[Luciano_Baracco]Nicaragua - The Imagining of a Nation - From Nineteenth-Century Liberals to...

NICARAGUA: THE IMAGINING OF A NATION

NICARAGUA: THE IMAGINING OF A NATION

From Nineteenth-Century Liberals

to Twentieth-Century Sandinistas

Luciano Baracco

Algora PublishingNew York

© 2005 by Algora PublishingAll Rights Reservedwww.algora.com

No portion of this book (beyond what is permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the United States Copyright Act of 1976) may be reproduced by any process, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher.ISBN: 0-87586-392-2 (softcover)ISBN: 0-87586-393-0 (hardcover)ISBN: 0-87586-394-9 (ebook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data —

Baracco, Luciano.Nicaragua, imagining the nation: a history of nationalist politics in

Nicaragua from 19th century liberals to 20th century Sandinistas / Luciano Baracco.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-87586-392-2 (trade paper: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87586-393-0 (hard

cover: alk. paper) — ISBN 0-87586-394-9 (ebook) 1. Nicaragua—Politics and government—20th century. 2. Nicaragua—

Politics and government—1838-1909. 3. Nationalism—Nicaragua—History. 4. Atlantic Coast (Nicaragua)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.

F1526.3.B29 2005 972.85'04—dc22 2005013344

Front Cover: Nicaraguan peasant. Painting by Daniel Bastreri.

Printed in the United States

For Pietro and Giulia

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1

INTRODUCTION 3

CHAPTER 1. NATIONS AND NATIONALISM IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE 91. ERNEST GELLNER: INDUSTRIALISM, NATIONS AND NATIONALISM 92. TOM NAIRN: UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT AND THE MODERN JANUS 123. ANTHONY GIDDENS: THE NATION-STATE AND VIOLENCE 164. BENEDICT ANDERSON: IMAGINED COMMUNITIES 215. CONCLUSION: MODERNITY AND NATIONALISM 26

CHAPTER 2. FROM INDEPENDENCE TO CLIENT STATE 311. THE AGE OF ANARCHY 322. THE INTER-OCEANIC CANAL IN THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION 343. THE THIRTY CONSERVATIVE YEARS 354. THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION: 1893-1909 365. THE POST ZELAYA ERA: CHAMORRISTA CONSERVATISM 386. THE SANDINO REBELLION (1927-1933) 407. POPULAR NATIONALISM AND THE SEGOVIAS 448. THE SANDINISTA NATION 459. REFLECTIONS ON THE NATION-STATE AND THE COOPERATIVE PROJECT OF THE SEGOVIAS 4710. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOMOCISTA STATE 5211. SOMOCISMO, THE STATE AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT 5412. CONCLUSION 57

CHAPTER 3. THE SANDINISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT 61

1. THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AND THE FORMATION OF THE FSLN 612. THE FSLN AND THE FAILURE OF RURAL GUERRILLA WARFARE 663. THE RE-BIRTH OF SANDINO IN THE WORKS OF CARLOS FONSECA AMADOR 674. EXILE IN CUBA: 1970–1975 705. “VIVA SANDINO” 716. THE NEW MAN: SANDINO, CHÉ, AND THE FSLN 757. CONCLUSION 77

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Nicaragua: The Imagining of a Nation

CHAPTER 4. REVOLUTIONARY NATION-BUILDING: IMAGINING THE SANDINISTA NATION THROUGH HISTORY AND LITERACY 79

1. PEDAGOGY AND LIBERATION 802. LITERACY AND CONSCIENTIZATION: THE NICARAGUAN EXPERIENCE 823. MOBILIZATION, TRAINING, AND THE TEACHING PROGRAM 864. HISTORY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND TIME: THE ORIGINS OF A NEW NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS 895. LA CRUZADA EN MARCHA 916. THE NATIONALIST TROPE: EL MUCHACHO DE NIQUINOHOMO 967. STRETCHING THE LIMITS OF THE STATE: RIGHTS, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE LIFE-ADMINISTERING POWER OF THE STATE 1038. CONCLUSION 105

CHAPTER 5. INDIANS, CREOLES, AND MESTIZOS: THE ATLANTIC COAST AND VISIONS OF THE NICARAGUAN NATION 107

1. THE MISKITU 1082. THE CREOLES 1123. MESTIZO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SOMOZA PERIOD 1184. COSTEÑO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SOMOZA PERIOD 1265. CONCLUSION 132

CHAPTER 6. FROM ACQUIESCENCE TO ETHNIC MILITANCY: COSTEÑO RESPONSES TO SANDINISTA ANTI-IMPERIALIST NATIONALISM 133

1. MESTIZO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD 1342. CREOLE VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD 1393. MISKITU VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD 1424. THE LITERACY PROJECT IN LANGUAGES 1455. CREOLE RESPONSES TO THE LITERACY PROJECT 1496. MISKITU RESPONSES TO THE LITERACY PROJECT: “SITTING ASTRIDE A TIGER” 1517. CONCLUSION 156

CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION 161

BIBLIOGRAPHY 167BOOKS 167ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS 169CONFERENCE PAPERS 174DOCTORAL THESES 174

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the financial assistance given to me by the Cad-bury Trust during my doctoral research on which this book is based. The direc-tor of the Historical Institute of Nicaragua and Central America (IHNCA), Margarita Vannini, generously provided me with invaluable facilities whilst undertaking research towards the book, whilst the Institute’s librarian, Gloria Mora, persevered with my many requests for materials held in the IHNCA’s archives. I am grateful to Judy Butler for her hospitality and valuable insights into many aspects of the revolutionary period. I would also like to thank the per-sonnel at the Organization of American States’ mission in Nicaragua, Alejandro Guilí, Cherry Cunningham and Raúl Rosende. Many thanks also to my doctoral supervisor, Jenny Pearce, for her support during my doctoral studies, and the historians Steve Palmer and Francis Kinlock who helped me grasp the complexi-ties of nineteenth century Central American history. All the individuals men-tioned here, and many others besides, helped me in one way or another in the completion of this work and their help is greatly appreciated.

Some of the material in Chapter 4 appeared originally in the article, “The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade Revisited: The Teaching of Literacy as a Nation Building Project,” in Bulletin of Latin American Research (2004) Vol. 23, No. 3, and has been reproduced here with permission from Blackwell Publishing. Chapter 6 contains material published originally in the article “Sandinista Anti-Imperialist Nationalism and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua: An Analysis of Sandinista-Miskitu Relations,” in Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2004) Vol. 10, No. 4, and has been reproduced here with permission from Taylor and Francis, Inc.

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INTRODUCTION

In the aftermath of the world-historical events of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the advent of capitalism, the long-established dynastic empires which had formed a familiar part of the landscape of the pre-modern world began to fragment and be replaced by the new geo-political and cultural entity of the nation state. By the post-1945 era, this fragmentation process had extended to Africa and Asia as newly independent former colonies struggled to take their place in the world community of nation-states. In its first waves, and helped on its way by the French revolutionary wars, this process swept away age-old restrictive feudal polities ruled over by absolutist monarchies whose legitimacy had rested on the idea of divine right. In their place emerged states over which the nation would exercise sovereignty. An association between the attainment of nationhood and the freedom, liberty and self-determination of peoples was forged, which has led liberation movements to frame their political projects in national terms ever since. Such liberation movements, whether in the North or South, whether of liberal, fascist or socialist persuasion, have all been national and have framed their respective political ideologies through nationalist discourses.

The modernity of the concept of the nation, however, sits uneasily on the immemorial status which nationalism attributes to it. Despite nationalism’s por-trayal of the nation as an historic patrimony of a people, the idea of the nation shares a common provenance with nationalism itself in the early nineteenth cen-tury. Rather than the idea of a re-awakening of a long-slumbering nation, the role of nationalism, and of nationalists, has often been more fundamental in that nationalists have consciously sought to build the nation through processes of mass communications, mass education, and mass urbanization. It was in the

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many ex-colonies where nationalism exhibited these nation-building tendencies most directly, in a modular fashion, as they struggled to create nations from within the territorial expanse that had formed the administrative units estab-lished by former colonial powers. Nations had to be built and nationalists actively engaged in this process through a variety of techniques.

Both nations and nationalism are rooted in the condition of modernity, and in large part have been made possible and necessary by that condition. In the spirit of classical Durkheimian functionalism, the breakdown of older forms of identity and association, such as blood, locality and family, through the effects of industrialism and capitalism, can be seen as requiring a new social cement which would bind anonymous individuals together in meaningful ways in order to maintain system integration and social equilibrium. The very development of both industrialism and capitalism required a collective and coordinated mobili-zation of a population, despite the fact that the initiation of this process tended to promote the very opposite, as Durkheim’s own concern with the theme of anomie during this period demonstrates.1 Thus, to have a demarcated territory ruled over by a single state was not sufficient. What was also required was a population, or community, whose members were actively involved in economic and political processes through which modernization objectives would be achieved. The tendency towards bureaucratic administration under the condi-tion of modernity made such mass participation possible. The ability for modern institutions to monitor and order events and the actions of individuals across time and space provided the infrastructural power to facilitate this objective of mass participation.2 The developmental essence of modernity, one characterized by constant change, made it both possible and necessary to continuously harness populations to economic and political processes for the first time in human his-tory.

Building the nation can be seen as being inherently bound up with the pro-cess of modernization. From the modernist paradigm, reaching the condition of modernity was dependent on the creation of a stable and viable national commu-nity. Although more recently it has been suggested that this modernist paradigm is breaking down with the increasing power of transnational institutions and globalization, thus far the path to modernity has been a national one. Nicara-gua’s history bears the marks of its own attempts to follow that path. The con-text in which the question of Nicaragua as a national entity first began to be posed was, perhaps, more problematic than had been the case for other emergent

1. See Durkheim, E. (1964) The Division of Labor in Society (New York, The Free Press).2. Giddens, A. “Time-Space Distanciation and the Generation of Power” in Giddens, A.

(1983) Power, Property, and the State: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism Volume I (Cambridge, Polity Press), pp. 90-108.

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Introduction

nations of Latin America. Since it had been a province within the regional impe-rial possession of the Kingdom of Guatemala, competing conceptions of the nation existed which oscillated between regional or provincial nationhood, impeding any perceptions of Nicaragua as a national entity until 1857, thirty-six years after the departure of the Spanish colonial authorities. This unpromising legacy of Iberian colonialism was compounded by those imperial powers which remained in the region and which viewed Nicaraguan territory as offering a potential site for their own endeavors to build an inter-oceanic canal route.

Conditions for the formation of the nation in the case of Nicaragua were extremely problematic. By 1838, the failure of initial attempts to consolidate this process on a regional, Central American basis led to an alternative, provincially-based, process from which Nicaragua first began to be conceived of in national terms. This book will take as its major field of enquiry the various attempts to build a Nicaraguan nation. It does so by acknowledging that such attempts have been intimately bound up with the hegemonic projects of political agents who have all held modernization as their goal; from nineteenth-century Liberals to twentieth-century Sandinistas. However, it will also show how the Sandinista period represented a unique break with the past in two ways. Firstly, by the time the Sandinista regime had been established in 1979, significant developments had occurred in Nicaragua’s administrative infrastructure which increased the state’s capacity to engage in serious nation-building strategies. Secondly, the coming-to-power of the Sandinista government through an anti-imperialist, popular insurrection made the critical notion of popular sovereignty into a visi-ble reality. Despite the attainment of formal independence from Spain some hun-dred and fifty-eight years previously, this period presented an opportunity like no other before it, in which the essential conditions for nation-building were present; a significant bureaucratic-administrative infrastructure and the attain-ment of popular sovereignty.

Many theoretical approaches have informed the conclusions drawn in this book, although the most influential approach has been that of Benedict Ander-son (1991) on the nation as an imagined political community. It covers a period up to 1981, with the major analytical work concentrating on the latter part of the twentieth century. Although the revolutionary triumph of 1979 presented an opportunity for the construction of a sovereign nation, the intensification of US economic and military aggression led to the debilitation of that potential as the Sandinista government became more and more preoccupied with fighting this aggression. No doubt this was a deliberate outcome of the Reagan administra-tion’s war against Sandinista Nicaragua. The year 1981 forms the end point of a period in which the original program of the FSLN was most directly applied, a program geared towards the transformation of the political identity of the nation

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so as to become more amenable to the political nature of the Sandinistas’ mod-ernization plans. This identity became a lived experience for so many Nicara-guans through the mass mobilizations that characterized this brief period. This book is about such mobilizations and the visions of communion with anony-mous others which they inspired, a communion whose membership was limited and defined in national terms.

Chapter 1 reviews some of the existing literature addressing the subjects of nationalism, the nation and nation-building. Firstly, it reviews the functionalist approach of Ernest Gellner, whose ideas center on the rise of industrialism as the primary factor behind the emergence of nations and nationalism. Secondly, it discusses the approach of Tom Nairn (1981), which presents nation building as a political process essential in all modernization projects. Thirdly, the review turns to the state-centered approach of Anthony Giddens, who links the emer-gence of nations to the formation of the inter-state system, and portrays it largely as a reflection and an appendage of the modern state. Fourthly, the review examines the cultural approach of Benedict Anderson and the idea of the nation as an imagined political community, one made possible through the cul-tural system that emerged with the Enlightenment and capitalism.

Chapter 2 examines how these theoretical frameworks can be applied to nineteenth and twentieth-century Nicaragua. Characterized by constant civil wars and competing conceptions of the nation this is a period that defies the simple application of theoretical models. The role of the idea of an inter-oceanic canal in the generation and resolution of these conflicts will also be assessed. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Nicaragua experienced sig-nificant modernization during the Liberal Revolution of José Santos Zelaya(1893-1909). The eventual overthrow of this administration by a US-backed coup illustrates the limits of Nicaraguan nationalism in an age of growing US imperialist influence in the Central American region. The post-Zelaya period resembled the early period of independence with the re-emergence of interne-cine civil war, and formed the background for the Sandino Rebellion (1927-33). Despite the emphasis on Sandino’s military activities common to most histories, the rebellion he led will be seen as an attempt to complete the nation-building project of Nicaragua’s nineteenth-century Liberals in an age of US imperialist intervention in the Central American region.

Chapter 3 follows the emergence of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), tracing the inspiration for its formation to the Cuban revolution. It then shows how the FSLN moved away from the Cuban revolutionary model, and especially the foco theory of guerrilla warfare developed by Ché Guevara owing to the failure of these ideas in the Nicaraguan context. An alternative strategy was then developed which centered around the rediscovery of Sandino.

6

Introduction

This work was largely the achievement of the principal founder of the FSLN, Carlos Fonseca Amador. It was not until Fonseca went into a period of exile in Cuba (1970-75) that the link between Sandino’s anti-imperialist nationalism and revolutionary socialism was fully elaborated. Whilst Somocismo’s Conservative opponents aligned themselves with the US in their endeavor to win state power by portraying themselves as the heirs of Sandino, unlike any other opposition group the Sandinistas legitimized their own struggle by drawing upon national history and traditions. Their struggle was to be self-consciously represented as the ongoing struggle of the Nicaraguan nation against US imperialism and its oligarchic allies. As will become clear, despite claims to be the only true repre-sentatives of Nicaragua’s people and history, Sandinista nationalism both natu-ralized and nationalized political and economic ideas which clearly had their origins outside Nicaragua. Sandinista nationalist discourses did not so much represent the nation as create a certain image of it, which not only legitimized Sandino’s anti-imperialism but the Sandinistas’ own revolutionary socialist pro-gram as well.

Chapter 4 will present a detailed examination of Sandinista nation-build-ing, which not only sought to construct a national community but to cast the political identity of that community as anti-imperialist, revolutionary and social-ist, in line with its own modernization program. The principal example taken in this chapter will be the period during which the new regime undertook the National Literacy Crusade (1980). Through the application of the ideas of Bene-dict Anderson, a close analysis of the events which filled that time will provide a description of how the imagining of Sandinista Nicaragua became a lived flesh and blood experience. The evidence used to illustrate this will be the official bulletin of the Literacy Commission La Cruzada En Marcha (1980), literacy primers and the popular nationalist story El Muchacho Niquinohomo (1973) by Sergio Ramírez. Together, these offer a glimpse of Sandinista attempts to create “that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.”1 Such a massive mobilization consequent on the Literacy Crusade was unprecedented in Nicaraguan history, not only granting a sense of “community in anonymity,” which was perhaps for the first time conveyed across the whole national space, but also acting as an impulse towards the expansion of the administrative capacity of the state apparatuses.

Chapter 5 examines the culturally and ethnically distinct Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. It provides an historical introduction to the groups that inhabit the region: Indians, Creoles and mestizos. The over-riding theme within this history

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, Verso), p. 26.

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has been that of the impact of Anglo-American colonialism on the region. Through the analysis of development programs, government agencies, academic studies and popular literature, the chapter examines the visions of the Atlantic coast held prior to 1979 by various mestizo political groups, and then contrasts them with Costeño visions of themselves and the Atlantic Coast.1

Chapter 6 examines the new Sandinista government’s policies towards the Atlantic Coast. Regardless of their revolutionary nationalism, which distin-guished them from both Somocista and Conservative mestizos, the Sandinistas tended to reproduce an ethnocentric view of Costeños, which had been common to all mestizo nationalist discourses. Costeño visions of themselves and their place within the revolutionary process are then outlined by the discussion of various ideas about their own ethnic or indigenous identity. Adopting a similar approach to the case study in Chapter 4, the literacy campaign in English and Miskitu is examined to assess its impact on creating the conditions for a national imagining process. On this occasion, however, the very opposite of the intended effects was to occur. The chapter illustrates how the Literacy Project in Lan-guages led to the alienation of most Costeños from the revolution. In the case of the Miskitu, this alienation was to culminate in the emergence of an alternative national imagining process based around the idea of the Miskitu nation.

1. Costeño is the collective noun used throughout this thesis for Atlantic Coast Nicara-guans.

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CHAPTER 1. NATIONS AND NATIONALISM IN THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE

1. ERNEST GELLNER: INDUSTRIALISM, NATIONS AND NATIONALISM

A strong modernist explanation of the emergence of nations and national-ism was proposed by Ernest Gellner in his work Nations and Nationalism (1983). Using ideas from Durkheimian functionalist sociology, Gellner couples the rise of nations and nationalism to the rise of industrialism. Principally, the transition to industrialism required a new division of labor which broke down the highly rigid feudal stratification system which had acted as a barrier to the formation of a national community. Gellner characterized agrarian societies as highly strati-fied, with social castes rarely interacting with one another. The culture of each social caste was preliterate and, essentially, context-bound. The only exception to this was the clergy, which used its literate culture to reinforce the boundaries between each social caste. Agrarian societies were characterized by social immo-bility, with a plurality of self-sustaining caste cultures which were inward look-ing and isolated from one another.1

This contrasts sharply with industrial societies, which, according to Gell-ner, need to exhibit homogeneity and social interdependence in order to func-tion properly. The overriding feature of such societies is perpetual growth founded on a new and complex division of labor.2 Industrialism’s requirement of a complex division of labor creates the need for an interdependent social class structure. It is industrialism which brings humans together in new ways,

1. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism (London, Basil Blackwell), p. 13.2. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism p. 24.

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increasing the need for interaction between social strata, a need which also brings with it the requirement of a common culture through which uniform communication can be conveyed to society as a whole. This common culture facilitates the participation of every member of an industrial society and repre-sents the foundation from which nationalist sentiments emerge. Such cultures are of a literate form due to the very nature of the context-free communication systems which make it possible for them to function. Thus, they cannot be spon-taneous, as the local cultures of agrarian societies were, but have to be nurtured by specialists. The site from which such “high cultures,” as Gellner calls them, are nurtured is that of mass, standardized, generic education, a task so immense that it can only be organized through the state.1 Through these “high cultures,” required by the relations of industrial production and disseminated by mass edu-cation systems, a pervasive sense of commonality and community emerged which cut across the kin, clan, and localized divisions characteristic of agrarian societies.

