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| “ | We are creating a new society in which an individual is not a piece of merchandise, a society in which there are no wolves and lambs, when men do not live off the exploitation of other men. We are struggling to create a society in which the workers are the fundamental power driving things forward, but in which other social sectors also play a role, always insofar as they identify with the interests of the country, with the interests of the great majority. | „ |
| ~ Tomás Borge |
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Spanish: Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish. The party is named after Augusto César Sandino, who led the Nicaraguan resistance against the United States occupation of Nicaragua between 1927 until 1933.
The FSLN overthrew Anastasio Somoza Deybale in 1979, ending the Somoza dynasty, and established a revolutionary government in its place. Having seized power, the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, first as part of a Junta of National Reconstruction. Following the resignation of centrist members from this Junta, the FSLN took exclusive power in March 1981. They instituted a policy of mass literacy, devoted significant resources to health care, and promoted gender equality but came under international criticism for human rights abuses, mass execution and oppression of indigenous peoples.
A US-backed group, known as the Contras, was formed in 1979 to overthrow the Sandinista government and was funded and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1984 elections were held but were boycotted by some opposition parties. The FSLN won the majority of the votes, and those who opposed the Sandinistas won approximately a third of the seats. The civil war between the Contras and the government continued until 1989. After revising the constitution in 1987, and after years of fighting the Contras, the FSLN lost the 1990 election to Violeta Barrios de Chamorro but retained a plurality of seats in the legislature.
The FSLN is now Nicaragua's sole leading party. It often polls in opposition to the much smaller Constitutionalist Liberal Party, or PLC. In the 2006 Nicaraguan general election, former FSLN President Daniel Ortega was reelected President of Nicaragua with 38.7% of the vote to 29% for his leading rival, bringing in the country's second Sandinista government after 17 years of other parties winning elections. Ortega and the FSLN were reelected in the presidential elections of 2011 and of 2016.
Background edit
The FSLN was originally formed clandestinely in 1961. The organization’s founding members included Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomas Borge. Particularly important to the organization’s formation and early development, Fonseca is widely credited as the organization’s intellectual father. His revolutionary ideology came to be known as Sandinismo — which combines elements of Marxist class analysis and Sandino’s own nationalist and anti-imperialist ideology as applied to the Nicaraguan social, political, and economic reality. This led the Sandinistas to organize for the military overthrow of the Somozas because they were convinced that the Somozas were completely unresponsive to peaceful demands for democratization and economic reform.
Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s the Sandinistas suffered serious setbacks, including the death in combat of all of its original founders, except Borge. These losses led to a regrouping period in which they sought to accumulate strength in secret while organizing politically. However, it also led to a split into several competing Sandinista factions. The first, called the Prolonged Popular War (Spanish acronym GPP) Tendency, advocated building grassroots peasant support in the countryside via the People's War strategy. In contrast, the Proletarian Tendency grew out of the urban underground and advocated the organization of union workers into self-defense units. The final faction, called the Terceristas (Third Way), favored a more pragmatic approach combining different forms of struggle and advocated the creation of a broad alliance of all Nicaraguans opposed to Somoza to generate a national insurrection.
By late 1978 the long awaited national insurrection began and many of Somoza’s supporters abandoned him. To take advantage of this opportunity the Sandinistas reunited early in 1979 and created a single nine member National Directorate with three representatives from each faction. The members were Daniel Ortega, Humberto Ortega, and Víctor Tirado (Terceristas); Tomás Borge, Bayardo Arce, and Henry Ruiz (GPP); and Jaime Wheelock, Luis Carrión, and Carlos Núñez (Proletarian faction). On July 19, 1979, the Sandinista Revolution triumphed, ousting Anastacio Somoza Jr.’s regime in a mass popular insurrection.
Once in power the Sandinistas embarked upon ambitious political and economic programs designed to democratize Nicaragua and lift the country out of under-development. Their political agenda called for reforming the country’s institutions, including disbanding Somoza’s National Guard, and enfranchising the country’s vast rural and urban poor through mass organizations affiliated with the FSLN. In 1984 they carried out the first democratic national elections in the country’s history, which the Sandinistas won with 66 percent of the vote.
Though derided by U.S. president Ronald Reagan’s administration as a “Soviet style farce,” the elections were designed with the technical assistance of the Swedish Electoral Commission and observed by credible international organizations and European governments. The newly elected Constituent Assembly, with the help of open “town meetings” around the country, promulgated a new constitution in 1987. Simultaneously, the Sandinistas launched aggressive economic reforms to combat the twin evils that had historically plagued Nicaragua: poverty and inequality. To this end they implemented an agrarian reform to distribute land confiscated from Somoza and his cronies (one-fifth of the country’s arable land) to individual peasants, cooperatives, and collective farms.
In the cities they passed popular economic reforms, such as raising the minimum wage and introducing price controls and subsidies on basic goods and services, and embarked on public works programs to increase employment. These coincided with the Sandinistas’ desire to implement a mixed-economy in which private property, state property, and cooperative property would co-exist. Sandinista social policy was equally ambitious, especially in the areas of education, health care, and housing.
From 1979 until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, U.S.-Nicaraguan relations were cool but nonconfrontational. However, shortly after entering office President Reagan signed a secret executive authorization to begin trying to overthrow the Sandinista government, which the United States accused of supporting the guerrillas in El Salvador, being too closely allied to Fidel Castro's Cuba, and being Communists. U.S. coercion ranged from diplomatic pressures and economic sanctions to supporting the rebel force known as the Contras and threatening direct U.S. military action. These policies put a huge economic strain on the Nicaraguan economy, and the Sandinistas were forced to respond by shifting much of their trade to Europe and the Soviet Union.
