Few governments that have come to power by force have enjoyed as much international goodwill and support as did the Sandinistas when they seized power in Nicaragua on July 19, 1979. They were seen as young Davids who had vanquished a brutal Goliath.
The fall of Anastasio Somoza seemed to usher in a new dawn for Nicaragua, a country with little history of representative government. The Sandinistas were generally viewed as populists, determined to open the political process and let the Nicaraguan people select their own leaders.
By 1986, only the most politically biased - or naïve - still judge the Sandinistas as social democrats. Nicaragua's rulers are now seen, even by critics of the Reagan administration's Central American policy, as Marxist-Leninists, dedicated to imposing a dictatorship even more total and brutal than that of Somoza. Sandinista Nicaragua is considered to be firmly in the camp of the Soviet Union and its hemispheric client state Cuba.
Has there been a sharp turn to the left by the Sandinista leaders? Have they been forced to adopt draconian internal control measures because of U.S. hostility, including support of a "counterrevolutionary" army? In short, is the communization of Nicaragua the fault of the United States?
A look at the record of the Sandinista leaders prior to 1979, and their statements and actions since coming to power, shows conclusively that there was no change in Sandinista political views. The Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was Marxist-Leninist from its beginnings. As Pulitzer Prize winner Shirley Christian, in her book Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, has written:
The leaders of the Sandinista front intended to establish a Leninist system from the day they marched into Managua …. Any indication the Sandinista leaders gave of wanting something other than a Leninist system in Nicaragua was, as they admitted several times, for tactical or strategic purposes, not for reasons of substance.
The Sandinista front was founded in July 1961 by a group of upper- and middle-class student activists who had been inspired by Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba. The last survivor of these founders in Tomas Borge, today the Sandinista minister of interior.
Despite the growing unpopularity of the Somoza dynasty, the Sandinistas could never attract many to their cause. Castro's continuous support, however, enabled them to remain a nuisance to Somoza.
When Somoza critic Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, was gunned down in January 1978, things started to change. The brutal murder triggered popular outrage, and the Sandinistas were quick to capitalize on the mounting resentment. This was the beginning of the end of the Somoza regime, and the Sandinistas maneuvered themselves to the forefront of the anti-government coalition.
By late 1978, the ranks of the FSLN had swelled, from just a few hundred hard-core militants who had comprised the front during most of its existence, to almost 1,000 combatants. By the following summer, this number had risen to about 5,000. While numerically smaller than
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