From these premises, Gellner draws a number of conclusions which are vital to his understanding of nations and nationalism. Firstly, what binds individuals into national communities is seen to be a high culture: “Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture.”2 Secondly, the basis for nationhood is the confluence between the boundaries of a high culture and the boundaries of the state which nurtures it:

Exo-socialisation, the production and reproduction of men outside the local intimate unit, is now the norm, and must be so. The imperative of exo-socialisation is the main clue to why state and culture must now be linked, whereas in the past their connection was thin, fortuitous, varied, loose, and often minimal. Now it is unavoidable. That is what nationalism is about and why we live in an age of nation-alism.3

Spurred on by the needs of industrialism for a homogeneous, literate, high culture, each state forms an essential apparatus which nurtures such a culture. It is due to these characteristics that the age of nationalism emerges, dividing the world into a series of individual nation-states which form the basic “breathing chambers” in which each high culture can be nurtured and sustained. The duty of allowing a high culture to breathe falls on the many professionals within the state apparatuses, for it is they who become the bearers of the nationalism which will police, direct and nurture it. Gellner’s approach, therefore, suggests that nationalism does not emerge as an expression of pre-existing national forma-tions, although it may well selectively use cultural artifacts from the past.

1. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism p. 51.2. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism p. 36.3. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism p. 38.

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Chapter 1. Nations and Nationalism in Theoretical Perspective

Rather, nationalisms, emanating from states, create nations: “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”1

Modernity, the nation and nationalism are integrally linked in Gellner’s model. It is the coming of industrialism which makes both nations and national-ism possible and necessary. The modern age is, de jure, the Age of Nationalism. The importance of the state in fostering these essential features of modernity is highlighted by Gellner, and has largely been accepted by subsequent approaches which have attempted to build on Gellner’s work. Bearing these positive aspects in mind, there are also some obvious criticisms which can be levelled against Gellner’s work. Despite its central role as an explanatory factor in the rise of nations and nationalism, no systematic analysis of the emergence of industrial-ism is undertaken. This leads to an ambiguity in the definition of industrialism generally, with it being referred to at various times as a complex division of labor, a culture and a social system. Nowhere does Gellner see industrialism as being intimately bound up with economic processes. Although Gellner sees industrialism as the central axis on which the emergence of nations and nation-alism depends, it remains marginal in his analysis. A more detailed approach to the relationship between industrialism and nationalism would have disclosed the tendency of societies to develop nation-building nationalisms as part of a strategy to initiate the growth of industrialism and modernization. This raises the possibility that nationalism can precede industrialism and may be part of the process by which it is initiated.2 In these cases, it is precisely the absence of industrialism which promotes a nationalist response. It has also often been the case that nationalism precedes the age of mass education, suggesting that the initiation of mass education programs forms part of that nationalist response, rather than being a consequence of it.

Perhaps a more fundamental criticism of Gellner’s approach is his character-ization of the nation. Whilst his division of the nation and nationalism is a valid one, his definition of the nation as a state-nurtured high culture which pertains to the political boundaries of that state seems to be a more appropriate descrip-tion of nationalism. Gellner’s reference to culture represents a critical break-through in theorizing the nation, for it is essentially correct to portray both nations and nationalism as a result of modern cultural processes. However, he systematically fails to elaborate how these concepts work and come to occupy a place in everyday life. Instead, he simply refers to the role of the state in sustain-

1. Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism p. 55. This repeats a formulation found in his earlier work Thought and Change (1964): “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist,” p. 169.

2. Smith, A. (1998) Nationalism and Modernity: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London, Routledge), p. 38. Smith cites Denmark, Australia, and Japan as examples of this.

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ing literate high cultures. The valid analytical division between nations and nationalism which Gellner establishes begins to break-down as the nation becomes increasingly synonymous with nationalism. By pointing to this weak-ness in Gellner’s argument, I am not suggesting that the nation is indeed a natu-ral entity simply waiting to be reawakened by state-sponsored nationalism. Yet, by linking the idea of the nation to the requirements of industrial production, and the conscious attempts to meet those requirements by political élites who occupy the state, the valid distinction which Gellner establishes between nations and nationalism seems to collapse. The nation simply is, and always remains, a result of the conscious policing activities of nationalists. The nation seems to be indistinguishable from nationalism.

Given this lack of autonomy, one would expect that a breakdown of nation-alism, usually through a collapse of the state which nurtured it, would be fol-lowed by the disintegration of its nation. History suggests the contrary. Nations do survive the collapse of their polities and can turn against them in acts of defi-ance. Although countries such as Japan, Germany and Italy may have experi-enced a total collapse of their military, industrial and state infra-structures in 1945, this does not mean that they also disappeared as national entities. The emergence of modern nations may depend on a transition in the mode of produc-tion, yet, if we accept that they are the product of cultural processes unique to modernity, then they must and do exhibit a degree of autonomy from both state and economic processes.

2. TOM NAIRN: UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT AND THE MODERN JANUS

An alternative approach to that developed by Gellner can be found in Tom Nairn’s work The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (1981). Writing in response to the failure of Marxism to produce a convincing account of the role of capitalism in the spread of nationalism, Nairn adopts a position similar to that of world systems theory in seeing both nations and nationalism in terms of the uneven development of capitalism which characterized its spread across the globe. By adopting a global perspective, Nairn hopes to avoid the fragmentary nature of theories of nations and nationalism which take a country-by-country approach. For Nairn, explaining the existence of individual nations can only be achieved by looking at the world system of nation-states; it is not the trees which explain the forest, but the forest which explains the trees.1

1. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain. Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, Verso), p. 332.

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For both Marxists and Idealists, a society’s progress entails passing through a stage of development where markets and classes are organized along national lines, only to mature into an international stage of development. In fact, the reverse seems to have occurred; the spread of capitalism across the world has been accompanied by a more authoritative, and seemingly permanent, fragmen-tation of the world into nation-states. According to Nairn, the failure of the internationalization thesis, validated by numerous teleological models of eco-nomic growth, is attributable to the uneven spread of capitalism. The idea of capitalism evenly spreading outwards from the West, homogenizing and civiliz-ing humanity simultaneously, has proved to be fundamentally false. The spread of capitalism did not, as Marx famously wrote, “sweep away all fixed fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinion” to replace them with uniform commodity relations. For more liberal thinkers such as Kant, not only would the spread of capitalism lead to the development of the productive forces to an unprecedented degree, it would also provide the basis for perpetual peace, since war would disrupt a developmental process seen to have been in the general interests of the whole of humanity. The historical reality, however, has been quite the reverse, as the world became increasingly, and more thoroughly, fragmented:

In reality, the spirit of commerce and the power of money, as they invaded suc-cessive areas of the globe, would lead to the renewal of atavistic urges. They would produce an intensification of warfare. Instead of growing less significant as barriers, national divisions would be erected into a new and dominant principle of social organization. History was to defeat the Western Philosophers.1

Not only did those areas which were initially peripheral to the center of cap-italism remain resistant to development, the causes of this resistance related to the exploitative activities of the developed, core economies of the West. Indeed, such was the growth-oriented nature of the new economic order of the West that rapacious exploitation became an inherent feature of its functioning. As the West spread across the globe like a “tidal wave,” it did not make partners out of the peripheral areas of the new global economy, but imperial possessions.2 The global rise of nationalism lies in the reaction to this exploitative relationship between core and peripheral areas within the world economy. The fact that the peoples of the periphery, and especially the peripheral élites, wanted the benefits associated with modernity and progress is not in doubt. What was unclear were the means through which these benefits would be achieved. If the peoples of the periphery were to achieve development and modernity, they would have to “do it for themselves,” since reliance on those who had already achieved these goals

1. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain, p. 337.2. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain, p. 338.

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would end in exploitation and failure. Furthermore, avoiding these debilitating relations of exploitation meant that the periphery could not repeat the model of slow, gradual growth experienced by the core economies. Instead, they would have to take “historical short-cuts” characterized by a mobilization of whatever resources were available in a forced modernization drive. Such a strategy would necessarily entail the mobilization of the lower strata into any such drive. It is in this process that populist, nationalist appeals are made to a mythical people and their mythical past:

This meant the conscious formation of a militant, inter-class community ren-dered strongly (if mythically) aware of its own separate identity vis-à-vis the out-side forces of domination. There was no other way of doing it. Mobilization had to be in terms of what was there; and the whole point of the dilemma was that there was nothing there — none of the economic and political institutions of modernity now so needed….The new middle-class intelligentsia of nationalism had to invite the masses into history; and the invitation had to be written in a language they understood.1

Nationalism is about modernization, yet this association is not without its ambiguities. Whilst nationalism assisted the periphery to resist the detrimental impact of capitalism spread by the core economies, the periphery itself adopted, or at least sought to acquire, many of the attributes of these core economies. This is especially the case in the building of national states which had proved to be powerful arms for development. It was a strategy adopted by the first periphery, Germany and Italy, and has been adopted by peripheral areas ever since. Largely as a reaction to this, nationalism was also adopted by core economies, making it into an omnipresent ideology.2 However, Nairn suggests that this reaction by the core economies is in some ways more real than the over-ideologized national-isms of the periphery. The very point of nationalist ideology was the overcoming of backwardness and underdevelopment, yet it was these very conditions which prevented nationalism from becoming a “fully-functioning reality” within the periphery. It was in the advanced states and economies where nationalism was given real muscle. Being developmental leaders, England and France had initially failed to foster strong nationalist sentiments. Responding to developments else-where in the world system, and especially in Germany and Italy, England and France adopted the same techniques as had these newly industrialized leaders, creating a global dialectic of competition:

As Germany, Italy, and Japan emerged into the extra-rapid industrialisation made possible by their “revolutions from above,” was it surprising that England and France developed their own forms of “nationalism”? There resulted a struggle between founder-members and parvenus, where great-power nationalism was forged

1. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain, p. 340.2. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain, pp. 343-44.

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from the new notions and sentiments. Forged, naturally, with far greater efficacy than on the periphery, for the simple reason that these societies had the media and the abundant human and material resources to do so.1

In an analogy to the Roman god Janus, Nairn characterizes nationalism as manipulating irrational sentiments by looking backwards into history and con-structing the myths and legends necessary to mobilize whole societies in order to propel them into the future. The more precarious these societies are vis-à-vis the core economies, the more extreme the nationalism becomes. Both fascism and socialism have their roots in the pressures brought to bear by uneven devel-opment, where catching-up became a matter of survival for Russia, Germany, Italy, and Japan, all of which, subject to intense external pressure, adopted the most authoritarian forced-march mobilizational nationalisms to date. For Nairn, nationalism remains a kind of “pathology of modern developmental history.” Its irrational, populist appeals to a venerable and noble past represents only one face of this modern Janus; the other is inextricably bound up with the a future characterized by the material progress of modernity.

Nairn’s account provides a convincing explanation concerning the relation-ship between the global spread of capitalism and the creation of nations and nationalism. His identification of the impact of the uneven spread of capitalism across the globe marks a significant advance on many Marxist and Liberal accounts which have so far failed to explain convincingly why the international-ization of capitalism was accompanied by the seemingly permanent division of the world into nation-states. In a clear advance on Gellner’s approach, Nairn shows how nationalism is not simply the ideology of industrialism but an ideol-ogy which is involved in the attainment of industrialization. It is as much an ide-ology of modernization as an ideology of modernity.

The major weakness in Nairn’s work lies in his reduction of non-economic variables to the realm of irrationalism. It is owing to this tendency that his approach fails to explain why some peripheralized areas produce nationalisms whilst some do not. Within the British context, for example, economically peripheral areas such as northern England have never developed their own nationalisms, although, when such peripherality has combined with cultural and ethnic differences, as in Wales and Scotland, nationalisms have arisen. The inability to deal adequately with non-economic variables is deeply rooted in Nairn’s negative characterization of ideology in general. Equating it with false consciousness, the ideological content of nationalism is dismissed as no more than irrational sentimentalism encouraged by peripheral elites in order to con-ceal the real cause behind the spread of nationalism: uneven development and

1. Nairn, T. (1981) The Break-Up of Britain, p. 344.

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the attempts by some to overcome its negative effects. Clearly, differential responses to peripherality do relate to a coincidence with distinct ethnic and cultural identities. However irrational they may be to those who wish to expose the mythic foundations of many nationalisms, the force which they have in mobilizing whole populations, for good or evil, suggests that these foundations should not simply be dismissed as epiphenomenal. The rise of nationalisms on the Celtic fringes of Britain, and the lack of such sentiments amongst those southern Italians who remain poor neighbors to their northern compatriots, could not simply be explained through reference to the criteria of uneven devel-opment. Nairn’s model might provide a more appropriate explanatory approach to the rise of anti-colonial nationalisms in the context of imperialist exploita-tion. It is rather less convincing, however, when applied to economic inequalities amongst regions within the same economy, state or society.1

Whatever his contribution to the understanding of the spread of national-ism may have been, Nairn, like Gellner before him, fails to provide an adequate understanding of the nation as an autonomous cultural entity. If the nation is an entity which is largely the result of cultural processes, then this is not surprising. The tendency to equate such non-economic factors to irrational, and therefore irrelevant, sentiments has produced a built-in inability to adequately address such a cultural entity like the nation. The nation remains epiphenomenal in Nairn’s approach. It should, however, be central to any thesis on nationalism. We can only gain a proper understanding of how nationalism works when we have reached an accurate understanding of what the nation is.

3. ANTHONY GIDDENS: THE NATION-STATE AND VIOLENCE

A more institutional approach to nations and nationalism can be been found in the work by Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: A Contemporary Cri-tique of Historical Materialism Volume II (1985). Writing from a neo-Weberian per-spective, Giddens seeks to distinguish between nationalism, which, for him, is largely a psychological phenomenon and the nation, which can only be under-stood in relation to the state. Although he acknowledges the importance of capi-talism, industrialism and modernization to any discussion of the subject, he points out that the feature that distinguishes modern nations from all previous political communities is their territorial integrity, something which is guaran-

1. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence: A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materi-alism Volume II (Cambridge, Polity Press), p. 213.

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teed by the modern state. For Giddens, therefore, modern nations are always nation-states.1

Being critical of the tendency of many social scientists to treat nations and nationalism as largely synonymous, Giddens’ approach establishes a clear ana-lytical distinction between the two. He gives the following definition of the nation:

The nation-state, which exists in a complex of other nation-states, is a set of institutional forms of governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence.2

Central to this definition is Giddens’ understanding of the origins, nature and workings of the modern state. It is important to stress, however, that his study relates exclusively to the West and concentrates on the transition from absolutist states to modern nation-states in Europe. It was absolutism which initiated a movement away from imprecise frontiers between states which had existed during the feudal period and towards fixed borders which were moni-tored by each state through the new technique of international diplomacy, the first example being the Congress of Westphalia (1648). This event marked the beginnings of a series of treaties which ended the patchwork of fiefdoms and principalities that had characterized feudal Europe, ensuring that states would exercise sovereignty over a continuous stretch of territory. In terms of the terri-torialization and stabilization of the European state system, this emerging sys-tem of external monitoring was “as consequential for the development of modern societies as that of the ‘hidden hand’ in the sphere of economic relations.”3

The establishment of the inter-state system had been accompanied by trans-formations within societies which led to the centralization of authority into the hands of a single sovereign body, the state.4 According to Giddens, sovereignty continued to be symbolized by the monarch, yet the expansion of centralized administrative apparatuses under absolutism shifted the exercise of power away from a single individual and into the realms of the administrative apparatuses of the state. This process was not conflict free, however. As the coordinated spread of the state’s authority began, it had to confront a multitude of local sovereign-ties, such as peasant councils, communes, religious authorities and city parlia-ments. A number of strategies seem to have been adopted to overcome potential opposition. Localities were granted concessions such as autonomy in return for a pledge to adhere to the more generalized governmental and legal frameworks of

1. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 116.2. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 121.3. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 87.4. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 94.

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the state. Local entrepreneurs also made strategic alliances with the state against the predominantly conservative interests of aristocrats and guilds represented on localized political bodies which sought to maintain restrictive controls on commerce. Violent repression was also to play its part. The consequences of this was a “displacement of authority upwards, considerably strengthening the cen-tralised apparatus of royal power.”1

Although many social scientists identify the emergence of capitalism as the primary force behind the centralization and nationalization of state authority, Giddens treats economic factors as less important in this process than the need for the state to monopolize the means of violence within the society over which it exercises sovereignty. In order to monitor effectively its borders, and ulti-mately survive in a hostile inter-state system, the absolutist state began to re-organize the whole apparatus of making war, dissolving autonomous clusters of military power within society, centralizing such power, and pointing it out-wards against other states.2 The low levels of weapons technology and commu-nications infrastructure militated against the existence of large, mobile, standing armies during the medieval period. In times of rebellion, the monarch could mus-ter armies for short periods, yet under normal circumstances order was upheld by local armies, usually located in cities or feudal fiefdoms which were under the direct command of local nobles rather than the monarch. Advances in weapons technology, especially in the realm of muskets and artillery, made cities and for-tified positions largely obsolete. These were accompanied by new techniques of warfare, especially the introduction of what Giddens refers to as disciplinary regimes that enabled absolutism to initiate the building of coordinated mass standing armies which could engage in mobile warfare.3 Order could now be maintained on a more regularized and constant basis by the state, a development which reduced the need for the existence of localized military power com-manded by autonomous agents. This process led to the gradual internal pacifica-tion of European societies and the monopolization of such power in the hands of the state.

Giddens identifies the constant need to monitor, police and defend the bor-ders of the state’s territory within the new inter-state system as providing the main impetus for the internal pacification of European societies. Making war, or preparing to make war, became essential for a state’s survival. Thus, although societies had been pacified internally, the means of violence had not declined but had instead been re-organized and concentrated in an outwards direction. It was the accomplishment of this goal that led absolutism to exhibit the centralizing

1. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 97.2. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 192.3. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, pp. 107-114.

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and bureaucratic tendencies that it did. This especially relates to ensuring the availability of the financial and material means, as well as the social conditions of order, necessary to undertake military activities in the inter-state system. In the process of war-making, the regularization and homogenization of what are now basic functions of the state, such as tax collection, the money system, and the legal system became essential. Although this did not amount to the administra-tive character which modern nation-states were to take on, it did mean that the state’s presence in people’s lives became more regular.

The pace of centralization quickened with the advent of the French Revolu-tion and the Napoleonic Wars. It is this period which sees the maturing of many of the features of absolutism into what we now recognize to be modern nation-states. What is notable about Napoleon’s military activities across Europe is the fact that, whilst France may have exercised authority over the states which it conquered, France itself did not incorporate conquered territories into its own: “Absolutist France is the first example of a state that played a directive role in European politics without becoming a transnational entity of the old type, and thus genuinely ushered in the beginnings of the modern era.”1

What is integral to Giddens’ definition of the nation is its territorial bound-edness, something which is both initiated and sustained by the state in the con-text of an inter-state system. Thus, modern nations are, by their very nature, nation-states. They have their provenance in the period of European absolutism and revolutionary warfare which marked the beginning of the nineteenth cen-tury. The latter period provided the technology necessary for the centralizing disciplinary doctrines utilized by absolutism to administer, in a coordinated fashion, human activities across time and territorial space. In this process, the spread of literacy played a significant role, as communication across national ter-ritories would have been impossible without it. The distanciation of information from the context of its immediate oral production required a reading public.2

For Giddens, it is territorial unity and the state’s centralized administrative mode of operation which ensured the integrity of that unity, and which provided the impetus for nationalism. Pre-modern forms of group identity were largely localized and exclusionary, with small tribe, village and city communities solidi-fying around contrasts with outsiders. This process is reinforced by genealogical myths of common and distinct descent and kinship. According to Giddens, the fact that nationalism first arose in France, the most centralized absolutist state in Europe, was no historical accident. The role of the centralizing state was crit-ical in this, especially in the breaking down of localized or provincial identities

1. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 104.2. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 210.

