Remembering Sandino

[Judi Lynn]

The Nicaraguan nationalist was assassinated eighty-three years ago last month.
by Jonah Walters
3.7.17




Augusto Sandino (center) being interviewed by Mexican journalists in 1930. Institute for the History of Nicaragua and Central America

Come, morphine addicts, come and kill us in our own land. I await you before my patriotic soldiers, feet firmly set, not worried about how many of you there may be. But keep in mind that when this happens the Capitol Building in Washington will shake with the destruction of your greatness, and our blood will redden the white doom of your famous White House, the cavern where you concoct your crimes.

–Augusto César Sandino, San Albino Manifesto. 1927

On February 21, 1934, thirty-one years to the day before Malcolm X was gunned down at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom, a similarly historic assassination took place in a much smaller country a few thousand miles to the south.

That evening, General Augusto César Sandino was attending 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.

For the previous six years, Sandino had led a violent insurgency in the Nicaraguan highlands. Derided as a bandit, he was in fact the head of an internationally recognized revolutionary movement against the prolonged American occupation. 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.

In the decades leading up to that February evening, twin assailants had menaced Nicaragua. On the one hand, the people faced the homegrown threat of petty despotism, embodied in this era by Anastasio Somoza, an American ally who commanded a domestic paramilitary closely aligned with the Marines — the despised National Guard.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/augusto-sandino-nicaragua-somoza-us-imperialism-sandinista/