.  

The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History by Mateo Jarquín (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)

The episode comes to mind because of a reflection shared by Mateo Jarquín in his impressively researched new book, The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History: “It always struck me as curious that the Sandinistas were so well known abroad—that they had found so much success in revolutionizing the international scene—even though they had clearly struggled to bring about social transformation at home, ” he writes. 

It was precisely that contradiction that struck me in my encounter with the old woman. I’d not been back to Nicaragua since the 1980s and I was shocked by the generalized poverty I saw everywhere. Decades after the vaunted Sandinista revolution was supposed to have brought transformative change to Nicaragua, including greater literacy rates, it remained the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, after Haiti. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the ongoing revolutionary rhetoric of the government, American fast-food franchises proliferated in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua—alongside a freebooting business culture —and American tourists flocked to the country’s Pacific coast beach towns. Outside of these enclaves, the rest of the country seemed to have stood still. Why, I wondered, was this so? What was going on? Whatever happened to the Revolution? 

In an attempt to answer such questions, Mateo Jarquín has written an opportune history of the self-described Sandinista “revolution” that, in 1979, overthrew the five decades-old Somoza family dynasty and which, through the machinations of its leader, Daniel Ortega, has gone onto dominate Nicaraguan society ever since. At a time when the humanistic pretensions of “el Sandinismo” have long since been abandoned at the service of a quasi-monarchical police state run by the loutishly cunning Ortega and his vindictive, clownlike wife, Rosario Murillo, it seems a worthwhile task to re-examine the history of what happened along the way.  

Jarquín takes the Sandinista story right back to its origins as an anti-imperialist force led by the man who inspired its name, Augusto César Sandino, a guerrilla leader who fought against U.S. military intervention in the 1930s. He follows it through its revival in the 60s and 70s and on, right through to the present day; he relays that story extremely well, and moreover, he does so fairly. Despite his own acknowledged position as a scion of one of Nicaragua’s leading families, Jarquín has based his rendition of history on an impressive body of scholarship, and in an impartial tone of voice, and for that, he deserves high praise.   

It is an extraordinary story, one that is best understood by traveling back to the late 70s when the young Nicaraguan rebels burst to victory, resembling a band of cool Robin Hoods with their long hair and ragtag uniforms, “the first time the armed Left since the Cuban revolution of 1959 to seize power in Latin America.”  It was an unusual moment in time, during the brief presidency of Jimmy Carter—a time of collective doubt and self-questioning in the United States. Watergate had occurred, and so had the defeat in Vietnam, and the Church Committee had convened and brought out the CIA’s dirty laundry. The Sandinistas were leftists, yes, but not as far left as Fidel Castro’s Soviet-backed Cubans, and at first blush they appeared, as Jarquín writes, “to have welded two impossible dreams together for a Latin America desperately hungry for both—democracy and social justice.”  As with all dreams, of course, that one did not last.  

A lot happened to change things. Carter lost out on a second term to Ronald Reagan, who embarked upon a covert campaign to weaken Soviet expansionism around the world via “freedom fighters” that included a right-wing Nicaraguan guerrilla force that became known as the Contras. He also slapped sanctions on the Sandinistas. who had become more overtly Marxist, were Cuban and Soviet-backed, and had dispensed with many of their earlier democratic pretensions. 

By the mid-80s, the Sandinista coalition had fragmented, with most of its politically mainstream members dropping out of the ruling junta, leaving the Cuban-backed hardliner Ortega effectively in charge. As the U.S.-Nicaraguan confrontation dragged bloodily on, causing thousands of deaths, it also became ever more public, thanks to the Iran-Contra scandal, with its various dramatic personae becoming household names, including such characters as Oliver North, Fawn Hill, Eden Pastora, as well as Ortega himself.   

As a place of late Cold War confrontation, Nicaragua became a Thing, fueling heated political debate and inspiring popular culture. There were movies—Last Plane Out, Under Fire, and Walker; books—Chris Dickey’s With the Contras, Omar Cabezas’s Fire from the Mountain and Susan Meiselas’s iconic photo book, Nicaragua June 1978 – July 1979; and music—The Clash recorded an album in 1980 labeled simply, “Sandinista!” Salman Rushdie went to Nicaragua and wrote about it, and so did Christopher Hitchens, while Paul Berman and Michael Moore engaged in a bitter public debate about whether the Sandinistas were, as Berman saw them, human rights-violating Leninists, or as Moore argued, hapless victims of U.S. aggression. The unhappy truth of it, in fact, is that they were both at least partially right.  

By the end of the 80s, Nicaragua was a threadbare place, its grocery markets shelves empty, and its government had grown unpopular after of thousands of young men and women had died in the army it had conscripted to defend “the Revolution.” In the end, as Jarquín argues convincingly, change did not come to Nicaragua on the battlefield, but through diplomacy that was made possible because of changes in the international political landscape. “A changing superpower context— decreasing support for Reagan’s Contra policy in the U.S. Congress, combined with Soviet withdrawal from competition over the Third World—made it harder for either belligerent to see through plans for a military victory,” Jarquín notes, adding that the Central American context in the 80s had shifted with elections in Costa Rica and Guatemala. Moreover, he adds, “the desgaste (‘wearing out’) of the revolutionary process, as Sandinistas leaders often put it, forced the Nicaraguan government to assume a more flexible posture in negotiations. As their popularity declined alongside economic collapse and the carnage of war, FSLN leaders found that the only way to save their Revolution was to make significant concessions to their foes.”  