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and the achievement of territorial unification. The breakdown of such localized identities, together with the increasing depersonalization characteristic of social relations in national societies, risks the growth of anomie amongst a population who can no longer depend on their traditional sources of “ontological security.” It is this breaking down of traditional forms of identity by an increasingly inva-sive, bureaucratic national state that forms the foundations of nationalist senti-ments:

The disintegrative impact which is wrought upon pre-existing traditional cul-tures by modern economic and political development creates a search for renewed forms of group symbolism, of which nationalism is the most potent. Nationalismengenders a spirit of solidarity and collective commitment which is energetically mobilising in circumstance of cultural decay.1

It is only once this “search for renewed forms of group symbolism” has been initiated that those doctrines which are normally identified as being central for the generation of nationalism begin to play an important role. Thus, Enlighten-ment doctrines such as citizenship colonized an existing space left over by the erosion of older sources of group identity.

For Giddens, the degree to which nationalist sentiments occupy an overt position in people’s daily consciousness will depend on the status of their onto-logical security. If this security is threatened in some way, nationalism tends to become more regressive and authoritarian. By referring to psychological models of leadership developed by Freud, Giddens suggests that it is in the context of growing ontological insecurity that individuals become susceptible to suggest-ibility by charismatic leaders. It is for these reasons that nationalism can be both progressive, socially inclusive and the bearer of Enlightenment doctrines, yet at other times can be authoritarian, exclusionary and fascistic.

Although both Gellner and Nairn correctly identified the critical role of the state in the formation of nations and nationalism, they did not provide a detailed analysis of that role. By focusing on the state, Giddens demonstrates its forma-tive role in the building of nations and the fostering of nationalism, independent of economic explanatory factors. Criticism can be leveled at Giddens’ approach however, for, whatever his stated intention, the weight of his analysis is placed on the state at the expense of the nation. Nations and nationalism can be nur-tured through cultural movements rather than the institutional processes of the state, as illustrated by the Italian Risorgimento. The foundation of modern Ger-many and Italy seems to reverse the order discussed by most state-centered explanations of nations and nationalism. In these cases, the sense of nation pre-ceded and assisted in the building of a national state. Furthermore, when states

1. Giddens, A. (1992) The Nation-State and Violence, p. 215.

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collapse, as they did in Italy, Germany and Japan in the mid-1940s, their respec-tive nations did not follow suit. These criticisms emerge because Giddens’ con-ception of the nation, as well as nationalism, depends exclusively on an institutional analysis of the state. The nation and nationalism exist as props for the state which enable it to survive in a hostile inter-state system. They have no autonomous role of their own. How the subjective loyalties and passions which constitute nationalism come to be attached to the state’s sovereignty, for exam-ple, cannot be totally reduced to institutional factors but relate to cultural pro-cesses that possess a degree of autonomy from the state. The modern administrative state may indeed thoroughly penetrate the societies over which it exercises sovereignty, yet this is not a uni-directional process and there is plenty of evidence that nations possess a significant degree of autonomy from the con-scious, rational workings of the state. As with Gellner and Nairn, Giddens repeats their failure to discuss the nation in its own terms. Although all three of these authors recognize that culture does play some part in the formation of nations, they all exhibit an ambiguous or negative attitude towards it in their analyses, preferring instead to concentrate on economic or political factors.

4. BENEDICT ANDERSON: IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

In his work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-ism (1991), Anderson provides the following definition of the nation: the nation is an “imagined political community — and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”1 It is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members..., yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” The nation is “limited” because it is never imag-ined as being “coterminous with mankind,” and it is imagined as “sovereign” because it arose in an age where the People were replacing the divine right of monarchs as the source of paramount legitimacy, a product of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Finally, the nation is a “community,” because despite “the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.”2

To understand the origin and spread of nationalism, Anderson suggests that it should be aligned to the great cultural systems which preceded it, rather than with political ideologies such as liberalism or fascism. Pre-modern reli-gious world-views held a propensity to provide answers to cosmological ques-

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 6.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, pp. 6-7.

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tions about the meaning of life and death and the presence of suffering, which evolutionary political ideologies such as liberalism have little time for. Although religious explanations lost most of their persuasive power with the rise of secu-lar rationalism, questions over life, death and suffering undeniably remained part of the human condition, making fatality seem ever more arbitrary. Ander-son suggests that nationalism provided a kind of modern, secular equivalent to religion’s ability to generate a sense of place and belonging to an immemorial past and a limitless future. The appeal of nationalism is not due to the self-con-scious activities of nationalists but to its propensity to turn arbitrary fatality into meaning.1 Religious communities had been imaginable through sacred lan-guages, Church Latin or Qur’anic Arabic for example, although Anderson acknowledges that those who could actually read sacred scripts constituted only a tiny minority. Yet these readers occupied a central position in their respective communities. Through their ability to read in Latin and to speak ver-naculars, Catholic priests became the intermediaries in the cosmological hierar-chy between God and the rest of humanity. The strategic position of clerics in Christendom helps to explain the great territorial expanse of authority which the papacy once exercised.2

The hierarchical nature of religious communities was mirrored by the other great communities of the pre-modern world spoken of by Anderson, that of dynastic communities based around the notion of kinship with a single dynast, usually with some divine affinities, at its apex. As observed by Giddens, the notion of a bounded contiguous territory as the basis of the nation was foreign to the Middle Ages and early absolutism. In a world where territories were not “legally demarcated” and “borders were porous and indistinct” with sovereign-ties fading “imperceptibly into one another,” it was kinship that provided the raw materials through which communion was imagined. At this time it made less sense to refer to individual dynasts by nationality than by Houses or family name: Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Romanovs provide three European exam-ples. It was only in the twentieth century that the House of Saxa-Coburg-Gotha, for instance, became exclusively associated with the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.3

The conqueror of these religious and dynastic realms was not a political movement but the transformative impact of print-capitalism. Here, Anderson is not referring to changes in the mode of production which necessitated a re-orga-nization of society along national lines but to the wider cultural impact which

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 14.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 15.3. In 1914, the House of Saxa-Coburg-Gotha became the House of Windsor, thus shedding

its trans-national kinship ties, especially with Germany.

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capitalism was to have on consciousness. The development of “print-as-commod-ity” was to break the authority enjoyed by the sacred scripts of religious commu-nities and lead to an apprehension of time which transformed the perception of societies from hierarchical structures to horizontal structures. Europe’s print market had been confined to the servicing of a “wide but thin stratum of Latin-readers,” which was easily saturated. In pursuit of profits, and assisted by the Reformation, print capitalists began to print in vernaculars:

The coalition between Protestantism and print-capitalism, exploiting cheap popular editions, quickly created large new reading publics — not least among mer-chants and women, who typically knew little or no Latin — and simultaneously mobilised them for politico-religious purposes. Inevitably, it was not merely the Church that was shaken to its core. 1

During the slow centralization of states which characterized the period of absolutism in Europe, Latin was replaced by vernaculars as “instruments of administrative centralization.” At this stage, the adoption of vernaculars was a haphazard affair, yet the advent of print-capitalism was to create mass monoglot reading publics. Europe was dotted with diverse languages, none of which could be said to have belonged to a given territory, as is often said of languages today. Print-capitalism was to produce a standardized print vernacular, which all its speakers, despite a variety of idiolects, could read, creating a field of communica-tion which was essential for the creation of a national consciousness. Through the spread of a standardized print-language, in the form of novels and newspa-pers, language itself became the vehicle through which to discern the absence or presence of shared affinities with others. The large religious community of Christendom, bound together by the truth of sacred Church Latin scripts, was fragmenting, to be replaced by a plurality of territorialized communities which had been brought into being largely as a result of the impact of print-capitalism.2

The fracturing of religious communities may have been attributable to the activities of print-capitalists but the ability to imagine the sociological concept of society was dependent on technological innovations in the measuring of time that led to a change in the very apprehension of time itself; from “Messianic time” to “homogeneous empty time.” Messianic time was based on the religious conception of an eternal repetition of events in time with the future as a “prefig-ured fulfilment.” Importantly, simultaneity is experienced along time, with no “radical separations between past and future.” In contrast, homogeneous empty time is contingently filled by human practices and measured by clocks and cal-endars. Its essential connection with the imagining of a nation is its ability to allow the comprehension of simultaneity across time rather than along it. With-

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 40.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 44.

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out these changes in the apprehension of time, Anderson argues that the notion of “meanwhile,” so taken for granted in the modern age, would have been unimaginable. In this sense, a new temporal understanding made it possible to conceive of a society: a group of strangers simultaneously engaged in different activities but brought together as a community progressing through time at the same measured rate by the print media’s reporting of daily events in a linguisti-cally demarcated territory. Those featured in novels and newspapers were repre-sented as fellow citizens, read about in a particular language; the interest of such news had a particular resonance to members of the same linguistic group — and visibly so, since the same newspapers and stories can be seen in the numerous shops, subways and offices which make up an individual’s physical life world. The imagined world of the newspaper is one which is ontologically existent:

At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is con-tinually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life…fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.1

Without this “half-fortuitous” encounter between human fatality, linguistic diversity and print-capitalism, there could have been no imagining of the nation. In this sense, nationalism does not self-consciously invent the nation, as some have suggested. Thinking in national terms is a cultural product of modernity rather than the result of political activity on the part of nationalists. Anderson does, however, qualify this point when addressing nations of a more recent prov-enance. He identifies two types of self-conscious nationalisms where the state was a primary mover in consciously shaping the nation. These were the official nationalisms of Czardom or Atatürk’s Turkey and the anti-colonial nationalisms of the post-1945 era, what he refers to as the “Last Wave.” Owing to their self-conscious nature, Anderson describes them as being of a “Machiavellian spirit,” since they represented modular copies of the first examples in the Americas and Europe, yet were intimately connected to claims of dominion and power that “developed after, and in reaction to, the popular national movements proliferat-ing in Europe since the 1820s.”2 Speaking of twentieth-century anti-colonial nationalism, Anderson identifies the colonial state as the formative agent which created a system of bounded territories, and a native intelligentsia whose colo-nial education granted them the powerful weapon of bilingualism and access to the texts and doctrines of the Enlightenment, which had been so central to the popular nationalisms of Europe. It was these intelligentsias who were to foster dreams of liberation and nationhood.3

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, pp. 35-36.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 86.

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These native intelligentsias were assisted by the cultural work carried out by the colonial state, especially the writing of anthropologies and archaeologies of native peoples. Not only did these grant a sense of historical identity and belonging to a particular place but these constructed histories were given public representation through the institution of the museum. In the context of mass illiteracy, the majority of the population simply could not constitute an audience for the literary devices that Anderson identified as being of seminal importance in imagining the nation, it was the maps, museums and censuses commissioned by the colonial state which made it possible for these masses to imagine them-selves as part of a national community. Indeed, many of those scholars who have subsequently sought to develop Anderson’s ideas have concentrated on symbolic media such as public festivals, flags, radio broadcasts, routines and habits, which make up aspects of a nationally imagined community. These forms of communi-cation were better suited to the mass of potential citizens whose illiteracy diminished the power of those literary devices that had been so central in enabling the idea of nation-ness to permeate the élites.

Through reference to the cultural processes found under the condition of modernity, Anderson demonstrates how the nation came to occupy a position of universal legitimacy, as the most important element in making sense of one’s place and identity in the world. Given this characteristic of the modern era, one can then see why this era has been described as the age of nationalism. In a world divided into nations, politics must be conducted along national lines, since “nation-ness is virtually inseparable from political consciousness.”1 It is for this reason that all political projects are nationalist, be they liberal, socialist or fas-cist. Problems emerge when one considers the fact that, in the areas which Anderson identifies as being the genus of nationalism, Europe and what was to become Latin America, populations were largely illiterate and could not consti-tute an audience for the written texts so vital in conceiving of communion in national terms. Many rituals and symbolic representations also provide critical supports for the nation and vehicles for the expression of nationalism; yet, apart from maps, museums and censuses, Anderson fails to discuss them in any detail.

There is also an ambiguity over Anderson’s treatment of nations, national-ism and power relations. Why should some nationalisms be genuine and popu-lar, whilst others may be Machiavellian? For Anderson, nationalism was a framework within which political ideologies were operationalized in a world imagined as a series of distinct national units. From this perspective, nationalism is not an ideology but the mode in which modern politics are conceived and

3. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 140. Anderson uses the term Creole instead of the term “mestizo”.

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 135.

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exercised. Rather than seeing official and revolutionary nationalisms as in some sense ingenuine because they are often due to the conscious efforts of political actors, an emphasis should be placed on the style of imagining. Nations and nationalism cannot be understood as the results of political ideologies, yet understanding the political character and identity they take on, as all nationally imagined political communities do, requires an analysis of the political ideolo-gies which have shaped the style of their imagining. Through the writing of his-tory or the celebration of heroes, the imagining process always gives the nation a particular typical identity which is deemed nationally specific. It is through such interpolative activities that the idea of a national character, or subjectivity, comes into being. Yet whose interests such subjectivities serve is neither raised nor answered by Anderson. Although nations are portrayed as being character-ized by a “deep horizontal comradeship,” this covers over how nationalism imag-ines away “the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each.”1

5. CONCLUSION: MODERNITY AND NATIONALISM

Despite the differences which exist between all of the approaches discussed in this chapter, they share one assumption in common: the modern provenance of nations and nationalism. Few societies before 1800 exhibited the territorial and political unity now common to modern nations, and even fewer political movements sought power on the basis of an appeal to just such an entity or doc-trine.2 Although many nationalists claim primordial origins for their nations, such claims are often constructing backwards projections since many of the symbols, rituals and historical events which they use in their nationalist reper-toires were not conceived of in national terms at the time of their original cur-rency. Framing such evidence in national terms only came later, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Each of the above approaches has tended to concentrate on one particular dimension of modernity: modernization, in terms of either industrialism or capi-talism, the institutional state and homogenized cultural identities. Moderniza-tion was to tear traditional societies apart, yet by itself cannot be used as the explanatory factor behind their replacement by modern nations. A critical role in this process was played by the absolutist and colonial state, which promoted the

1. Stewart-Sweet, S. “Book Review” in Telos (Summer 1984) Vol. 60, p. 230. This point is also made by Palmer, S. (1990), p. 28.

2. Breuilly, J. (1999) “Nationalism and Modernity” in Müller, J. & Stråth, B. (eds.) (1999) Nationalism and Modernity (Department of History and Civilization, European Univer-sity Institute Working Papers, Florence), p. 42.

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clear division of the world into a series of legally demarcated, contiguous territo-ries, over which a single sovereign body held sway. Yet the emotional appeal of the nation on which nationalism counts for its mobilizational power cannot be explained by reference to state structures and institutions alone. These bonds between individual and nation find their expression in the cultural productions of societies which create emotional attachments to the idea of the nation. As has been pointed out throughout, some of these approaches concentrate on the state more than the idea of the nation, whilst others are more successful in disclosing the autonomy between the two. Finally, each of these approaches has provided insights into why nations and nationalism arose, how they arose and why they became universal.

All of the points drawn out by the various approaches discussed in this chapter possess a degree of relevance to the following discussion. The lack of ter-ritorial boundedness due to the historical novelty of Nicaragua as a national entity was the first hurdle which had to be overcome, one which required the formation of a state that was seen to be the legitimate representative of the mes-tizo population who bore the independence project. War against imperial inter-lopers clearly played an important role in this but a whole range of interpolative devices were simultaneously employed to make it possible to think about Nica-ragua in national terms. The celebration of military victories through public hol-idays, the writing of national histories, the drawing of maps of the republic and the introduction of print media all contributed to these first fragile national imaginings. Although the process of nation-building in general has been highly problematic in the case of Nicaragua, the establishment of legally recognized borders, guarded and guaranteed by the inter-state system, has been less prob-lematic since the turn of the twentieth century than the cultural/ideological dimensions. The Nicaraguan state had undergone various improvements under the auspices of local and extra-regional sponsors, the most effective and wide ranging examples being the Liberal revolution of José Santos Zelaya (1892-1909) and the Somocista dictatorship (1937-1979). However, whilst Zelaya’s state-building policies were also accompanied by cultural-ideological projects prima-rily concerned with the construction of a ethnically homogeneous, politically liberal, and culturally distinct nation, whose interests were seen to be embodied in the state, it is precisely this state-nation relation that was to become so prob-lematic during the Somocista period.

As will be seen in Chapter 2, the Somocista state had its origins in the US Marine occupation of Nicaragua (1926-33). Under the Somoza family, the US built-up the apparatuses of the Nicaraguan state to an unprecedented degree. It was, however, an essentially repressive process largely, although not exclusively, aimed at policing the political status quo established after the death of Sandino

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in 1934 that was so favorable to US interests in the region. In this sense, the whole nation-building politics of the state were brought into question. If nation-states are such because of their capacity to speak for, defend and promote a dis-tinctive cultural entity, then the Somocista state was not among their number. As has been observed throughout this chapter, the state is a set of institutional apparatuses; it is not a community. The Somozas were to preside over what I will term a client state, where the locale of sovereignty was not the Nicaraguan nation but the US State Department. Whilst state-building proceeded apace, it was only to embark upon those cultural projects which would help secure the basic interests which remained at the heart of the Somocista state, the servicing of US regional interests. Imagining the nation as a distinct cultural entity, and one which had distinct interests of its own, came to an abrupt end with the over-throw of the Zelaya administration in 1909. This process was not to re-emerge again until 1979, when the Sandinistas took power. It is for this reason that this book will draw extensively on the work of Benedict Anderson, since it is not so much the political construction of the state which is the issue that it seeks to address but the unfinished task of constructing a nation as a cultural community with a unique history, which was autonomous and distinct from all others, and whose members identified themselves as such.

Despite Nicaragua’s formal independence in 1838, I will treat the Sandinis-tas’ revolutionary nationalism as having similar characteristics to what Ander-son referred to as the Last Wave, the anti-colonial nation-building nationalisms which swept across the globe from 1945. Under US patronage, the Nicaraguan state developed the basic administrative apparatus and territorial integrity on which the Sandinistas were to operationalize a revolutionary nationalism that was self-consciously to construct an anti-imperialist, sovereign nation. It was through the construction of such a nation that the Sandinistas hoped to mobilize a whole society in pursuit of their modernization project. For these reasons, Anderson’s ideas on imagining national communities provides the best frame-work through which to gain a comprehensive understanding of the origins and nature of the Sandinista revolution. The first and most pressing task of the revo-lution was to build a society seemingly bound together by a common history, culture and political identity, and one that possessed a common interest that was seen to be embodied in the state. The idea of the nation engendered by the Sandinistas’ nationalism was to provide the basic framework and limits of that community and was the pillar on which their socialist program of modernization and development would rest.