Similarly since the early 1980s, sales of weapons from Western countries were also embargoed pushing the Nicaraguans to import most of their weapons from the Socialist Bloc. While the Sandinistas claimed that these weapons were for defensive purposes to fight the U.S.-supported Contra rebels, the Reagan Administration pointed to them as proof that the FSLN were Communists and presented an eminent threat to other countries in the region and ultimately the United States. However U.S. public support for military intervention, whether indirectly by supporting the Contras or directly by U.S. troops, was the most unpopular U.S. foreign military policy of the 1980s. Indeed widespread domestic opposition led to strong public pressure on Congress to limit aid to the Contras. It also eventually led to the outlawing of lethal aid for the Contras from 1984 to 1985.
In turn this led members of the Reagan Administration, notably Oliver North of the National Security Council, to engage in the illegal and covert funding of the Contras by giving them money received from selling arms to a hostile country, Iran, in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages held by Lebanese Hezbollah. When this back-channel funding was uncovered it became known as the “Iran-Contra affair.” An independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, was appointed to investigate the affair. Eventually several members of the Reagan Administration were prosecuted and convicted. However, these convictions were later overturned on appeal or through presidential pardons.
From 1984 through early 2007 the electoral system that the Sandinistas put in place peacefully transferred power four times. The first was in 1990 when the Sandinistas were voted out of office. For the next sixteen years, three conservative administrations held power. However, on November 5, 2006, Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega was reelected president of Nicaragua on a social democratic platform. The 2006 elections were widely scrutinized by international observers including delegations from Europe, the Organization of American States, and the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia. By all accounts they were, with the exception of a few minor irregularities, fair and transparent. In January 2007 Ortega began his new term in office.
Human rights violations edit
Time magazine in 1983 published reports of human rights violations in an article which stated that "According to Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights, the regime detains several hundred people a month; about half of them are eventually released, but the rest simply disappear." Time also interviewed a former deputy chief of Nicaraguan military counterintelligence, who stated that he had fled Nicaragua after being ordered to kill 800 Miskito prisoners and make it look like they had died in combat.
Another article described Sandinista neighbourhood "Defense Committees", modeled on similar Cuban Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, which according to critics were used to unleash mobs on anyone who was labeled a counterrevolutionary. Nicaragua's only opposition newspaper, La Prensa, was subject to strict censorship. The newspaper's editors were forbidden to print anything negative about the Sandinistas either at home or abroad.
Nicaragua's Permanent Commission on Human Rights reported 2,000 murders in the first six months and 3,000 disappearances in the first few years. It has since documented 14,000 cases of torture, rape, kidnapping, mutilation and murder.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in a 1981 report found evidence for mass executions in the period following the revolution. It stated: "In the Commission's view, while the government of Nicaragua clearly intended to respect the lives of all those defeated in the civil war, during the weeks immediately subsequent to the Revolutionary triumph, when the government was not in effective control, illegal executions took place which violated the right to life, and these acts have not been investigated and the persons responsible have not been punished."
The IACHR also stated that: "The Commission is of the view that the new regime did not have, and does not now have, a policy of violating the right to life of political enemies, including among the latter the former guardsmen of the Government of General Somoza, whom a large sector of the population of Nicaragua held responsible for serious human rights violations during the former regime; proof of the foregoing is the abolition of the death penalty and the high number of former guardsmen who were prisoners and brought to trial for crimes that constituted violations of human rights."
A 1983 IACHR report documented allegations of human rights violations against the Miskito Indians, which were alleged to have taken place after opposition forces (the Contras) infiltrated a Miskito village in order to launch attacks against government soldiers, and as part of a subsequent forced relocation program. Allegations included arbitrary imprisonment without trial, "disappearances" of such prisoners, forced relocation, and destruction of property.
In late 1981, the CIA conspiracy "Operation Red Christmas" was exposed to separate the Atlantic region from the rest of Nicaragua. Red Christmas aimed to seize territory on Nicaragua's mainland and overthrow the Nicaraguan government. The Nicaraguan government responded to the provocations by transferring 8,500 Miskitos 80 kilometres (50 mi) south to a settlement called Tasba Pri. The U.S. government accused Nicaragua of genocide. The U.S. government produced a photo alleged to show Miskito bodies being burned by Sandinista troops; however, the photo was actually of people killed by Somoza's National Guard in 1978.
The IACHR's 1991 annual report states: "In 1990, the Commission was informed of the discovery of common graves in Nicaragua, especially in areas where fighting had occurred. The information was provided by the Nicaraguan Pro Human Rights Association, which had received its first complaint in June 1990. By December 1991, that Association had received reports of 60 common graves and had investigated 15 of them. While most of the graves seem to be the result of summary executions by members of the Sandinista People's Army or the State Security, some contain the bodies of individuals executed by the Nicaraguan Resistance."
The IACHR's 1992 annual report contains details of mass graves and investigations which suggest that mass executions had been carried out. One such grave contained 75 corpses of peasants who were believed to have been executed in 1984 by government security forces pretending to be members of the Contras. Another grave was also found in the town of Quininowas which contained six corpses, believed to be an entire family killed by government forces when the town was invaded. A further 72 graves were reported as being found, containing bodies of people, the majority of whom were believed to have been executed by agents of the state and some also by the Contras.
Trivia edit
- Even though its name is homage to Augusto César Sandino ironically Sandino hated the crimes they commit.