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Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Steven Palmer
Steven Palmer*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Ernesto “Che” Guevara hoy, Augusto Cesar Sandino ayer, marcan con heroismo la indispensable rota guerrillera que habra de conducir a los pueblos victimas del imperialismo a la posesión absoluta de sus propios destinos. Carlos Fonseca

Sandino, guerrillero proletario

Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , 1988 , pp. 91 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Latin American Research Review

Footnotes

∗

I would like to thank Catherine LeGrand and Chris de Bresson for their invaluable commentary and for lending me otherwise unavailable source material. Thanks are also due to Herbert Klein, Stephen Haber, John Silver, Max Cameron, Félix Matos, and José María Ghio for their insightful assessments of earlier drafts of the manuscript and to Matthew Palmer for special editorial assistance. This work was supported in part by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Columbia University President's Fellowship.

References

Notes

1. Correspondence may be sent to Steven Palmer, Department of History, 611 Fayerweather, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027.

2. David Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, Fla.: Institute of Inter-American Studies, University of Miami, 1984), 17–19, 52–55, 70–74; and Hugo Cancino Troncoso, Las raíces históricas e ideológicas del movimiento sandinista: antecedentes de la revolución popular nicaragüense, 1927–79 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984), especially 129–64. Nolan's detailed argument showing the adherence of FSLN leaders to many of the tenets of Marxism-Leninism unfortunately does not discuss Marxism-Leninism as a historical category, nor does Nolan ask how its adoption in the Nicaraguan context might have led to important modifications of this ideological formation. Although Cancino's sympathy with the Sandinistas occasionally impairs his analysis, his study succeeds in demonstrating how Sandinismo is situated outside of traditional currents of Marxism-Leninism and the significance of this departure.

3. See, for example, Jaime Wheelock Román, Raíces indígenas de la lucha anti-colonialista en Nicaragua (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1979); and Wheelock, Imperialismo y dictadura: crisis de una formación social (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1975). See also three works by Humberto Ortega Saavedra: 50 años de la lucha sandinista (Mexico City: Editorial Diogenes, 1979); El sandinismo: documentos básicos (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1983); and El programa histórico del FSLN (Managua: Departamento de Propaganda, 1984).

4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Q. Hoare and G. Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), especially 5–13 on the role of intellectuals and 125 for a discussion of myths and the popular will.

5. See especially Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); and Gregorio Selser, Sandino: General de Hombres Libres (n.p.: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana, 1979), printed in Costa Rica.

6. Macaulay, Sandino Affair, 112–14.

7. Cited in Selser, Sandino. All quotations from Selser come from the English edition: Gregorio Selser, Sandino, translated by C. Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 221–22.

8. Banana Gold (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1932), 276–77.

9. Macaulay, Sandino Affair, 256, 307.

10. Jean Ziegler, Les Rebelles (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1983), 100.

11. Rafael Córdova Rivas, Contribución a la revolución (Managua: Centro de Publicaciones de Avanzada, 1983), 18–23.

12. Miguel Jesús Blandon, Entre Sandino y Fonseca Amador (Managua: Impresiones Troqueles, 1980), 19–20.

13. Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, “Estirpe sangrienta: los Somoza,” and “Quieren otra vez matar a Sandino,” La patria de Pedro: el pensamiento nicaragüense de Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, 2d ed. (Managua: La Prensa, 1981), 6 and 161 respectively; and Ernesto Cardenal, “Hora O,” Poesía y revolución (Mexico City: Editorial Edicol, 1979), 11–26.

14. Macaulay, Sandino Affair, 226.

15. Tomás Borge, Carlos, the Dawn Is No Longer beyond Our Reach, translated by Margaret Randall (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1984), 21–22. For an account of Fonseca's movements and the books he was reading during critical moments in the development of Sandinismo, see “Cronología básica de Carlos Fonseca” in Carlos Fonseca, Obras, 2 vols. (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1981–82), 1:431–40.

16. For a discussion of Somoza's El calvario de las Segovias, see Macaulay, Sandino Affair, 307.

17. Borge, Carlos, 20.

18. For accounts of the specifics of the FSLN's growing conflict with the PSN, see John A. Booth, The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1982), 15; Nolan, Ideology of the Sandinistas, 22–24; and Cancino Troncoso, Raíces históricas, 129–31.

19. Cancino Troncoso, Raíces históricas, 129–64.

20. Fonseca, Obras 1:83–84.

21. Fonseca, La lucha por la transformación de Nicaragua (1960) and Breve análisis de la lucha popular nicaragüense contra la dictadura de Somoza (1961), Obras 1:37–38, 39–51.

22. Although Sandino's movement was brutally crushed by Somoza after Sandino's assassination in 1934, some of the original participants who survived the Guardia's surprise attack on the Sandinista-held region around Wiwilí attempted to take up arms again after the assassination of the first Somoza. In the early 1960s, the young FSLN members came in conctact with former Sandinista General Santos López and others, who trained them in guerrilla warfare and guided their first incursions into Nicaragua. See Booth, End and Beginning, 116.

23. Nolan, Ideology of the Sandinistas, 22–26.

24. For a discussion of the failure of the guerrilla movements of the 1960s, see Luis E. Aguilar's introduction to Marxism in Latin America, edited by Luis E. Aguilar, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 60–64.

25. The most important writings from this period are Mensaje del Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional a los estudiantes revolucionarios (1968), Nicaragua: hora cero (1969), the pamphlet El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (1971), Sandino, guerrillero proletario (1972), Notas sobre la carta-testamento de Rigoberto López Pérez (1972), and Crónica secreta: Augusto César Sandino ante sus verdugos (1972), all found in volume 1 of the Obras.