In line with many of those works that have applied Anderson’s model beyond the novel and the newspaper on which his own discussion concentrated, I utilize a different set of devices to illustrate the value of his approach. These

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devices came into being during the revolutionary government’s first major project, the National Literacy Crusade. The pedagogic content of the National Literacy Crusade forms only background information. I am far more interested in the events which filled that time, saturated as it was by so many literary and visual devices to make the people conceive themselves part of a national commu-nity as never before. It is the day-to-day and increasingly mundane imagining of “a deep horizontal comradeship” based around the idea of the nation that I am interested in discussing. The analysis of the National Literacy Crusade provides yet another avenue through which to explore Anderson’s ideas on the nation as an imagined political community. However, taking on board some of the obser-vations of his critics, I will also be concerned with the style in which the Nicara-guan nation was imagined. In this way, the power relations inherent in all national imagining processes will become clearer. Only by analyzing the class content of various nation-building projects can the process by which Nicaragua came to be imagined as a culturally and historically distinct national entity be fully and comprehensively understood — and only by understanding the failure to complete this task during the nineteenth century can one understand the ori-gins of the Sandinista revolution in the twentieth century.

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CHAPTER 2. FROM INDEPENDENCE TO CLIENT STATE

With the collapse of the Kingdom of Guatemala and the ending of the colo-nial period in 1821, the province of Nicaragua became part of the United Prov-inces of Central America. However, the inability of the five provinces that made up this new republic to work together led to its own collapse in 1838. Thus it was by historical accident, rather than the intentions of any particular group, that Nicaragua first began to be seen as an independent nation. No one had fought for its nationhood and, even after 1838, few saw Nicaragua in terms of a nation. For the remainder of the nineteenth century, and indeed well into the twentieth century, the mestizo population of this new state was to be preoccu-pied by the search for a distinctive identity which would form the basis of a Nic-araguan nation sui generis. Through a series of dramatic and violent events, the first tentative imaginings of nation-ness in relation to Nicaragua can be traced. During the period beginning with the Thirty Conservative Years and ending with the overthrow of the Liberal Revolution (1893-1909), Nicaragua became both a recognizable geopolitical entity and a socio-cultural community. It is dur-ing this period that the state began to engage in a range of activities to propagate an official nationalism that actively engaged in constructing the nation. Within such an official nationalism, geographic factors were to take on a particularly central role. The existence of a possible inter-oceanic canal route within this new country allowed for the dissemination of a shared sense of historical destiny amongst the mestizo population, a cosmopolitan destiny characterized by com-mercial wealth and progress. The reality was, however, quite the opposite. A canal project of such international importance brought with it repeated episodes of foreign intervention from aggressive imperial powers operating in the region.

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It was as a result of such interventions by the US that the Sandino rebellion of 1927-1933 took place. For his detractors, Sandino represented the remnants of an uncivilized, barbarous past and he was commonly dismissed as a bandit. The alternative narrative, one which could be said to constitute the official FSLN ver-sion, is that of the selfless patriot, whose crazy little army managed to force the withdrawal of a better trained and armed foreign invader from Nicaragua. Some forty years after his assassination, it was this mythic guerrilla figure who was to form the basic foundation of the mobilizing nationalism of the FSLN in their own struggle against the same foreign enemy and its Nicaraguan allies.

With the overthrow of Somocismo in 1979 and the electoral defeat of the Sandinista government in 1990, a number of recent accounts of the Sandinorebellion have attempted to overcome the bandit-patriot dichotomy, success-fully revealing a number of elements which had been marginalized, often deliber-ately, within these narratives. The selective memory of many historians and political actors had, until recently, prevented the discussion of evidence that did not fit easily into either of the two narratives. By moving away from the themes of bandit and patriotic guerrilla leader, recent approaches have disclosed a num-ber of features that are of particular value in linking the Sandino rebellion to the failure of nation-building during the nineteenth century. By re-locating the San-dino rebellion within its own time and place, many of the recent accounts have stripped away the mystique which surrounds it and revealed the connections it shared with the less romantic, and indeed extremely authoritarian and violent, political culture of early twentieth-century Nicaragua. Perhaps more impor-tantly, these studies have examined the short-lived civil struggle in which Sand-ino was engaged. At its centerpiece was the experimental cooperative established in the Segovias after the signing of peace accords in 1933. The assassi-nation of Sandino ended this civil struggle and heralded a new era of subjugation to US regional interests that was to last forty-two years.

1. THE AGE OF ANARCHY

The period 1821-1857 is commonly referred to the Age of Anarchy, with twenty-five out of these thirty-six years characterized by internecine civil wars. Civil wars between the Nicaraguan cities of León and Granada had made their own particular contribution to the failure of the Central American Federation. Yet, even after 1838, these cities continued to act as rival centers of power. The first attempts to consolidate the Nicaraguan state were initiated by Supreme Directors José León Sandoval (1845-47) and Fruto Chamorro (1853-55). These two administrations, both Conservative, rationalized the state by establishing

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Chapter 2. From Independence to Client State

separate ministries of finance, war and exterior relations under Sandoval, and imposing a reasonably effective system of tariffs on alcohol sales under Chamorro. The latter measure significantly improved state finances. However, such reforming administrations tended to provoke hostility from their political enemies. The immediate causes of the National War (1854-57) can be attributed to the arbitrary dissolution of the Nicaraguan Constituent Assembly and the enactment of major constitutional reforms by Fruto Chamorro.1 With Chamorro winning a majority in the Constituent Assembly, he embarked on a reform pro-gram aimed at increasing the powers of the Supreme Director, an office which he renamed president. These actions led to open rebellion on the part of Liberals, who claimed that they contravened the principle of individual liberty. Establish-ing an alternative government in León in 1854 under Francisco Castellón, Nica-ragua’s Liberals then recruited a group of North American mercenaries led by William Walker to fight their Granadan Conservative rivals. Regional forces were already involved in the conflict, with Guatemalan Conservatives assisting the Granadans and Salvadorian Liberals assisting the Leónese. After defeating the Granadans, a Liberal government under Patricio Rivas was established in 1855. However, Walker turned on his Liberal patrons, replacing Rivas with Fer-mín Ferrer as president in 1856, and then took the position for himself in the same year. As head of the Nicaraguan state, Walker reintroduced slavery and established English as the official language. His ambitions of regional domina-tion united the rest of Central America against him. The Central Americans were then joined by a powerful ally, Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose Accessory Transit Company had been seized by Walker. As president, Walker revoked Vander-bilt’s concession to run ships along the waterways of southern Nicaragua on the grounds that the company had failed to pay any of the taxes which had been agreed upon during the negotiations for the concession.

The fight against Walker, referred to as the National War, acted as a cata-lyst to unite Nicaragua’s feuding élites. Forced together by the threat posed by Walker, and the pressure exerted by other Central American governments, a joint Liberal-Conservative government was formed in 1857 under the leadership of Máximo Jeréz and Tomás Martínez. Martínez continued in the presidency until 1867 with the general consent of all parties.

1. Díaz, A. (1996) Gobernantes de Nicaragua (1821-1956): guía para el estudio de sus biografías políticas (Managua, Aldila Editor), p. 49.

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2. THE INTER-OCEANIC CANAL IN THE NATIONAL IMAGINATION

The idea of an inter-oceanic canal had been proposed as early as the 1780s, although discussion about the feasibility of the project grew only after indepen-dence. The proposed route took advantage of Nicaragua’s geography, with the San Juan River offering a natural waterway from the Caribbean Coast to the western shores of Lake Cocibolca (Lake Nicaragua), leaving a remaining 18-mile strip of land through which a canal would be carved to the Pacific Coast. The process of national imagining in nineteenth-century Nicaragua was intimately linked with this geography.1

By the mid-nineteenth century, the canal project was as much a political as an economic project, connected with territorial, economic and political aggran-dizement. It can be seen as a universal project which possessed the potential to convert Nicaragua into a distinct cosmopolitan nation, economically and cultur-ally enriched by world trade and foreign immigration. Not only would the water-way provide the great trading nations of the world with a vital link between two oceans but it would also facilitate the growth of an export economy within Nic-aragua itself. Writing in 1822, the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was to testify to such aspirations with his elaborate proposals for the colonization of the banks of the San Juan River by European immigrants who would bring with them advanced technology and, above all, civilization. 2

The local élites were not the only groups who recognized the strategic importance of an inter-oceanic canal. Such a valuable waterway also occupied a strategic position within the geopolitical ambitions of imperial powers. Under these circumstances, the promotion of the canal project posed a potential threat to the consolidation of Nicaragua. Firstly, any inter-oceanic canal would require the involvement of a foreign power, given the impossibility of financing the canal route from internal resources. The search for funds inevitably brought with it a danger to sovereignty and territorial integrity for the incipient Nicaraguan state. Walker was only the first but perhaps the most devastating example. Secondly, this perceived threat was to re-ignite the question of Central American Union-ism as the best defense against aggressive imperial powers.3

The war against Walker is illustrative of both of these points. The occupa-tion by the filibuster came to reinforce a sense of collective identity, not only at the level of the governing classes but also amongst the masses who had been

1. Kinlock, F. “El canal interoceanico en el imaginario nacional. Nicaragua, Siglo XIX” in Taller de historia: nación y étnica. identidad natural o creación cultural? (1994) No. 6, p. 40.

2. Williford, M. “Utilitarian Design for the New World: Bentham’s Plan for a Nicaraguan Canal” in The Americas (1970) No. 27, pp. 80-81.

3. Kinlock, F. (1994) El canal interoceanico, p. 40.

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drawn into the fight against Walker. For the first time, mestizos and Indians fought on the same side against a common enemy. Nevertheless, to the degree that a national consensus emerged during the National War, it could not be interpreted as the convergence of a clearly defined national project. The cultural and economic activities of the popular sectors remained distinct from the élites and, even within the governing class, there was a vacillation between distinct strategies for assuring national sovereignty; Central American Unionism or soliciting the protection of a European power.1 As a nation-building project, the inter-oceanic canal illustrates the persistent elusiveness of the nation. The fight against the Other which culminated from the attempt to realize Nicaragua’s his-toric destiny as a center of world commerce had enhanced the perception of Nic-aragua as a nation amongst many sectors. However, the impact of these conflicts should not be over-estimated. Due to the form which this conflict took on, a regional war against the filibuster Walker, Nicaragua’s fortunes continued to be bound up with the larger Central American community.

3. THE THIRTY CONSERVATIVE YEARS

The Thirty Conservative Years (1857-1893), inaugurated the first period of sustained stability since independence from Spain. This period of stability was itself a product of the absence of any major foreign intervention. With the sign-ing of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850) British pretensions to construct an inter-oceanic canal through Nicaragua ended, whilst active intervention by the United States was curtailed by its own embroilment in a civil war. With a degree of consensus existing amongst the mestizo élites, efforts were quickly undertaken to reinforce and expand it by representing the state as the center of the collective interests of this community. This was attempted through the pro-motion and publication of official histories, the establishment of a civil census, and the elaboration of a map of the republic.2 In 1865, the second administration of General Tomás Martínez patronized the publication of the Memories of the His-tory of the Revolution of Nicaragua in 1854 and the following administration of Fernando Guzmán continued this work with the publication of the Geographic and Economic Notes About the Republic of Nicaragua (1868) by Pablo Levy, which took on the form of an inventory of the country’s resources. At the close of the Thirty Years period, the government of Evaristo Carazo patronized a course about the history of Nicaragua which was subsequently published in 1882. The theme of

1. Kinlock, F. (1994) El canal interoceanico, p. 45.2. Herrera, M. “Nacionalismo e historiografía sobre la guerra del 56. Nicaragua, 1850-1889”

in Revista de Historia (1992-1993) No. 2, p. 36.

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the National War predominated, with the celebration of those figures who had played a part in the defeat of Walker. By retelling the actions of Andrés Castro, the unarmed Nicaraguan peasant who had killed one of Walker’s troops with a rock, a myth was created that came to symbolize the small nation of Nicaragua standing against a powerful aggressor. The decisive battle of San Jacinto, which, according to Pablo Levy’s work, “saved the nation,” also figured prominently, with the anniversary of this battle becoming a civic festival in 1871.1

The commissioning of histories, censuses and maps aimed to give the idea of the nation an existential sense.2 These activities were underpinned by the devel-opment of the state’s ideological apparatus. In particular, spending on education was increased and the presence of a reading public was becoming perceptible with the appearance of stable newspapers and the establishment of a national printing press.3 This evidence suggests that, at least amongst the educated mes-tizo élites, the nation took on a more visible, concrete presence. Owing to these interpolative activities during the Thirty Years period, the mestizo élite became a national community in a way which it clearly was not during the Age of Anar-chy. It would be, above all, a community of property-owning, literate mestizo men, whose political identity would be closely tied with the civilized world of commerce, work and the Catholic faith. The greater consensus around such themes from 1858 onwards can be seen as a consequence of both the National War and the state’s increasing ability to define the political identity of its citi-zens. It is this ability which also signifies an increasing convergence of interests between the state and its citizenry. Although it would be an over-optimistic conclusion to suggest that the state began to function as the executive commit-tee of the mestizo community; this coincidence did allow it to act as an instru-ment for the achievement of a number of élite objectives.

4. THE LIBERAL REVOLUTION: 1893-1909

The Thirty Years period came to an end in July 1893 with the accession to the presidency of José Santos Zelaya. The wresting of the Atlantic Coast from British suzerainty in 1894 was emblematic of Zelaya’s national project, as was his determination to oversee the construction of an inter-oceanic canal. In pur-suing these objectives, Zelaya promoted a far more inclusive idea of the nation, which was reflected in the new constitution of 1893, known as La Libérrima. Most historians note that this document removed those restrictions which had been a

1. Herrera, M. (1992-1993) Nacionalismo e historiografía, p. 35.2. Herrera, M. (1992-1993) Nacionalismo e historiografía, p. 35.3. Herrera, M. (1992-1993) Nacionalismo e historiografía, pp. 31-32.

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central part of the Conservative ideology of order during the Thirty Years period, the property qualifications on voting and standing for public office. La Libérrimaabolished the indirect electoral system and established direct, secret elections for the presidency and Constituent Assembly.1 Other reforms included the aboli-tion of the death penalty, a habeas corpus law, freedom of religion, the promotion of municipal autonomy, the secularization of education, laws against vagrancy and a new labor code. Whatever the official discourse on individual liberty dur-ing the Zelaya period, they never became a reality. Despite the extension of the suffrage, Zelaya was well-versed in the practice of continuísmo — continuous re-election through legal and illegal means. Only nine months after its proroga-tion, La Libérrima was suspended and a state of siege was declared until February 1896. By 1905, many constitutional civil liberties had been eliminated, making the president into a virtual dictator.2

The new labor code and vagrancy law were established as a conscious effort to guarantee coffee exporters a regular supply of labor. The Indian population was required to spend a specific number of days per month working on export haciendas or on government-sponsored infrastructural projects. Agro-exporters received further support in terms of infrastructural investments, especially with the building of port facilities. Importantly, the legal status of Indian communal lands was abolished in 1906 and they were offered for sale to coffee planters and private farmers, deepening a pattern of land ownership which had been initiated since the War of the Indians (1881). In common with most of his predecessors, Zelaya also aimed to implant the civilization of the industrialized nations in Nic-aragua by means of foreign immigration and foreign investment.3

Despite his nationalism, Zelaya sold the concessions for Nicaragua’s mineral reserves to North American firms and entered into negotiations with the United States over a new canal project. Although these negotiations had begun in 1902, they eventually collapsed, as the United States opted for a Panamanian route. The subsequent courting of European and Japanese capital for the completion of this project provoked direct intervention by the US. With the complicity of the Taft administration in Washington, a Conservative rebellion was launched by General Emiliano Chamorro. The execution of two North American mercenaries gave President Taft the excuse to land US Marines at Bluefields on the premise of protecting the lives and property of US citizens. This combined opposition led to Zelaya’s resignation and exile in December 1909.4

1. Vannini, M. (1997) “El régimen liberal de Zelaya” in Instituto de Investigaciones y Acción Social de la Universidad Politécnica de Nicaragua (eds.) (1997) Historia y Violencia en Nicaragua (Managua, UNESCO) p. 251. This constitution did not enfran-chise women.

2. Vannini, M. (1997) El régimen liberal de Zelaya, p. 252.3. Vannini, M. (1997) El régimen liberal de Zelaya, p. 253.4. Zelaya died in exile in New York in 1919.

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5. THE POST ZELAYA ERA: CHAMORRISTA CONSERVATISM

The overthrow of the Zelaya government in 1909 by a Conservative coup which received direct military support from the US can be seen as an attempt by certain sections of the Conservative Party to restore the political order of the Thirty Years period. Foremost amongst these forces was the prominent Conser-vative General, Emiliano Chamorro. With US assistance, Chamorro had success-fully forced Zelaya to resign the presidency and replaced him with his ally, Adolfo Díaz. In return for US assistance, Chamorro and Díaz secretly agreed to a number of US demands collectively known as the Dawson Pacts (1910), which cancelled business concessions granted to non-North American companies, promised to pursue those responsible for the execution of the two US mercenar-ies, undertook to exclude Zelayistas from the state administration, and agreed to a loan from US bankers, which would be guaranteed by Nicaragua’s customs revenues. The final draft of the Pacts would then be subject to the approval of the US Chargé d’Affaires. The objective of the Dawson Pacts was clear: “Through these agreements the US hoped to re-establish stability in this strategically important country without resorting to a costly military intervention.”1

When these agreements became public in 1912, Liberal forces began another civil war and were joined by a section of the Conservative Party under the lead-ership of General Luis Mena, the then Minister of War. This fissure amongst the Conservatives was not simply a reflection of the opposition of General Mena and his followers to the Dawson Pacts but was the result of the long-term transfor-mations which certain sections of the Conservative Party had undergone as a consequence of economic modernization during the Zelaya administration. A significant number of lower-ranking Conservative families had benefited finan-cially from the expansion of coffee exports over the previous twenty years and were far more integrated into the export economy than many of the traditionally powerful Conservative oligarchs, whose major economic activities remained those of cattle-rearing and traditional agriculture. General Mena emerged as the political and military leader of this modernizing faction, expressing views on religion, education and the state that were clearly at odds with those of General Chamorro. Hostility, however, was not solely based on ideological differences. The nouveaux-riches were often received with condescension by traditional Con-servative families, who commonly referred to them as “mulatos”/“mestizos” in contrast to their own more aristocratic Spanish heritage.2 As a consequence, the

1. Gobat, M. “Granada’s Conservative Revolutionaries: Anti-Élite Violence and the Nicaraguan Civil War of 1912.” Paper presented at the III Central American Congress of History, San José, Costa Rica, July 15-18, 1996 p. 3.

2. Gobat, M. (1996) Granada’s Conservative Revolutionaries, p. 9.

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Mena faction was systematically excluded from many of the party’s patronage networks and institutions, especially the exclusive Club de Granada. In turn, the Mena faction condemned the Chamorristas for being un-Nicaraguan and “vendapatrias” (country-sellers) for their support of the Dawson Pacts.1 The sub-sequent dependence of the Chamorristas on a contingent of 400 US Marines only served to confirm these criticisms. With the Chamorrista faction eventually emerging as the victors of the 1912 civil war, the US had managed to increased its grip on Nicaragua, not only securing all strategic objectives set out in the Daw-son Pacts but, in addition, successfully concluding the signing of the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which granted the US exclusive rights in perpetuity to con-struct an inter-oceanic canal through Nicaraguan territory, as well as the right of military intervention in Nicaragua.2

The 1912 civil war marks a turning point in terms of the pattern of élite vio-lence. Official histories during the Sandinista period tended to depict this war as a Liberal attempt to expel a foreign invader invited into Nicaragua by the Con-servatives. In particular, these histories emphasize the heroic resistance of the Liberal General, Benjamín Zeledón, who took the cities of Managua, Granada and Masaya, and, having refused to surrender to Major Smedley Butler’s US Marines, was later to be captured and executed.3 However, the old Liberal-Con-servative divide appears to have had less importance in generating conflict than the specific circumstances prevailing in the immediate post-Zelaya period. The true nature of the internal transformations which the Conservative Party had undergone during its sixteen years out of office only became clear once it had returned to power. Ironically, the major protagonists of the majority of anti-élite violence were themselves members of the ruling Conservative Party.4 With the Chamorristas handing over Nicaragua’s national economy to US business in return for US guarantees to maintain their personal political dominance over the country, it was the Mena Conservatives that opposed the monopolization of the country’s economy by foreign interests. The future of this modernizing faction would depend on their having a free hand in the national economy. Contrary to the official Sandinista account of the 1912 civil war, therefore, it appears that both Mena and Zeledón shared a common nationalist agenda.