The result, he observes, was the Central American Peace Accords, signed by the region’s presidents at Esquipulas, Guatemala, in August 1987. “In signing, the FSLN reversed its prior refusal to modify its internal system of government in order to satisfy foreign interests. But in return, Sandinista leaders helped deal a significant blow to U.S. military aid to the Contra,” Jarquín writes. “And crucially, they won a battle that revolutionary regimes often lose: one for legitimacy in the eyes of neighbors, who increasingly treated Sandinista leaders as legitimate equals and took steps to integrate their own armed left-wing groups into mainstream politics.” 

Then, unexpectedly, right on the heels of all of that peace-making activity in Central America, came the end of the Cold War, and with it, the loss of power of Ortega, who stood for, but lost, the February 1990 elections that were held in Nicaragua, nearly eleven years since the Sandinistas had seized power and made the country an East-West flashpoint.  

The author’s grandmother, Violeta Chamorro, a former junta member who had long since fallen out with Ortega—the widow of an outspoken newspaper publisher who had been assassinated on Somoza’s orders in 1978—handily won office instead. For the next sixteen years, Ortega and his faction of the Sandinista movement lurked in the political wilderness while a succession of center-right politicians beat him out at each of the next several elections.  

Then, in 2006, Ortega won elections again and returned to office. He did so this time at the helm of a reconstituted Sandinista Front that had brokered deals with its old adversaries, including the country’s arch-conservative Catholic archbishop and its free-marketeering private enterprise association. Accusing Ortega—justifiably—of having betrayed the principles of Sandinismo, many of his former allies, such as the novelist Sergio Ramírez, who had once served as his vice president, broke ranks with him and created a rival political party—to no avail. Ortega’s faction, which has gone on to claim “Socialism, Christianity and Solidarity” as its guiding tenets, and retains a firm grip on the army and the police, is the one that has prospered.   

The tools used by Ortega and Murillo to consolidate their power are little more than a refrito of the time-honored playbook used by autocrats everywhere. Over time, by ruling in close concert with the security forces, and by getting rid of inconvenient laws in a parliament they have come to dominate, they have abolished presidential term limits, stolen elections, and employed violence to stifle political dissent. Murillo has gone from being Nicaragua’s first lady and its minister of information to vice-president, as well. She is, in fact, Ortega’s co-president, and if he dies tomorrow, will succeed him in office. With nine children between them, they have also replicated the dynastic form of power that characterized the long Somoza tenure, promoting many of their own children to key advisory and administrative roles in international affairs, the economy and the family’s own businesses. “The Sandinista Revolution […] lives on,” writes Jarquín, “albeit in a mutated form that constitutes a bizarre mix of changes and continuities.”   

Nobody brings up the idea that there might be free and fair elections anymore; it is not even a notional possibility. In 2018 Ortega sent out his thugs to suppress student-led protests in 2018, eventually killing over 300 civilians. Then, in 2021, ahead of an election featuring yet another Chamorro—this time, it was Cristiana, one of ex-president Violeta’s daughters—Ortega had her arrested and placed under house arrest on trumped-up charges of “money laundering.” He then proceeded to arrest, or else ban, the remaining opposition candidates from running against him—calling them “terrorists” and “coup-mongers”—thus guaranteeing his fourth consecutive electoral victory. Since then, evidently feeling unhindered from any further considerations of political or diplomatic decorum, Ortega and Murillo have gone on a wholesale purge, issuing diktat after diktat to summarily arrest and imprison hundreds of their perceived enemies—including former Sandinista comrades and, especially, Catholic clerics—most of whom they have gone on to deport from Nicaragua and strip them of their nationality, their properties, and even their academic degrees.   

During the Cold War, it was a long-held assumption in the West that access to market economics would inevitably foster the spread of democracy in the former Soviet bloc. In his conclusion, Jarquín points out that Nicaragua’s current reality shows that to have been an illusion, “In Nicaragua […] a solid consensus on market economics and openness to foreign investment has done little to restrain human rights abuses and restrictions on civil liberties. Nobody wishes to go back to the armed conflicts of the Cold War era. But it is worth noting that the post–Cold War period has started to look as conducive to authoritarianism as what came before.” 

Indeed. As Jarquín writes in his conclusion: [During] the Cold War, decisions made by Central American leaders sometimes reverberated globally. For better or worse, that is no longer the case. Today, when Central American countries appear in the headlines in the United States, they appear as part of a domestic problem—the source of immigrants or the cause of a so-called “border crisis”—rather than a foreign policy issue. Meanwhile, foreign actors—including the government of the United States, which retains overwhelmingly asymmetric influence in this hemisphere—seem surprisingly incapable of influencing Central American elites to change their policies one way or another.  

In the end, in the downsizing of history exemplified by what Jarquín artfully describes as the Sandinista Revolution’s “strange afterlife,” Jarquín points out that what happens next in Nicaragua may be little more than a family affair.  

“As of this writing, the biggest risk to Ortega’s power seems to be internal. After returning to power, he has increasingly co-governed with his wife, Rosario Murillo, who holds the office of vice president. Together, they have groomed their children for leadership roles. Given Ortega’s age, and given the sultanistic and personalistic qualities of the regime, the question of succession has hung over Nicaragua in recent years. Will orteguismo follow somocismo in attempting—and pulling off—a dynastic transition?”  

Jarquín’s words were prescient. In June 2024, Ortega punished his own brother Humberto, the former chief of the Sandinista army, by placing him under house arrest. Humberto’s apparent transgression was to have made critical remarks to a media outlet about the lack of a “succession plan” in the event he dies while in office. In October, Humberto died of illness, still under house arrest.  

Jon Lee Anderson is a U.S. journalist. He began his reporting career in Latin America in 1979, and became a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1998. Over the years, he has reported from dozens of countries, including Nicaragua, and is the author of several books, including Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and Guerrillas: Journeys in the Insurgent World.