26. Nolan, Ideology of the Sandinistas, 17.

27. Many sympathetic analysts of FSLN ideology have erred in the opposite direction from Nolan in seeing the FSLN's ideological project as simply a direct continuation of Sandino's struggle. See Cancino Troncoso, Raíces históricas, 137, and Harry E. Vanden, “Ideology of the Sandinistas,” Nicaragua in Revolution, edited by Thomas Walker (New York: Praeger, 1982), 41.

28. Fonseca, Obras 1:365.

29. See, for example, Fonseca, Viva Sandino, Obras 2:70.

30. Selser, Sandino, 95.

31. Letter of Augusto C. Sandino, 26 Feb. 1930, cited in Fonseca, Viva Sandino, Obras 2:69.

32. Viva Sandino, Obras 2:42–44, 50; and Sandino: guerrillero proletario, Obras 1:369, 384.

33. See Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Germán Carrera Damas, El culto a Bolívar (Caracas: Ediciones de la Biblioteca, 1973); and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, “José Martí, contemporáneo y compañero,” Siete enfoques marxistas sobre José Martí (Havana: Editorial Politécnica, 1978).

34. Nicaragua: hora cero, Obras 1:81–82

35. El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, Obras 1:366.

36. Nicaragua: hora cero, Obras 1:82–83.

37. El Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, Obras 1:366, and Nicaragua: hora cero, Obras 1:86.

38. Nicaragua: hora cero, Obras 1:95, 1:82.

39. For examples of such conjunctive representations, see Obras 1:66–67, 2:85. The FSLN oath is cited in Nicaragua: hora cero, Obras 1:95. Since Fonseca's death, the FSLN has added Carlos Fonseca to this symbolic trajectory, featuring his image repeatedly beside that of Sandino, (the father and son of the revolution), the connection between the two being thus “naturalized” to appear organic. See, for example, Humberto Ortega Saavedra's introduction, “Carlos, el eslabón vital de nuestra historia,” in Obras 1:11–21.

40. Borge, Carlos, 14.

41. “Charla al movimiento cristiana,” Prosa política y poemas (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1981), 133.

42. Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, translated by K. Weaver (New York: Crown, 1985), 220–21. 1 have restored the key word muchachos from the original text because this term was used affectionately by sympathetic peasants to refer to both Sandino's original soldiers and the young men of the FSLN.

43. See also the intellectual tributes paid by Ortega and Wheelock in their respective introductions to volumes 1 and 2 of Fonseca's Obras.

44. Interview cited in Pilar Arias, Nicaragua: revolución sandinista (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1980), 106–7.

45. “Mensaje no. 2,” Frente Sandinista: diciembre victorioso, compiled by Jaime Wheelock Román (Mexico: Editorial Diógenes, 1976), 98–100.

46. Nolan, Ideology of the Sandinistas, 91–92.

47. Ibid., 17.

48. Carta-testamento de Rigoberto López Pérez, Obras 1:393–406.

49. Thus the ideology as constructed by Fonseca was what Mannheim would label a “utopian” projection or what Sorel would call a “socialist myth,” which promises a collective liberation from a common oppressor and motivates the people to take collective action. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949); and Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, translated by T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (New York: Collier, 1961).

50. For an elucidation of the category of “romance” underlying many forms of popular culture from traditional mythology to mass cultural genres, see Frederic Jameson, “Magical Narratives,” The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103–50.

51. See, for example, Mensaje del Frente Sandinista a los estudiantes revolucionarios, Obras 1:67.

52. Sandino ante sus verdugos, Obras 1:412–27.

53. Philip Berryman, The Religious Roots of Rebellion: Christians in Central American Revolutions (New York: Orbis, 1984), 10.

54. R. R. Fagen, The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Personal Report (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981), 6.

55. The most significant testament to the universality and strength of the symbol of Sandino as a legitimator is the fierce struggle over the image and word Sandino that has raged between the FSLN and the opposition since 1979. In 1981 the FSLN made it illegal for unauthorized groups to use any representation of Sandino, thus stopping Alfonso Robelo's rightist party, the Movimiento Democrático Nicaragüense (MDN) from employing it in their political organizing. Indeed, since Róbelo joined the counterrevolutionary opposition (the “contras”), they too have employed Sandino in their propaganda, claiming that if he were alive today he would be fighting against the FSLN. See Marsy Ann Ashby, “Augusto C. Sandino: The Prophet and National Symbol of Post-1979 Nicaragua,” M.A. thesis, UCLA, 1983, p. 48, which cites the pamphlet by the Frente Democrático Nicaragüense (FDN), ¿Qué, quiénes, cuándo, dónde, cómo, por qué?, p. 2.

56. Again, the closest example is the reinterpretation of José Martí by the Cuban revolutionaries. The Movimiento 26 de Julio did not articulate its ideology and strategy around Martí, however, drawing instead on an already highly developed and legitimized Martí as a symbol of Cuban liberation. Only when they ascended to power and formulated an official policy of socialist development did they engage in a major reworking of the figure of Martí. For an excellent analysis of the pantheon of myths and heroes in the Cuban Revolution, see C. Fred Judson, Cuba and the Revolutionary Myth (London: Westview, 1984).

57. See, for instance, Frederic Jameson's discussion of “Marxism's great historical failure”: “the traditional negative hermeneutic for which the national question is a mere ideological epiphenomenon of the economic. … It is increasingly clear in today's world that a Left which cannot grasp the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism … can scarcely hope to ‘reappropriate’ such collective energies and must effectively doom itself to political impotence” (Jameson, Political Unconscious, 298).