1. Gobat, M. (1996) Granada’s Conservative Revolutionaries, p. 7.2. Selser, G. (1981) Sandino (New York, Monthly Review Press) pp. 41-46.3. The Sandinista version of events suggests that Zeledón was executed by US Marines.

However, Marine reports show that officers holding Zeledón called for reinforce-ments in an attempt to protect him from local Chamorristas, who were his real execu-tioners. See Millett, R. (1977) Guardians of the Dynasty: A History of the US Created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua and the Somoza Family (New York, Orbis Books) pp. 34-35.

4. Gobat, M. (1996) Granada’s Conservative Revolutionaries, p. 11.

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Whilst the Mena Conservatives represented a departure from the tradi-tional ideological disposition of the party, the figure of Emiliano Chamorroshould also be seen as representing something equally ambiguous. Although Chamorro has been portrayed as representing a brand of Conservatism analo-gous to that of the Thirty Years period, Wheelock (1997) suggests that he lacked their nationalist sentiments and practiced a mode of politics more representative of the pre-National War patriarchs.1 The pursuit of personal power became the hallmark of Chamorro’s brand of politics. His courting of US support to main-tain his power, in the form of the Dawson Pacts (1910), the subsequent Bryan-Chamorro Treaty (1914) and the numerous invitations to Marine expeditionary forces ended any sense of national sovereignty on the part of the Nicaraguan nation. The real authority in Nicaragua was not the nation, but the US Marine Corps.

From 1912 to 1925, a succession of Chamorristas took turns to occupy the presidency, including Emiliano Chamorro himself (1917-20), all of which were backed-up by the continued presence of US Marines. This pattern was broken in the elections of 1925, which saw a landslide victory for the joint electoral ticket of the Conservative Carlos José Solórzano and his vice-presidential candidate, the Liberal Juan Bautista Sacasa. With an apparent entente cordiale existing between the élites, and the continued observance of all treaty obligations by the new government, Washington believed the conditions were right for the with-drawal of the Marines. Chamorro, however, saw the inclusion of Liberals in the new government as a direct threat to his own personal power and, only two months after the Marines had left, launched a rebellion against Solórzano, who immediately surrendered. Solórzano’s handing over of power to Chamorro rather than to Vice-President Sacasa, as stipulated by the constitution, formed the background to the Sandino rebellion.

6. THE SANDINO REBELLION (1927-1933)

With the refusal of the US to condemn Chamorro, Vice-President Sacasalaunched a counter-rebellion in 1926, beginning in Bluefields under the military command of General José María Moncada. Although initially unsuccessful, Moncada’s forces were assisted by a generalized rebellion of Liberals against Chamorro that soon gave Moncada a military advantage. In a political maneuver designed to give the impression that he had relinquished power, Chamorro

1. Wheelock, J. (1997) “Treinta años de gobierno conservador” in Instituto de Investiga-ciones y Acción Social de la Universidad Politcénica de Nicaragua (eds.) (1997) Historia y Violencia en Nicaragua (Managua, UNESCO) p. 213.

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handed the presidency over to his political ally, Adolfo Díaz. Seeing through this tactic, the Liberals fought on and in December 1926 Díaz asked the US Marines to disembark at Puerto Cabezas and disarm Liberal forces. The Marine landings spread to all major Atlantic Coast ports and by February 1927 US forces had occupied the country’s principal military installation at Tiscapa, Managua.

With the realization that his Liberal forces were no match for the US Marines who were now aiding Chamorro and Díaz, Moncada sought a negoti-ated settlement. On the prompting of US special envoy, Henry Stimson, the war-ring parties accepted the Treaty of Tipitapa (1927). Government conscripts and Liberal rebels would surrender their weapons to the Marines and US supervised elections would be held in 1928. In addition, an impartial national constabulary would be established, to be trained and led by US officers, and prominent Liber-als were promised high political office.1 With Sacasa remaining on the Atlantic Coast, Moncada increasingly began to pursue his own agenda. The signing of the Treaty of Tipitapa effectively sidelined Sacasa, who left Nicaragua in May 1927 to seek exile in Costa Rica.

Before this point, Sandino was a political unknown, who had left Nicaragua in 1921 in search of work and adventure. After working in Honduras and Guate-mala, he gained employment as a mechanic in the Tampico oil fields of Mexico, where he underwent his political baptism. For at least one historian, Sandino’s encounter with the political culture of post-revolutionary Mexico provided the context which was to shape his subsequent ideas.2 Indeed, it is only by relating the germination of Sandino’s political experience of the Tampico oil workers’ movement that the meaning which Sandino himself attached to his ideas can be revealed. This issue is more than one of passing importance to the present dis-cussion, for both his detractors and supporters have associated his ideas with those of the mainstream international communist and socialist movement. In so doing, the anarcho-syndicalist content of Sandino’s thought appears to have been lost from many of the accounts of his struggle. Sandino’s syndicalism has commonly been dismissed as a deviation or mistake, when in fact it represented the foundations on which his subsequent ideas on workers’ and peasants coop-eratives were to develop. The waning of the anarcho-syndicalist influence amongst the Mexican workers’ movement from the 1940s, and their gradual replacement by communist and socialist inspired parties and institutions all played their part in this collective act of forgetting.

1. For the terms of the Tipitapa Treaty see Macaulay, N. (1971) The Sandino Affair (Chicago; Quadrangle Books) Chapter 2, pp. 31-47.

2. Bendaña, A. (1994) La mística de Sandino (Managua, Centro de Estudios Internacionales) Chapters 2 and 3, pp. 21-54.

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It was from the Mexican workers’ movement that Sandino inherited a phraseology that linked him to contemporary Marxism. However, these move-ments were the products of anarchist émigrés from Spain, who were followers of the Russian thinkers Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76), rather than Marx, who remained a marginal figure within Latin America’s workers’ movement of the early twentieth century.1 Sandino’s references to com-munism more accurately reflect an affinity to the anarcho-syndicalist concept of what was referred to as rationalist communism, one which was far removed from Marxism-Leninism.2 Sandino could not have picked a better place to have been inducted into the emerging class politics of the twentieth century. The cities of Veracruz and Tampico held the largest and most militant anti-imperialist indus-trial work force in Latin America at that time. The Mexican Revolution repre-sented an upsurge in nationalist and anti-Yankee sentiments, which manifested themselves in the confiscation of US properties and a program of social reforms embodied in the Constitution of 1917, guaranteeing trade union rights, an eight-hour working day, and which attempted to impose taxes on the profits of for-eign-owned industries. The victory of such nationalist sentiments remained a compelling memory in these industrial centers during the 1920s, where workers engaged in a constant struggle for the observance of social legislation which US-owned oil companies attempted to evade. It was also from the oil workers of Tampico that Sandino first encountered the anti-imperialist sentiments that were to become the hallmarks of his own struggle in Nicaragua.

Closely related to these anarcho-syndicalist and anti-imperialist influences was Sandino’s adhesion to the Argentine-based Magnetico-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, which he joined during his second trip to Mexico in 1929. The school’s founder, Joaquín Trincado, propagated a “mixture of anar-chism, communism and Zoroastrian theosophy...and was violently opposed to organized religion and had a great contempt for the Clergy.”3 Trincado was an exponent of the rational communism found amongst the oil workers of Tampico with his proposal to work towards the establishment of the universal commune mirroring the belief in a system of mutual assistance which formed key compo-nents within the ideas of Kropotkin, of whom he was a disciple.4 Trincados motto Siempre Más Allá” (Ever further beyond) was itself an allusion to the ideas of Mikhail Bakunin.5 The spiritualism of Trincado’s religious cosmology was to give Sandino’s thought a millenarian flavor, perhaps a necessary ingredi-

1. Bendaña, A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 41.2. Bendaña, A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, pp. 43, 60.3. Navarro-Génie, M. Augusto "César" Sandino: Prophet of the Segovias (http://www.pagusmundi.com/sandino/prophet.htm), p. 11.4. Bendaña A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 131.5. Bendaña A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 133.

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ent for any struggle that faces overwhelming odds. For those few biographers who have written on Sandino’s religious influences, some claim that he did not manipulate the popular religious beliefs practiced by the Segovian poor for his own ends. 1However, some evidence suggests that this was in fact exactly what he did, using his religious knowledge as a source of divine authority amongst his followers.2

Armed with his experience from Mexico, Sandino returned to Nicaragua in 1926 and engaged in his first political acts. After gaining employment at the US-owned San Albino gold mine, he encouraged miners to rebel against their work-ing conditions and loot the company stores. He then led a small group to Puerto Cabezas to join the Constitutionalist forces of Moncada. He was not well received. As an unknown military leader, he alarmed other Liberals with his ref-erences to communism and workers’ rights.3 Moncada refused his request for arms and ordered Sandino to stop flying the red and black flags which his com-pany carried with them. Antipathy between the two men turned into open hos-tility with Moncada’s signing of the Treaty of Tipitapa in May 1927. With the promise of lucrative positions within the state, the Liberal generals unanimously accepted the treaty. Only Sandino raised objections to the agreement. His actions tended to denote those of yet another caudillo pursuing his own personal ambitions for power, a characterization that his former allies actively promoted. This is especially true for the remote frontier region of Nueva Segovia, where local caudillos repeatedly waged war against one another. It was to this region that Sandino led his men, out of the reach of state authorities, where he was sure to find new recruits to his cause. His concern for social justice, however, which he expressed throughout the Constitutionalist War, distinguished Sandino from many of his contemporaries. Social justice and anti-imperialism, rather than per-sonal gain, formed the over-riding theme in Sandino’s public response to the Treaty of Tipitapa, taking the form of a manifesto addressed to the “Nicaraguans, to the Central Americans, to the Indo-Hispanic Race”:

I judge Moncada before history and before the Fatherland as a deserter from our ranks, with the added aggravation of having gone over to the enemy...The pessimists will say that we are too small to undertake a task of such magnitude; on the con-trary, I am convinced that, however insignificant we may be, our pride and our patriotic hearts are very great. For that reason, before the Patria and before history, I swear that my sword will defend the nation’s honor and redeem the oppressed.4

1. Bendaña A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 128.2. Navarro-Génie, M. Augusto "César" Sandino: Prophet of the Segovias, p. 13.3. Macaulay, N. (1971) The Sandino Affair, p. 55.4. Sandino, A. C. “Manifiesto de Julio” (July 1st 1927) in Ramírez, S. (ed.) (1984) Augusto C.

Sandino el pensamiento vivo: Tomo I (Managua, Editorial Nueva Nicaragua), pp. 118-119.

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Despite the fact that Sandino’s invocation of the nation appears to follow a pattern established by the mestizo élites of the nineteenth century, its combina-tion with the theme of social oppression bears the imprint of the Mexican Revo-lution rather than traditional liberalism. Few Liberals had expressed an interest in the conditions of Nicaragua’s poor and had only expressed disdain towards the Indians. Concentrating on the theme of social justice as the sole motivation of Sandino’s army tends to idealize the rebellion however and fails to identify those “deep and abiding roots” which it shared with the particular time and place in which it was located.1 Only by taking such factors into account can Sandino’s ability to sustain such a protracted struggle be fully explained. Certainly, this idealization would gloss over the fact that such abstract concepts as nationalism and anti-imperialism may have been beyond the comprehension of his mainly illiterate peasant army, whose world-view was bound to the localized reality of the Segovias. Understanding how Sandino related the underlying rationale of the rebellion to the political culture of the Segovias is essential in disclosing his abil-ity to assemble this fragmented population into a community that expressed, perhaps for the first time, a political identity of its own.

7. POPULAR NATIONALISM AND THE SEGOVIAS

A number of factors determined the loyalties of the Segovian peasantry to Sandino’s cause which can be related to the established power relations of the region, especially long-standing class antagonisms and a strong patriarchal cul-ture. Fear, too, was to play its part. Having sided with the government, the lands and property of the local bourgeoisie became legitimate targets for Sandino’s peasant soldiers. Nationalism legitimized the Segovian peasantry’s settling of old scores against their traditional class enemies.2 Anti-imperialism was presented in a familiar language of class retribution which was easily understandable to the peasant soldiers of the Defending Army of Nicaragua’s National Sovereignty(EDSNN). One remaining factor needed little explanation on the part of Sandino in gaining people’s loyalties: the brutality of the Marines and the National Guard, commonly referred to as The Black Legend. As noted by Schroeder (1995), the unfamiliar physical appearance of the Marines, their uniforms, weapons and

1. Schroeder, M. “Horse Thieves to Rebels to Dogs: Political Gang Violence and the State in the Western Segovias, Nicaragua, in the Time of Sandino, 1926-1934” in Journal of Latin American Studies (1996) No. 28, p. 387.

2. Schroeder, M. “The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism, Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926-1934.” Paper given at Rethinking the Post-Colonial Encounter: Transnational Perspectives on the United State’s Presence in Latin America: Yale University October 18-21 1995, p. 34.

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language fuelled a sense of Otherness between them and the local population.1

Many of the Marine intelligence reports display a “fundamentally racist” attitude towards most Nicaraguans, including their National Guard allies.2 The violence committed by the Marines against what they considered to be their racial inferi-ors appears to have been extreme even in the context of the violent culture of the Segovias.

The Sandino rebellion neither exhibits the selfless patriotism which was to be portrayed as intrinsic to the Nicaraguan national character by the FSLN, nor did it symbolize simple banditry, as the Somocista narrative suggested. Perhaps a more accurate characterization would be to see it as appropriating the politi-cal-military techniques of Segovian caudillos into the struggle for national liber-ation and social justice made both possible and necessary with the new conditions represented by the presence of the US Marines. The presence of a for-eign invader, different in almost every conceivable way from the native popula-tion, appears to have been the catalyst for the subordinate classes to launch a rebellion against a stagnating oligarchy in pursuit of the kind of civilization that Sandino had found in Mexico, of which he often spoke about to his peasant fol-lowers. As an attempt to restore order therefore, the arrival of the Marines was a policy disaster for the US.3

8. THE SANDINISTA NATION

The question concerning the status of Sandino as a nation builder remains a point of contention amongst Sandinista historians in the post-revolutionary era. In part, this discussion was facilitated by the electoral defeat of the FSLN in 1990, which loosened the narrow ideological confines under which many Nicara-guan academics willingly worked during the revolutionary period. Under such conditions, historians tended to concentrate on the militaristic rhetoric within Sandino’s writings, constructing him more as a mythic guerrilla figure rather than a leader in possession of a nation-building project. It is in his later writings and actions, especially those written after the signing of the peace accords in 1933, that this militarism gives way to an emphasis on a civil struggle, from which a number of assumptions can be drawn concerning Sandino’s vision of the nation.

Perhaps as a consequence of the conditions under which Sandino himself wrote most of his letters and manifestos, the over-riding theme concerning the

1. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 4.2. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 21.3. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 25.

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political disposition of Nicaraguans emphasized the military defense of the Patria against the foreign invader. The most direct representation of this was the official seal of the EDSNN, which depicted a peasant with a raised machete ready to sever the head of a cowering Marine. This image was also found on the gold coins minted by the EDSNN. Together with the renaming of cities under Sandinista control, the adoption of a new calendar which began in 1912 with the rebellion of Benjamin Zeledón, the composition of hymns, the flying of flags and the chronicling of the struggle, these denote a series of initiatives taken by Sand-inista military authorities which consciously sought to articulate a specific polit-ical identity of true Nicaraguans.1 For Sandino, this identity was expressed through active participation in the anti-interventionist struggle.2 Particular venom was reserved for those Nicaraguans who sided with the enemy. Although Sandino, and later the FSLN, attempted to simplify the conflict as one between Nicaraguans and a foreign invader, the reality was far more complex, since most urban Nicaraguans openly supported the Marine campaign against the EDSNN, perhaps one of the greatest failures of the Sandinista movement. Furthermore, by 1930, the Marines began to be replaced by an indigenous corps, the National Guard, which outnumbered the Marines by 1932.3 The Nicaraguanization of the conflict presented a number of problems for Sandino, for the enemy could no longer be constructed as a readily identifiable foreign invader. All those who assisted the Marines were no longer considered Nicaraguans. The first amongst these traitors were Emiliano Chamorro and Adolfo Díaz, who ceased to be Nica-raguans when they invited the Marines into the country.4 Those who supported the intervention were vendapatrias, a subjectivity which was held with special contempt within the patriarchal social and moral universe of the EDSNN; selling the Patria was equivalent to a son who sells his mother.5

In 1933, the Liberal Juan Bautista Sacasa, whose cause Sandino had rallied to in 1926, was elected president and the last of the US Marines left in January of the same year. The EDSNN suffered from a lack of resources and the peasant base appeared tired of war and debilitated by economic crisis. Despite this wea-riness, they had not been defeated and had achieved the objective of forcing a Marine withdrawal. On February 2, 1933, Sandino signed a peace accord with

1. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 29-30.2. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá... El movimiento sandinista en Nicaragua 1927-1934

(Managua, IHN/CEMCA), p. 112.3. Dospital, M. “La construcción del estado nacional en Nicaragua: el proyecto sandinista,

1933-1934” in Revista de Historia (1992) No.2, p. 53.4. Sandino, A. C. “Manifiesto de Julio” in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 118.5. Grossman, R. “La patria es nuestra madre: Gender, Patriarchy and Nationalism inside the Sandin-

ista Movement, 1927-1934.” Paper presented at the III Central American Historical Congress of History, San José, Costa Rica (July 15-18 1996), p. 22.

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President Sacasa and officially ended the war. What became immediately clear, however, was Sandino’s intention to engage in a civil struggle, providing evi-dence that his project went beyond the purely military dimension which forms the major preoccupation of many biographies.

9. REFLECTIONS ON THE NATION-STATE AND THE COOPERATIVE PROJECT OF THE SEGOVIAS

From the foregoing account, the portrayal of Sandino by his most vociferous detractors as nothing more than a bandit simply does not hold against the exist-ing evidence. The main area of contention centers on whether Sandinismo con-tained within it the key elements on which a distinctive national political community could be constructed or whether it represented no more than a mil-lenarian scheme geared to fighting the Marines which would wither once they had left the country. Although no consensus exists, the evidence seems to sug-gest the former.

Those accounts which dispute the state-building thesis point to the pecu-liar nature of Sandino’s ideological influences and his lack of faith in traditional politics. It is certainly true that Sandino repeatedly expressed contempt towards political parties and consistently stated that he had no intention to seek high political office for himself. For Sandino, political and economic objectives were to be achieved through the self-organization of the workers and peasants, inde-pendent of government or political parties. These anti-statist sentiments were seen to gain their fullest expression with the establishment of the workers’ and peasants’ cooperative centered in the Segovian town of Güigüilí, with its bound-aries running along the northern banks of the Coco River. This cooperative, guaranteed in the peace accords of 1933, was to become the centerpiece of Sand-inismo’s continuing struggle against the power of the traditional oligarchy. It was indeed an ambitious project which, amongst other things, began to con-struct roads, schools and hospitals, and to bring new lands under cultivation. It bore all the hallmarks of the anarcho-syndicalist ideas which Sandino had been introduced to in Mexico: “Sandino conceived the reconstruction of the nation, not through parties or elections, but based on the self-management of the work-ers and shared property.”1

There is also little doubt that the Segovian cooperative reflected the ideas of the Magnetico-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune (MSUC), which had become more influential with the signing of the peace accords. In his Protocol For

1. Bendaña, A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 69.

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Peace (20 January 1933) Sandino stipulated that the cooperative should be recog-nized as a new department called Light and Truth, a reference to a manifesto pub-lished in February 1931, which was replete with Trincadista premonitions of Divine Justice.1 Furthermore, with the declaration of peace, Sandino replaced the inscription Patria Y Libertad, with which he signed his letters and manifestos, with that of the MSUC: Siempre Más Allá. As Trincado’s official representative in Nicaragua, Sandino had faithfully followed his teachings. The cooperative which he was now engaged in represented nothing less than the commune which formed the ultimate objective of the MSUC. However short lived it proved to be, the cooperative has been taken as the most concrete manifestation of Sand-inismo, one which expressed the essentially anti-statist, rationalist communism of the MSUC. These features led authors such as Bendaña to come to the general conclusion that Sandinismo represented an “alternative to capitalist de-human-ization as well as the model of authoritarian socialism” to be established by a network of semi-autonomous cooperatives based on the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of mutual assistance.2

Alternatively, the Segovian cooperative can be seen as an embryo of a state project which he had first attempted to implement through the political-military structures of the EDSNN. Despite the understandable triumphalism of many pro-Sandinista accounts, the withdrawal of the Marines did not symbolize a Sandinista victory. What it did indicate was the increasing ability of the National Guard as an independent fighting force and the recognition on the part of the US government that a military stalemate had been reached which could only be resolved politically. When Sacasa promised to secure the withdrawal of the Marines if elected president, the political conditions for an honorable peace appeared to be within reach. Peace, however, did not mean the end of the Sand-inista struggle. Sandino was clearly not content to remain in his stronghold at Güigüilí. The Segovian cooperative represented a compromise for what Sandino really wanted: an independent Nicaraguan state that acted in the interests of the nation and over which the Nicaraguan nation, rather than a foreign power, would exercise sovereignty. These were the preconditions on which the objec-tive of social justice depended.3

In a document entitled Bases del convenio que se propine al general José María Moncada (6 January 1929), Sandino provided the most comprehensive presenta-tion of his political program, in which the state is clearly envisioned as an appa-

1. The “Manifiesto luz y verdad” (15 February 1931) and the “Protocolo de paz” (20 January 1933) are printed in full in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo II, pp. 159-60, 269-71.

2. Bendaña, A. (1994) La mística de Sandino, p. 136. 3. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 113.

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ratus capable of ensuring national sovereignty as well as social justice. In many ways, the proposals in this document to legislate an eight-hour working day and equal wages for women, to regulate child labor, and to establish trade union rights, appear to mirror elements of the Mexican Constitution of 1917. Further-more, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that Sandino’s frequent ambivalence towards both the state and political parties was based on the undemocratic, fac-tional character which they had historically exhibited in Nicaragua, rather than a wholesale ideological rejection. He was in fact well disposed to the new Auton-omist Party and the Labor Party, which had been formed in 1931 by anti-inter-ventionist intellectuals who blamed the caudillismo practiced by the oligarchy for the political and military instability. It was the Autonomists who initiated the process which concluded with the signing of the peace accords in 1933. Their openly anti-oligarchic stance and the insistence on the need for governments which represented the nation, rather a particular section of the country’s élite, appear to have concurred with Sandino’s own criticisms of Nicaragua’s political institutions.1 Indeed, in November 1933, in close association with the Labor Party, Sandino took the first steps towards forming his own political party, which was independent of the Autonomists.2

From the beginning of the rebellion, the EDSNN had exercised an alterna-tive set of rules that counter-posed those of the official state.3 As noted previ-ously, it engaged in a number of activities which are often monopolized by modern states. Minting money was one such activity, raising taxes and levying contributions was another. The political-military structure of the EDSNN actively sought to make its presence felt in the quotidian routines of life amongst the Segovian peasantry, portraying itself as the legal authority that regulated and ordered their lives, at the same time as it disseminated a distinctive political identity. In so doing, it also naturalized the politics of anti-imperialism that had formed the guiding principle of its military struggle.4 The Segovian cooperative continued and expanded on these practices and took the form of an alternative state. Understanding Sandino’s ideas on the state, especially his insistence on its independence, is essential in his portrayal as a nation-builder rather than one military leader amongst others. Whilst both fighting the Marines and establish-ing the cooperative, Sandino had engaged in all of what was clearly a form of statecraft in the running of the two organizations. There is no evidence that he ever rejected the idea that the state could be used as a vehicle to achieve social justice and he was clearly aware of how the Mexican state had been used in pur-

1. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 116. 2. Dospital, M. (1992) La construcción del estado nacional, p. 57.3. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 29.4. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 29.

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suit of these objectives. He remained opposed to the ways in which the state had been used by Nicaragua’s oligarchy. To engage in historical conjecture, given a different outcome to the war against the Marines/National Guard, the evidence suggests that Sandino would have sought to use the national state in pursuit of the same goals which he had pursued through the structures of his army and the cooperative.

The economic nature of the Segovian cooperative project also indicates that it was conceived as the beginning of a larger project. An immediate goal was the collective production of basic foodstuffs. However, there were also plans to enter into direct competition with the foreign-owned companies which operated in the region, with the longer-term intention of replacing them.1 Sandinoannounced that he planned to export gold with assistance from a Chilean com-pany, sending samples panned from the Coco River to President Sacasa. The president’s officials judged it to be of the finest quality. The export of bananas and tobacco was also planned. This trade would be facilitated by the canaliza-tion of the Coco River, using dynamite rather than imported technology to improve navigability. It was a project which reflected the nation-building aspi-rations of Sandino’s nineteenth-century predecessors. Not only would it inte-grate the marginalized indigenous communities of the Atlantic Coast into the commercial activities of the rest of the country, it was also to have global impli-cations. Sandino had repeatedly pointed to the necessity for a joint Latin Ameri-can venture to construct a canal through Nicaragua: “Civilization requires that a Nicaraguan canal be built, but that it be done with capital from the whole world, and not exclusively from the United States.”2 Whilst the Panamanian canal sim-ply affirmed growing US regional hegemony, a Nicaraguan canal was portrayed as guaranteeing Latin America’s independence by becoming a magnet for world trade which would act as an engine for the development of the whole region.3

Sandinismo sought to form a particular kind of state, capable of both inter-polating the nation into a coherent sociological entity and transforming its polit-ical identity. Unlike nineteenth-century liberal visions however, Sandino would concentrate on the marginalized poor, who would no longer be subservient instruments of US interests but independent political actors, conscious of their distinct common interests as against those of the US and able to realize them through a collectivist economic model and the geographical assets which their country offered the rest of the world.

1. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 171.2. Sandino, A. C. “Manifiesto de julio” in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p.

120.3. See Sandino, A. C. “Plan de realización del supremo sueño de Bolívar.” (20 March 1929)

in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento Vivo: Tomo I, pp. 341-355.

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As on so many previous occasions, history conspired against such a project. Although Sandino appears to have had plans to create a new party in alliance with the Labor Party that would contest the presidential elections of 1936, he quickly desisted from such activities. Whilst Bendaña rightly points out that Sandino kept his distance from the Autonomists’ nationalist challenge to the Sacasa administration, this does not indicate an ideological disdain towards such traditional tactics. Instead, it denotes an increasing awareness on the part of Sandino that both he and president Sacasa now faced a new common enemy: the National Guard.1

The National Guard were openly hostile to the peace accords, especially the provisions which allowed the EDSNN to maintain an armed guard of one hun-dred men after they surrendered all other weapons. Secret Guard reports showed their continued determination to eliminate the remnants of the EDSNN.2 The National Guard’s violations of the agreements made between the EDSNN and President Sacasa, harassing known Sandinista sympathizers and ambushing unarmed ex-EDSNN members, went unchecked. President Sacasa also showed an increasing inability to exercise his constitutional authority over the Guard’s commander-in-chief, Anastasio Somoza García. Aware of the need to present a united front against Somoza due to the weakness of the EDSNN, Sandino refused the advice of his Autonomist and Labor Party allies to take up arms once again. Instead, he sought to strengthen the accords through a series of meetings with President Sacasa. It was after one such meeting, on the 21 Febru-ary 1934, that Sandino was abducted by a group of guardsmen in Managua and executed. At the same time, National Guard units moved against the Sandinista cooperative, completely destroying it. Sacasa once again showed his political ineptitude, by promising to prosecute Sandino’s murderers, yet handing over the responsibility of the investigation to Somoza, who, in the eyes of most people at the time, was suspected to have been the main perpetrator of the crime.3

However much the Segovian peasantry had rallied in support of the Sandinorebellion, the fact is that it systematically failed to make any organic links with the urban population. The greater repressive capacity of the National Guardwithin the urban areas may account for this, although this factor alone could never be the sole explanation as to why so many Nicaraguans joined the fight against Sandino. A fear of what was perceived to have been the uncivilized Seg-ovian/Indian character of the EDSNN on the part of most urban mestizos led

1. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 179.2. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 178.3. On 30 May 1934, the Congress passed an amnesty for all those involved in Sandino’s

murder. The decree of amnesty ended with a citation from Goethe: “I prefer injustice to disorder.” See Dospital, M. (1992) La construcción del estado nacional, p. 60.

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them to accept the legitimacy of the US Marine mission in Nicaragua. The eco-nomic opportunities which the Marine presence offered them also appears to have been a contributory factor.1 Whatever the reasons behind this failure, once the rebellion’s leading figures were dead or in exile and its political-military structures in the Segovias destroyed, Sandinismo quickly withered.

As an unintended consequence of the rebellion, the military-bureaucratic apparatus of the state had experienced a rapid expansion in size and capacity. By September 1933, National Guard troops numbered 2,554, representing a higher figure than during the war.2 The impact of this was particularly acute in the Seg-ovias. As the center of the Sandino rebellion, Marine-National Guard activities targeted this traditionally isolated frontier region. This did not simply relate to strictly military affairs however, for the Marines brought with them new tech-niques of warfare which went beyond the confines of physical combat, establish-ing a network of bureaucratic surveillance through the use of maps, identity cards and intelligence reports. After one hundred years of independence, the state was finally extending its administrative-judicial grid across the Segovias. Since the process had been facilitated under the military exigencies of fighting a guerrilla army, the tendencies towards bureaucratization, centralization and extension of state authority which it initiated were characterized by a coercive quality which was to coalesce into what became known as Somocismo.3 This new modality of power totally outflanked Sandino’s mainly illiterate army, which felt the effects of such surveillance technologies but could not compre-hend their workings.4

10. THE EMERGENCE OF THE SOMOCISTA STATE

The murder of Sandino in 1934 saw the center of power shift decisively away from President Sacasa and towards the new Jefe Director of the National Guard, General Anastasio Somoza García. By 1934, Somoza’s political ambition to become the next president was an open secret.5 With Sandino’s murder and Somoza’s control over the National Guard, the politically inept figure of Presi-dent Sacasa offered no effective opposition to such ambitions. The old guard

1. See Schroeder, M. (1993) "To Defend Our Nation’s Honor": Towards a Social and Cultural History of the Sandino Rebellion in Nicaragua, 1927-1934 (PhD thesis University of Michigan) Chapter 8 Mapping War: An Anatomy of Rebellion, 1927-34, pp. 302-375.

2. Dospital, M. (1996) Siempre Más Allá..., p. 180.3. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, pp. 56-58.4. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 57.5. Walter, K (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza and State Formation in Nicaragua, 1936-1956

(Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press), p. 41.

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within the Liberal Party did not favor a Somoza candidacy and in May 1936 Sacasa reached an agreement with the Conservatives to field a pro-Sacasa Lib-eral, Leonardo Argüello, as the sole presidential candidate. The endorsement of this plan by the US embassy spelt an end to Somoza’s efforts of gaining the pres-idency through constitutional means. At the end of May, units from the National Guard attacked the presidential palace in Managua, whilst Somoza sympathiz-ers took over municipal government offices around the country. On the 6 June President Sacasa surrendered and left the country for the last time.1 Although Sacasa had appealed for support from the US before his departure, the State Department refused to act fearing that this could initiate yet another costly mili-tary expedition to Nicaragua.2 Recognizing that US interests would be guaran-teed under Somoza, the US embassy decided to adopt a neutral stance, arguing that intervention would go against President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy.

Somoza García lost no time in reforming Nicaragua’s political system to ensure that the “dice were loaded in favor of the Liberal party.”3 Importantly, he did not seek to exclude the Conservative opposition from the political system at any time. Pre-election agreements guaranteeing the Conservatives post-election representation within most state institutions ensured that they would act as a loyal opposition. Thus, whilst the Somocista Liberals won a majority in the 1938 elections for a Constituent Assembly, the Conservatives gained minority repre-sentation, despite their decision to boycott the elections. In 1939, this Constitu-ent Assembly passed a new constitution that confirmed Somoza’s dominance by bringing municipal government and many national government institutions under direct presidential control. Furthermore, Somoza’s term in office was extended until May 1947 and the Liberal-dominated Constituent Assembly was turned into the new Congress.4

Over the next ten years, Somoza was to engage in the reorganization of state institutions, concentrating on the differentiation and specialization of their roles. A cabinet of nine ministries was established, including a powerful new Ministry of Economics. Each ministry had specified realms of responsibility, and at least some attempt was made to ensure policy was informed by technical

1. Sacasa died in exile in the US in April 1946. 2. Through the Peace and Friendship Treaty (1907) the US was obliged not to recognize

any governments that came to power in the region through unconstitutional means. For the terms of the treaty, see Selsor G. (1981) Sandino, pp. 48-49.

3. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 92.4. The legislative branch of government was divided into two houses: the Chamber of

Deputies and the Senate. As in the US, they were referred to collectively as the Congress. This bi-cameral system, the only one in Central America, further illustrates the influence that the US exerted over Nicaraguan politics. Constituent Assemblies were elected for the purpose of amending the constitution. E-mail correspondence with Knut Walter, 6 January 1999.

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expertise rather than political considerations.1 The state’s capacity to regulate the economy was enhanced by the establishment of the National Economic Council which formulated economic programs for the new Ministry of Econom-ics and established communications with international bodies such as the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

Despite these moves, the administrative-regulatory capacity of the state continued to be limited by political factors. Patronage was still extensive in the public sector, with family ties and political affiliations being as important as professional competence in the allocation of posts. Indeed, the whole public sec-tor remained inflated, owing to the system of patronage exercised by the presi-dent and the PLN.2 No doubt such practices reduced the administrative efficiency of state institutions, yet this should not detract from the fact that the regime increasingly depended on institutional mechanisms. Re-vamping exist-ing state institutions and building up new ones increased the effectiveness of the politics of the regime, allowing it to coopt successfully the most important sec-tors of Nicaraguan society. The opposition, such as it was, was invited into the system to participate in the political and economic life of the country, so long as it did not challenge the nature of the regime and the paramount position that Somoza García occupied within it. It is in this context that Emiliano Chamorro, the regime’s most persistent opponent, came to terms with Somocismo. Chamorro, and the caudillo-style politics that he continued to practice, had been completely out-maneuvered by the politics of Somocismo, based as it was on the use of the institutional apparatus of the state.3

11. SOMOCISMO, THE STATE AND INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Characterizing the Somocista regime has usually formed part of a wider political polemic. In order to destroy any measure of legitimacy that the regime may have possessed amongst various sectors of Nicaraguan society, Sandinista accounts emphasize the repressive role played by the National Guard and the origins of the regime in the US Marine occupation of 1927-33. Like the regimes of Moncada and Díaz before it, Somocismo was portrayed as a product of US impe-rialism, whose interests it served. This view has been contested by the work of Knute Walter (1993). Whilst Walter acknowledged that repression was indeed a constant feature of the Somoza dynasty, his work discloses how this was

1. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 186.2. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 192.3. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 205.

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accompanied by political maneuvers designed to co-opt a diverse range of poten-tial opposition groups. These efforts were paralleled in the economic sphere with state-sponsored initiatives designed to impel capitalist development from which all sectors of Nicaragua’s business classes benefited. The reform of the banking system, investment in exporting infrastructure, rudimentary economic planning, legal guarantees to protect private property and a plethora of US-sponsored development agencies that emerged from the Alliance for Progressformed part of the measures taken by the state to facilitate a secure business environment. The success of this strategy, at least until the 1970s, clearly enabled the regime to secure a degree of domestic legitimacy and stability. The tactic of allowing opposition groups access to political and economic opportunities within clearly defined parameters proved a durable solution that weathered a series of challenges. As a consequence, Walter concludes that it is wrong to characterize the regime founded by the first Somoza as a personalistic dictator-ship, since power relations took on an increasingly institutionalized form, being mediated through the state. There was, as Walter notes, “always a preference to provide institutional solutions to political and administrative problems.”1 As the state gradually became the locale where disputes around political and economic issues were resolved, the caudillo-style politics practiced by figures like Emil-iano Chamorro began to decline in importance. Under Somoza García, the national state underwent significant modernization that increased its capacity to regulate the economy, to arbitrate between domestic political actors, and, through the institution of the National Guard, to exercise a monopoly over the means of physical coercion.

The consolidation of Somocismo was clearly assisted by the nature of the regime’s opponents, who did not oppose dictatorship as such but objected instead to the existing distribution of political, military and business opportuni-ties that favored Somocista Liberals. The dispute was especially bitter in relation to the presidency, a position that was completely out of reach for Conservatives. With or without Somoza García, Walter suggests, the consensus amongst the oligarchy over the need to secure the conditions for capitalist accumulation would have resulted in the emergence of some form of authoritarian statism:

Things probably would not have developed much differently if Somoza had not come to power or if he had not remained as head of the Guardia Nacional for so long. This is so because the Nicaraguan state during the Somoza regime represented an overall consensus among the politically dominant groups on the desirability of export-oriented, capitalist economic growth and the need to guarantee the institu-tional and coercive powers of the state to foster and assure such growth.2

1. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 240.2. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 246.

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By revealing how Somocismo served important demands emanating from Nicaragua’s oligarchy, Walter’s study not only suggests that the regime enjoyed a significant degree of legitimacy but also discloses the existence of a substantial degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the US, leading to the conclusion that the regime did not mechanically follow the dictates of successive US administrations but served to attain objectives that were of critical importance to domestic actors.1

There are a number of points in Walter’s approach that can be contested. They generally relate to a misunderstanding of the period prior to the establish-ment of the Somocista regime and the downplaying of the patrimonial, personal-istic practices that formed an integral part of Somocismo. Walter fails to note that the political consensus within Nicaragua that was of central importance in the success of Somocismo was a direct outcome of US policy, particularly its mil-itary operations against the Zelaya administration in 1909 and against Sandinoduring 1927-33. These operations wiped out domestic nationalist movements that would, if they had successfully captured the state, have resulted in a signifi-cantly different political regime in Nicaragua. The lack of discussion on this point is due more to Walter’s own analysis of the situation prior to 1936 rather than omission. Specifically, Walter identifies the Sandino rebellion as being pri-marily a regional war concerned with the withdrawal of the US Marines and the removal of José María Moncada from the presidency. From this perspective, San-dino remained a regional caudillo, not a nation-builder.2 If a consensus existed over the nature of the state during the Somocista period, if not the individual who presided over it, it was as a deliberate result of US political and military pol-icy in Nicaragua that had systematically eliminated all nationalist alternatives. By 1934, the only political actors left in the country were those sections of the Liberal and Conservative oligarchy who had collaborated with the US.

Although Walter observes a tendency towards the institutionalization of power relations under Somocismo, there is plenty of evidence that older patri-monial practices remained a central feature of the regime, with personalistic patron-client relations being given an institutionalized gloss. Walter acknowl-edges that most matters of state administration had to cross Somoza’s desk. Indeed, state institutions themselves were thoroughly penetrated by the PLN, suggesting that party affiliation was perhaps more important than administra-tive competence in gaining employment in the public sector. In many ways, the new institutional order that characterized the state under the Somozas seemed to have been colonized by older patrimonial practices through which power had traditionally been exercised in Nicaragua.

1. E-mail correspondence with Knut Walter, 6 January 1999. 2. Walter, K. (1993) The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, p. 31.

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The suggestion of growing regime autonomy can also be questioned. Almost every institution that made up the Somocista state was a US-sponsored initia-tive, from the National Guard to the reformed banking system, to new electoral laws and the bi-cameral structure of the Nicaraguan Congress and the develop-mental agencies established during the 1960s. Similar US-sponsored state-build-ing programs had been undertaken throughout the region during the 1940s and 1950s. Somocismo appears to have been the Nicaraguan version of a region-wide attempt by the US to secure a politically and economically dependent Central America.1 These institutional innovations to the state apparatus allowed the regime to exercise effective authority over Nicaraguan society. Whilst the US was to take a determining role in re-vamping the institutions of the Nicaraguan state, through the prior elimination of any nationalist political forces it simulta-neously set the parameters of what constituted acceptable politics in Nicaragua, effectively de-linking the relationship between nation and state. From this per-spective, national sovereignty over the state was reduced to a fiction. The Somocista regime represented the final outcome of a long-drawn-out process to stabilize Nicaragua on the part of, and in the interests of, the US.

12. CONCLUSION

The continuing occurrence of internecine civil wars during the early twenti-eth century clearly had their roots in the “process of partial, incomplete, trun-cated liberal nation-state formation” that characterized the nineteenth century.2

The ten year period from the Constitutionalist War of 1926 until the election of Anastasio Somoza García in 1936 embodies an historical conjuncture in which the old oligarchic system was in its dying stages. The caudillismo of Emiliano Chamorro epitomized that old regime, presiding over social and economic stag-nation and no longer able to sustain stable rule through its traditional networks of patronage. It was this vacuum which would act as a catalyst for the search for a modernizing alternative. Whilst the old regime was clearly dying, however, the contestation over what would replace it was to be settled through a combination of protracted guerrilla war and intense political-ideological struggles.

Three contending forces are perceptible in this vacuum: a weak liberalism represented by sections of the oligarchy, a radical nationalist modernizationproject represented by Sandinismo and a modernization process linked to US geo-political interests, now known as Somocismo. The first of these was perhaps

1. Interview with Francis Kinlock, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua; Managua 24 June 1997.

2. Schroeder, M. (1993) To Defend Our Nations Honor, p. 46.

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the weakest and least radical. Its main sponsors were the traditional Liberal oli-garchy, which continued to foster nationalist sentiments, yet whose class inter-ests set them in opposition to Sandinismo. Its figurehead, Juan Bautista Sacasa, pursued a program of peace and economic regeneration through public works. Beyond this, the Liberal agenda was extremely limited, however, and appears to have been increasingly dated by historical developments. It was the latter two which promised a new vision of the nation.

Sandinismo represented the arrival of the new class politics of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, socialist and anarchist ideas on the state, economy and lib-erty form the ideological foundations on which Latin America’s first organized workers’ movement would arise in the oil fields of Mexico. After his return from Tampico, Sandino was to become the emissary of such ideas in Nicaragua. Expe-riencing first hand the contrast between the working conditions in the Mexican oil fields and those of the San Albino mine convinced him of the urgent need for social change in Nicaragua. As is evident from much of his writings, the results of the Constitutionalist War taught Sandino a hard lesson. They showed him that none of the traditional political parties nor their backers were either willing or capable of fulfilling this historical task. Sandino turned to Nicaragua’s laboring classes as the only agents capable of completing this project. According to Sand-ino, in contrast to the vacillating élites whose political loyalties and principles could be bought off, “only the workers and peasants will go on to the end.”1

A central theme in the ideas of Sandino was the construction of the state as an entity which had to be independent from all foreign influence if it were to serve the nation. As the social legislation which resulted from the Mexican Rev-olution had shown him, only when a state was free from foreign, and especially Yankee domination, could it serve the interests of the nation. Sandino was to recruit Nicaragua’s poor in pursuit of this objective by framing his project within the discourse of nationalism, the first time that such élite precepts had been uti-lized in the interests of what he referred to as the worker-peasant-Indian major-ity.2 In so doing, he transformed this traditionally marginalized majority into active political subjects. Anti-imperialism had finally enfranchised this group, bringing them into Nicaragua’s political history as independent actors in their own right rather than as the foot soldiers of élite patrons. As such, they bore an essentially anti-imperialist, anti-Yankee and egalitarian political identity. Only with the successful conquest of state power, however, could Sandinismo have had any hope of universalizing such an identity beyond its social and geographi-cal base and portray it as an essential expression of the nation and its interests.

1. Sandino, A. C. “A los obreros de la ciudad y del campo de Nicaragua y de toda la America Latina” (26 February 1930) in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo II, p. 72.

2. Schroeder, M. (1996) Horse Thieves to Rebels to Dogs, p. 387.

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Sandino was always acutely aware of the importance of this last point. It is for this reason that he gave the EDSNN an elaborate command structure able to act as a kind of alternative set of rule-making authorities counter-posed to the official state.1 This command structure engaged in a number of activities which amounted to the beginnings of an imagining process that had at its heart the building of a distinct national political community. Understanding Sandino’s ideas on the state, especially his insistence on its independence, is essential in his portrayal as a nation-builder rather than a patriotic military leader whose sole motivation was the withdrawal of the US Marines from Nicaraguan territory.

Ironically, the effectiveness of his anti-imperialist struggle forced the US to re-organize the mechanisms through which it would express its regional hege-mony on a more authoritative and constant basis. This centered on the central-ization and rationalization of state institutions, increasing their overall administrative and coercive capacity. For the US, this represented a more sophisticated technique in securing regional objectives than direct military intervention. Owing to an increasing degree of integration into the international economy, the Nicaraguan state would, no doubt, have undergone a process of centralization and bureaucratization. Somocismo was to preside over this pro-cess, shaping the direction that this development would take. At times benevo-lent, at times murderous, the over-riding objectives of Somocismo remained the serving of US interests in the region. In the course of its forty-two year history, Somocismo was to confirm its client status many times over, distinguishing itself by its successful political demobilization of all sectors of Nicaraguan society.

In the foregoing discussion, I have attempted to illustrate the historical roots, ideological foundations and political objectives of both the Sandino rebel-lion and the Somocista state. Although a number of accounts tend to see the rebellion in terms of either traditional banditry or a patriotic fight against a for-eign invader, in line with more recent studies, this chapter has sought to portray the rebellion as of national significance, with its roots being located in the failure to consolidate national sovereignty during the nineteenth century. The most explicit example of this was represented by the US overthrow of the Zelayaadministration in 1909. Sandino himself stated that what the Nicaraguan people wanted was “to restore the rights they had lost since 1909.”2 Ultimately, the San-dino rebellion was to fail in this objective. Failure did not, however, extinguish “a thousand inchoate dreams” based around the very ideas that had inspired San-dino, those of an independent state over which the nation was sovereign, that in turn would provide the only foundations to achieve social justice for all Nicara-

1. Schroeder, M. (1995) The Sandino Rebellion Revisited, p. 29.2. Sandino, A. C. “Bases del convenio que se propone al general José María Moncada” (6

January 1929) in Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 302.

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guans. Despite the major restructuring of the national state that was undertaken during the Somocista dictatorship, these goals remained elusive and, indeed, never constituted the official goals of the state in any way. The state as a set of relatively effective administrative institutions was to become an existent reality after Sandino’s death. The nation, however, as a limited community that was both sovereign and distinct from all others was systematically undermined. The quest to establish the nation as such was to re-emerge once again during the 1960s, generating intense political struggles that ultimately resulted in the revo-lutionary overthrow of Somocismo in 1979.

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CHAPTER 3. THE SANDINISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION FRONT AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECT

1. THE CUBAN REVOLUTION AND THE FORMATION OF THE FSLN

Most of the founding members of the FSLN had already been involved in political activity prior to creating their own organization. Whilst a student at the Institute of Northern Nicaragua, Carlos Fonseca, the FSLN’s first General Secretary, had been involved in publishing a news sheet called Segovia which had been broadly critical of the Somoza dictatorship. However, it was not until he arrived at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) in León in 1956 to take up a law degree that he first became involved in a clandestine politi-cal organization by establishing the first student cell of the Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN). This cell consisted of three members: Fonseca himself, Tomás Borge, then working as a journalist for the Conservative opposition newspaper La Prensa, and Silvio Mayorga, a fellow law student at UNAN. It was also whilst studying at university in León that Fonseca began to read about Sandino. Explaining the background to the eventual split with the PSN is crucial in understanding the reasons and significance behind the adoption of the figure of Sandino by the young student revolutionaries.

The Moscow-aligned PSN had been founded in 1944, a move which was unconnected to the increasing Conservative and Liberal anti-Somocista opposi-tion throughout that year. Although many within and without the Somocista alliance viewed the establishment of a Soviet-style communist party with alarm, its association with Moscow actually robbed it of any revolutionary potential. At the time, Nicaragua was in an alliance with the Soviet Union against the Axis

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powers. Consequently, the PSN refrained from any activities which might have disrupted the war effort. Perhaps more significantly in the longer term, the PSN took an orthodox line, which insisted that capitalism, along with the proletariat, would have to develop and mature before socialism was possible. The PSN even voiced limited support for the Somocista state with the enactment of a new Labor Code in 1945 which legalized trade unions and strike action. With the ending of the war, however, the PSN’s opposition to Somocismo hardened, as a response to the regime’s increasing anti-communism. In 1959, a number of Cubans and PSN militants, including Fonseca, formed the 21st of September Rigoberto López Pérez Brigade in Honduras with the intention of making an armed incursion into Nicaragua. El Chaparral (1959), as it became known, was to prove a disaster. The group never even reached Nicaragua before it was intercepted by the Honduran army. A number of Fonseca’s band were killed and Fonseca him-self was badly wounded. The survivors were taken back to Tegucigalpa and then deported to Cuba. This was the last armed action to have any direct input from the PSN which, from that moment on, stuck rigidly to electoral politics.

Although there is no evidence in his writings during 1959-60 that the El Chaparral incident had led Fonseca to reject the PSN, it appears to have sown the seeds of doubt which would ultimately persuade him that, as a political force, it was unwilling and unable to overthrow the dictatorship. In a speech given at the Central University of Venezuela in March 1960, Fonseca blamed the failure of El Chaparral on the “revolutionary and military incapacity” of the group’s commander, Rafael Somarriba.1 Furthermore, whilst not criticizing the PSN directly, Fonseca appeared to reject the strategy of isolated armed attacks, such as that of El Chaparral, in favor of a “popular armed insurrection” of the kind undertaken by Sandino.2

Contrary to the PSN’s orthodox view that socialist revolution was only pos-sible once Nicaragua had developed a proletariat sufficient to carry out the task, Fonseca was convinced that the prospects of such a revolution remained credi-ble if, like Sandino and Ché Guevara, the armed insurgents developed links with the masses. At this point in time, it seems that Fonseca conceived the masses to have been principally the rural peasantry, although he did point to the role that students like himself and workers could play. Whilst Sandino had shown the revolutionary potential of the Nicaraguan peasantry, of more salient value at the time was the victory of Fidel Castro and the July 26th Movement. In an inter-view in 1970, Fonseca told the Chilean journalist González Bermejo: “The exam-ple of the people, youth and guerrillas of Cuba exercised a decisive role in the

1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Obras I: Bajo la bandera del sandinismo (Managua, Editorial Nueva Nica-ragua), p. 95.

2. Fonseca, C. (1981) Obras I: Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 99.

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Chapter 3. The Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Construction of a Revolutionary

maturation of the political process in Nicaragua which had suffered a brutal interruption in 1934.”1 Tomás Borge expressed similar sentiments in his eulogy to Fonseca written whilst in prison in 1976:

The victory of armed struggle in Cuba, more than just delighting our hearts, was the parting of innumerable curtains, an explosion that showed the naive and boring dogmas of those times for what they really were. The Cuban revolution sent a terri-fying chill running through America’s ruling classes and shattered the suddenly outmoded relics with which we’d begun to adorn our political altars. For us, Fidel was the resurrection of Sandino, the answer to our doubts, the justification for our heretical dreams of just a few hours before.2

The Cuban revolution showed the future founders of the FSLN that the PSN’s policy was wrong and amounted to a justification to abandon the armed struggle in favor of electoral politics. The belief that, like Ché Guevara in Cuba, Sandino had successfully waged a guerrilla war against US imperialism helped Fonseca to overcome the pessimism of Latin America’s communist parties.

Whilst Fonseca was already aware of Sandino during the mid-1950s, his association with the PSN had prevented him from openly discussing his political and military legacy in any detail. The official view of the PSN was that Sandino was nothing more than a petty-bourgeois nationalist. Latin America’s commu-nist parties made much of the split which occurred between Sandino and the Salvadorian communist Farabundo Martí, supposedly due to the purely nation-alist character of the struggle against the US Marines in Nicaragua. Once the Cuban revolution had occurred however, Fonseca, following the ideas of ChéGuevara, felt that the objective conditions normally identified as providing the basis for a successful socialist revolution could be replaced by the subjective conditions prevailing in each country in deciding whether such a revolution were possible.3 His ongoing studies of Sandino suggested to him that this legacy of anti-imperialist struggle made the prospects for a revolution in Nicaragua exceptionally favorable. In 1961, the members of the student cell which Fonseca had helped organize at the UNAN in 1956, together with a former member of Sandino’s EDSNN, Colonial Santos López, met in Tegucigalpa to form the Move-ment for a New Nicaragua, which in turn quickly became known as the National Liberation Front.4 In 1962, after some debate, Fonseca persuaded the other mem-bers to add Sandinista to the title of their organization, against the wishes of at least one of the group, Noel Guerrero. Some accounts omit this hesitation over

1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 208.2. Borge, T. (1984) Carlos, the Dawn Is No longer Beyond Our Reach (Vancouver, New Star

Books), p. 28.3. Hodges, D. (1986) The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin, Univer-

sity of Texas Press), pp. 176-77.

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explicitly identifying the new group with Sandino, a hesitancy which could probably be attributed to the lingering influence of PSN ideology.1

The Cuban experience finally broke Fonseca’s adhesion to the PSN, which had been growing steadily weaker as he uncovered more details about Sandino. This was only the first step, however. Fonseca was now able to conceive of an alternative set of revolutionary circumstances to those presented by orthodox Marxism-Leninism. From his observations of both Sandino and Ché, this alter-native constituted a popular armed struggle which would be conducted accord-ing to the favorable geographical, political and historical conditions found in Nicaragua, rather than a general scientific theory of socialist revolution. It was a strategy which was clearly already part of the repertoire of Fonseca and his col-laborators even before they broke with the PSN.2 There was, however, still much ideological work to be done before Sandinismo would become what Vanden (1979) described as the “repository of national consciousness,” a coherent revolu-tionary ideology towards which Nicaraguans, as Nicaraguans, felt a natural affinity.3

For the remainder of his life, Fonseca was to devote his intellectual activities to refining and developing Sandinismo. Two major objectives were pursued. Firstly, Sandino’s anti-imperialism had to be portrayed as a natural manifesta-tion of the popular will of the Nicaraguan nation. Secondly, the FSLN had to portray itself and its brand of Marxism as the exclusive representatives of this will. Despite the various opposition groups ranged against Somocismo, some of which occasionally made references to Sandino, only the FSLN followed his strategy of a popular guerrilla war. By channeling the people’s discontent with the US-backed dictatorship into electoral politics, the Conservative-led opposi-tion was depicted as having betrayed the Nicaraguan people’s inherently rebel-lious, anti-imperialist identity. Such politics were seen to have been a product of the US Marine occupation of Nicaragua that had established Somocismo. In this

4. The name appears to have been inspired by the Algerian struggle against French colo-nialism. See Zimmermann, M. (1998) In The Footsteps of Ché and Sandino: The Life of Carlos Fonseca Amador of Nicaragua (PhD Thesis University of Pittsburgh), p. 153. Interestingly Zimmermann also raises doubts about whether the founding meeting in Tegucigalpa ever really took place.

1. See Borge, T. “Historia politico-militar del FSLN” in Encuentro (September 1979) No. 15, p. 39. He suggests that the FSLN was established in 1961 without acknowledging the brief existence of the National Liberation Front. During his trial in 1964, Fonseca himself acknowledges that he had been a member of FSLN since September 1962. See Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 105, 212.

2. Palmer, S. “Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua” in Latin American Research Review Vol. XXIII (1988), No. 1, p 96. See also Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 99-101.

3. Vanden, H. “The Ideology of the Insurrection” in Bosset, T. (ed.) (1979) Nicaragua in Revolution (New York, Praeger,), p. 41.

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sense, the resurrection of Sandino in the writings of Carlos Fonseca was very much a reconstruction geared towards achieving these objectives. It was the lat-ter of the two which presented most problems, however, for, whilst the figure of Sandino had become an enduring part of Nicaraguan folklore, the FSLN’s Marx-ism was wholly alien to most Nicaraguans.

The search for an alternative, or indigenous, set of circumstances to promote revolutionary change might have had its roots in the Cuban revolution, yet the FSLN’s idea of adopting a national historical figure as the symbol of their strug-gle may be attributable to another source: the Peruvian Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui (1895-1930). In order for the Nicaraguan people to identify with the Sandinista struggle, Fonseca followed Mariátegui’s maxim for the need of a revo-lutionary myth which would have some resonance amongst the masses.1 Sandinobecame the basis of that myth which would act as an access point in the ideolog-ical battle to win over the masses to the FSLN’s program.2 Although Fonseca himself rarely made references to Mariátegui in his writings, other leading Sand-inistas have acknowledged him to have been a major influence on Sandinismo.3

Fonseca would have certainly come across the ideas of Mariátegui whilst reading the work of Ché Guevara, whose own ideas had been influenced by the Peruvian communist.4

Fonseca’s work on Sandino was to reach its most articulate phase with the completion of Viva Sandino (1974).5 Whilst the FSLN’s mature version of Sandino would take another fifteen years to develop, at least one account indicates that Fonseca had already formulated the basic outline of this during his student days at UNAN when he described Sandino as a path: “ ‘Sandino,’ Carlos said on one occasion, ‘is a path.’ It would be superficial to reduce him to a category or to one more date on the yearly calendar of activities. I think it is important to study his thought.”6 Whilst one of his collaborators at the time dismissed such a state-ment as poetry, the language used by Fonseca was indeed more than poetry. The idea that Sandino represented a path which transcended the chronological

1. Hodges, D. (1986) The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, p. 179.2. As Palmer points out, Fonseca can be seen as representing what Gramsci called an

“organic intellectual” who could articulate the popular will in terms understood by the masses themselves in order to mobilize them for a political project. See Palmer, S. Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua, p. 92.

3. See Humberto Ortega’s “Presentacion” in Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 7.

4. Hodges, D. (1986) The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution p. 79.5. Fonseca, C. (1985) Obras II: Viva Sandino (Managua, Editorial Nueva Nicaragua) This

work only became well known after it was first published in 1982. Owing to the conditions existing during the Somoza period, it remained unknown until dedicated chroniclers from the Institute for the Study of Sandinismo discovered and edited it. E-Mail correspondence with Miguel Herrera, 12 March 1999.

6. Borge, T. (1984) Carlos, the Dawn Is No longer Beyond Our Reach, p. 20.

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period in which he spent fighting the US Marines is in fact very revealing, although the significance of his choice of words only seems to have become clear after the failure of the FSLN’s first guerrilla campaigns.

2. THE FSLN AND THE FAILURE OF RURAL GUERRILLA WARFARE

Almost as soon as it was formed, the FSLN began preparations for a guerrilla unit to penetrate northern Nicaragua and established a Nicaraguan equivalent of the Sierra Maestra, the liberated zone from which Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara organized their guerrilla campaign. The earliest, known as the Río Coco/Bocay-Raití (1962-1963), situated in the northern Atlantic Coast, an area where most people spoke Miskitu Indian and where the guerrillas had no political contacts, contradicted everything which the group had learned from Ché’s writings on guerrilla warfare. Borge describes how the guerrillas found themselves in an inhospitable area which was inhabited by “a really backward people...Many of them did not know how to speak Spanish and I believe that they never really understood who we were. Some thought we were the Guard.”1 When the guer-rillas did encounter the National Guard, they had to retreat back to Honduras with heavy losses.

The failure of the Río Coco/Bocay-Raití expedition encouraged a legal inter-lude in the activities of the FSLN. They concentrated on establishing support networks both in the countryside and the urban areas. However, they also became indirectly involved with electoral politics. During the 1967 election cam-paign, the FSLN gave its support to the PSN-sponsored Republican Mobiliza-tion Party, which was part of a larger Conservative-dominated opposition alliance, the National Opposition Union (UNO). Although the FSLN was later to criticize this strategy, it did follow Fonseca’s own thinking as outlined in his courtroom testimony concerning the need for “unity with other anti-Somocista and revolutionary forces.”2 The futility of engaging in electoral politics led the FSLN into its second armed operation, which became known as Pancasán(1967).

Learning from El Chaparral and Río Coco/Bocay-Raití, the guerrillas cen-tered their operations north of the city of Matagalpa, the birthplace of both Borge and Fonseca. On this occasion, they did have some knowledge of the local terrain and some contacts with the Spanish-speaking peasants who lived in the area. When the guerrillas encountered the National Guard on August 27th, they

1. Borge, T. (1979) Historia politico-militar del FSLN, p. 42.2. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 115.

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were virtually wiped out. Silvio Mayorga, one of the founding members, was among those killed. Despite military defeat, the importance of Pancasán should not be understated as it marked a decisive break from the recent flirtation with electoral politics. The FSLN was able to carve out a space for itself in the politi-cal landscape of the country as the leaders of the armed struggle against Somocismo: “The Pancasán and Fila Grande guerrilla experiences sealed our political destiny once and for all. Sandino was no longer a name or one more date on the yearly calendar of activities, but truly a path.”1

The military defeat at Pancasán also coincided with the defeat of other Latin American insurgent movements which had been inspired by the Cuban revolu-tion and with the death of Ché Guevara himself in Bolivia. Unwilling to return to the politics of the PSN, yet realizing that Ché’s “foco” theory of guerrilla warfare would not enable the FSLN to establish a Nicaraguan Sierra Maestra, a pro-longed period of reflection, self-criticism and ideological debate began that ran until 1975.2 It was during this period that Fonseca was to take up his writings on Sandino once again. Although a number of declarations and interviews had been made between the Río Coco/Bocay-Raití and Pancasán operations, none of them explained in detail what the FSLN’s connection to Sandino’s struggle was. Beyond their stated anti-imperialist character, the FSLN had yet to systemati-cally present what their objectives were.3 This early period of intellectual inac-tivity was broken with the publication of the Historic Program of the FSLN (1969) and Nicaragua: Hora Zero (1969), where Fonseca finally began to ground his ideas on Sandino in Nicaragua’s rich history of revolt and rebellion. It is in the context of these post-Pancasán writings that Fonseca’s reference to Sandino as a path began to make sense.

3. THE RE-BIRTH OF SANDINO IN THE WORKS OF CARLOS FONSECA AMADOR

The Historic Program of the FSLN and Nicaragua: Hora Zero were both largely the creation of Carlos Fonseca. The first of these major documents became the FSLN’s political platform and consisted of thirteen points covering the political, economic, social and cultural objectives of the organization. Although there was a commitment to create peasant cooperatives and a people’s patriotic army, the

1. Borge, T. (1984) Carlos, the Dawn Is No longer Beyond Our Reach, p. 51.2. Hodges suggests that the FSLN never adopted Ché’s “foco” approach, but were instead

influenced by an (incorrect) interpretation of Ché’s ideas offered by Régis Debray. Hodges, D. (1986) The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, p. 223.

3. A partial exception to this was Fonseca’s “Proclama del Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional,” a short text published clandestinely in 1969 which included a list of 15 objectives. See Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 160-161.

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Historic Program of the FSLN went beyond Sandino’s ideas, or indeed any other political program in Nicaraguan history, in promoting Marxist-Leninist ideas in relation to state control over the means of production, distribution and exchange. Above all, the Historic Program of the FSLN spelt out that, as a political-military organization, the FSLN did not only seek national liberation from impe-rialism but also a social revolution.1

Of more interest to the present discussion, however, is the document Nicara-gua: Hora Zero. It is in this document that Fonseca first attempts to provide a comprehensive reinterpretation of Nicaragua’s political history, a history in which the new Marxism of the FSLN becomes both a logical outcome of, and the necessary solution to, “more than four centuries of foreign aggression and oppression.”2 Through a catalogue of inter-connected events, a common thread of US imperialist intervention is revealed, running through Nicaraguan history. From the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine (1823), to the death of Sandino, a chronology of imperialist intervention is documented in which the Somocista dictatorship constitutes the latest example. Included in Fonseca’s history was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), which permitted Britain and the US to “arbi-trarily decide to divide among themselves the right to build an inter-oceanic route in Nicaragua,” the destruction of San Juan del Norte by the US navy, the intervention of “thousands of North American filibusters” led by William Walker in 1854, the overthrow of the nationalist government of Zelaya in 1909, the death of Benjamín Zeledón in 1912 as a result of US military intervention, the signing of the Chamorro-Bryan canal treaty in 1914, and, finally, the US occupa-tion of 1926-1933, which ended with Sandino’s death and the establishment of the Somoza dictatorship. These events reduced Nicaragua to a “base for imperi-alist aggressions against other Latin American peoples, and especially against the countries of the Caribbean basin,” with the Somoza regime allowing the US to use Nicaraguan territory for operations against Guatemala in 1954, Cuba in 1961 and the Dominican Republic in 1965.3

However, this process was not uncontested. On the contrary, what is essen-tial for Fonseca’s characterization of the Nicaraguan nation was what he referred to as its “tradition of rebellion,” a willingness to use violent rather than peaceful means to achieve political objectives, a factor which distinguished Nicaraguans from other Latin Americans. Those oppositionist groups which sought change through elections can be seen to have been as foreign and as alien to Nicaragua as Somocismo itself.4

1. “The Historica Program of the FSLN” in Borge, T. et al. (1982) Sandinistas Speak (New York, Pathfinder Press), p. 13.

2. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 176.3. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 177-179.

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The reason why this rebellious spirit had never triumphed so far was due to a lack of organization and proper direction as a consequence of Nicaragua’s political isolation and economic underdevelopment. As a result, the country’s political consciousness was very low. Quoting Marx’s comments on the Spanish, Fonseca was to describe Nicaraguans as “a rebellious people, but not a revolu-tionary people.” Under such conditions, according to Fonseca, although Sandinoachieved a great victory by forcing the withdrawal of US Marines from the coun-try, ultimately he could never have succeeded in initiating revolutionary change. Sandino, like Zeledón and the patriots who fought Walker, lacked two essential ingredient which would ensure that the struggle against imperialism did not “simply achieve a change of men in power, but a change of the system”: the prole-tariat and a correct revolutionary consciousness. The fact that Sandino appeared to lack these means made his achievements all the more remarkable:

The Sandinista resistance, which became the heroic vanguard of the people, almost completely consisted of peasants, and it is precisely because of this factor which was the glory and tragedy of this revolutionary movement. It was a glory for the people of Nicaragua that the most humble class responded to the stained honor of the homeland and at the same time it was a tragedy because it was an attempt made by a peasantry without any political consciousness. Once Sandino was assas-sinated, his movement was incapable of continuity.1

Despite the need for leadership, this did not come from the “old Marxists” of the PSN but from the revolutionary triumph in Cuba. Armed actions against the dictatorship had continued intermittently, such as the campaign of the veteran Sandinista Ramón Raudales and the assassination of Anastasio Somoza García by the young Nicaraguan poet, Rigoberto López Pérez in 1956, but these fol-lowed the pattern of individual, sporadic, rebelliousness. Depicting the period immediately prior to the formation of the FSLN as one characterized by the fail-ure of traditional Marxist parties to engage in effective, organized and revolu-tionary opposition allowed the Sandinistas to occupy a privileged position in Fonseca’s historiography. The FSLN marked a turning point. Its role was to syn-thesize the rebelliousness of the Nicaraguan people with the political and orga-nizational lessons of the Cuban revolution, transforming Nicaraguans into truly revolutionary subjects. Sandino was indeed a path, continuing Nicaragua’s cen-turies old tradition of rebellion whilst simultaneously developing it further than what had hitherto been possible. In the context of the growth in Third World revolutionary Marxism, especially in Cuba, and the emergence of a nascent pro-letariat in Nicaragua, the FSLN could take the struggle against imperialism a step further on the path which Sandino had taken, going beyond the limits of

4. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 179-180.1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 181.

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popular rebellion and into the province of socialist revolution. By portraying the new Marxism as both a necessary step and a logical progression in the fight against imperialism, the Historic Program of the FSLN finds a legitimate place on the political agenda of Nicaragua despite its historical novelty. Never again would national liberation be separate from socialist revolution. Only through socialist revolution could national liberation finally become a reality, and vice versa, and only the FSLN, in the footsteps of Sandino and Ché, was capable of following the path which would lead to both. In the final passage of Nicaragua: Hora Zero, the oath taken by all militants makes the fusion of the two figures the essence of the FSLN’s version of Sandinismo:

Before the image of Augusto César Sandino and Ernesto Ché Guevara, before the memory of the heroes and martyrs of Nicaragua, Latin America and the whole of humanity. I place my hand on the red and black flag which signifies a “Free Home-land or Death,” and I swear to defend with arms in hand the national honor and to fight for the redemption of the oppressed and exploited of Nicaragua and the world. If I carry out this oath, the liberation of Nicaragua and all peoples will be the reward; if I betray this oath, death in disgrace and shame will be my punishment.1

4. EXILE IN CUBA: 1970–1975

Soon after completing the Historic Program of the FSLN and Nicaragua: Hora Zero, Fonseca was imprisoned in Costa Rica, where he had gone to write these documents. A failed attempt to break him out of prison led by Humberto Ortegaresulted in an eighteen-year prison sentence. The pair were released in 1970, after an FSLN commando group hijacked a plane carrying executives of the United Fruit Company. A hostage exchange took place and Fonseca and Ortega were in Cuba by November 1970. They were joined by other leading members, including a group which had been based in Chile until the 1973 coup forced them to leave, and a group freed from prison in Nicaragua through another hostage exchange in 1974. According to Zimmermann (1998), this period allowed the FSLN leaders to live a relatively open life together for the first time. It also gave them the oppor-tunity to build on the ideological work which Fonseca had started in Costa Rica.2 Whilst other members concentrated on organizational work, Fonseca devoted most of his attention to developing his ideas on Sandino.

In Sandino: guerrillero proletario (1972), Fonseca repeats many of the themes mapped out in Nicaragua: Hora Zero (1969), although there is a more pronounced emphasis on the proletarian nature of the Sandinista struggle. Presenting him as

1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 194.2. Zimmermann, M. (1998) In the Footsteps of Ché and Sandino, p. 226.

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the precursor of Ché Guevara, Fonseca described Sandino as a “worker of peas-ant extraction” who had his first encounter with Yankee imperialism in 1912, when he saw the corpse of Benjamín Zeledón. His anti-imperialist consciousness grew whilst working as a mechanic in Veracruz, Mexico, “where there still lin-gered the gun smoke of the bullets fired by the oppressed peasantry led by the guerrilla Emiliano Zapata.”1 Returning to Nicaragua to fight for the Constitu-tionalist cause, he recruited a group of workers from the San Albino mine. The account of Sandino’s military campaign against the Marines after Moncada had signed the Treaty of Tipitapa explicitly attempts to minimize Sandino’s split with the international communist movement by recounting the names of com-munist participants in the EDSNN, including Agustín Farabundo Martí, “who until the last moment remembered Sandino as a brother.”2

This theme was taken up again in another major work on Sandino, Cronología de la Resistencia Sandinista (1973), which represents Fonseca’s own attempt to write a month-by-month account of the Sandino rebellion. Although the split between Martí and Sandino is acknowledged, the two guerrillas were said to have maintained a mutual respect for one another, illustrated by Martí’s declaration as he stood before a firing-squad in February 1932 that Sandino was a great patriot.3 No mention is made of Sandino’s free-masonry or his adhesion to the Magnetico-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune. There is also a quite detailed account concerning Somoza García’s rise to power, which concentrates on the role of US ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane and Emiliano Chamorro in con-spiring to overthrow President Sacasa after Sandino’s assassination.4 The narra-tive concludes with the Cuban revolution and the citing of Sandino’s name by Ché Guevara in the first Declaración de Havana (1962) and the pictures of Sandino being raised as a “symbol of Latin America’s tradition of anti-imperialist war” at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966.5

5. “VIVA SANDINO”

This text, one of the last which Fonseca was to write on Sandino, followed a pattern established in his other works: a chronology of US intervention in Nica-ragua, the notion of a rebellious identity for the Nicaraguan people and the Sand-ino rebellion described as the most recent expression of this rebelliousness. The

1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 263.2. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 274.3. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 126, 134.4. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 162.5. Fonseca, C. “Cronología de la resistencia sandinista” in Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera

del sandinismo, pp. 166-167.

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work itself is the result of a number of years of research which gathered informa-tion from libraries in Cuba, Mexico, and Costa Rica, most of which Fonseca had never seen before. More than any other text, Viva Sandino (1974) unequivocally identifies Sandino with revolutionary socialist ideas, ascribing the breach with his Marxist supporters in terms of a mistaken political line taken by the interna-tional communist movement of the day rather than a lack of proletarian con-sciousness on the part of Sandino. The fact that his movement did not develop a socialist character was due to a combination of circumstances which conspired against him and not a lack of revolutionary consciousness on his part.

The first part of Viva Sandino is taken up by the construction of an historical narrative of imperialist intervention and Nicaraguan resistance, a process punc-tuated by utopian pacifism on the part of tribal chiefs, who were depicted as the forebears of Sandino’s intellectual sympathizers who persuaded him to make peace.1 Indeed, Fonseca constantly sees a continuity between the forces of impe-rialism and liberation, with the name of Chamorro being prominent amongst those who sought a compromise with imperialism for over a hundred years, whilst the region of the Segovias remained a symbol of ‘ferocious’ rebellion. The area around Matagalpa had been the center of the most intense anti-imperialist resistance, from the War of the Indians (1881) to the Sandino rebellion.2 Such violent episodes were particularly acute in Nicaraguan history since its position as a possible site for an inter-oceanic canal acted like a magnet to the pretensions of the major imperialist powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Through the machinations of Emiliano Chamorro, “descendant of one of the dominant oligarchic clans of the 19th century,” not even the resistance of Ben-jamín Zeledón in 1912 could prevent Nicaragua from being reduced to “the con-dition of a protectorate.” It was not until the arrival of a Matagalpan, Bartolomé Martínez, to the office of the presidency in 1923 that significant resistance was rekindled. In 1925, Don Bartolomé backed the electoral ticket of Carlos José Solórzano and Juan Bautista Sacasa, who won on a platform to end the US mili-tary presence in Nicaragua. For Fonseca, it is this, and the reaction of the Chamorro clan, which form the antecedents for Sandino’s role in what was, by then, a centuries old pattern of rebellion between the humble Nicaraguan, usu-ally of Segovian origin, and imperialist aggressors allied with the local oligarchy.

The political identity of Sandino is established from the outset of the text as revolutionary rather than merely rebellious. Fonseca immediately establishes an

1. Fonseca, C. “Viva Sandino” in Fonseca, C. (1985) Obras II: Viva Sandino (Managua, Edito-rial Nueva Nicaragua), p. 24.

2. Fonseca was from Matagalpa. His great uncle, also called Carlos Fonseca, had been a member of the EDSNN. See Zimmermann, M. (1998) In the Footsteps of Ché and Sandino,p. 22.

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affinity between Sandino and the contemporary Latin American revolutionary movement with a quotation from Ché Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare: A Method(1975): “In America there has been recourse to guerrilla warfare on different occasions. The most recent example can be seen in the experience of Augusto César Sandino, fighting against the Yankee expeditionary forces in the Segovias of Nicaragua.”1 Fonseca goes on to identify the Russian revolution as one influ-ence on Sandino’s thought.2 Although Fonseca acknowledges that a “socialist opinion was unknown throughout all this time in the country,” Sandino’s own class consciousness was highly developed as a result of his travels to Mexico. Thus, whilst socialist ideas have yet to arrive in Nicaragua, Sandino’s own “iden-tification with advanced ideas of social revindication” allows him to tap into the rebelliousness which forms the “soul of the Nicaraguan people” as the basis of an effective strategy of guerrilla warfare:

The workers who accompany him are, like Sandino, from peasant origins who have sought work in the growing mining industry. They take up arms without hav-ing known a labor union organization before. It can be said that the determining factor has been the traditional popular rebelliousness of the country...The man who will soon be known as the guerrilla general Sandino, discovers with his popular genius which had been nourished with experience beyond the frontier the different advantages offered by the zone of the Segovias.3

Sandino’s response to the Treaty of Tipitapa was his Manifiesto de Julio (1927) where “there speaks not only the patriot, but the proletarian-in-arms.”4

The expropriation of the Segovian bourgeoisie carried out in Sandinista zones, the black and red flags which the Sandinistas inherited from the Mexican work-ers’ movement, and the singing of the International are all taken as evidence that the Sandino rebellion was informed by ideas “that were very close to socialism.” Yet Fonseca is clear that the political implications of Sandino’s own class con-sciousness were unable to develop owing to the conditions of the space and time in which he acted. These limitations could have been overcome if the interna-tional revolutionary movement had continued to give its support to Sandino. Farabundo Martí is seen as symbolizing the link between Sandino and the inter-national communist movement during the early phase. Although this link was broken, it is attributed to a discrepancy between the leadership of the Mexican communist party and Sandino. The source of this discrepancy related to Sand-ino’s willingness to work with non-communist anti-imperialist groups such as APRA5 , and even elements within the Mexican government. For breaking the rules of the “inflexible sectarianism” of the American communist parties of the

1. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 21.2. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 43.3. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 44.4. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 49.

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day, especially by adopting a peasant rather than proletarian base for his strug-gle, Sandino was condemned. By pointing to the infancy of the Mexican party, established in 1918, its decisions are seen as a result of a lack of maturity which plagued “the historical phase through which Latin America was then passing.”1

History would absolve Sandino’s strategy, as both Ché Guevara and Ho Chi Minh would demonstrate how peasant rebellions could turn into socialist revo-lutions. Differences over ideology are clearly played down as an explanatory fac-tor in Sandinos split with the Comintern in favor of the adverse circumstances of the 1930s which conspired against international solidarity with the Sandinista movement. Quoting Martí, Sandino’s differences with the communist movement are portrayed as more apparent than real:

Before receiving the volley that would deprive him of his life, the communist, Martí, declares: “I testify now to the moral integrity and absolute purity of General Sandino. I acknowledge that in Mexico he received repeated offers of considerable sums of money so as to abandon his struggle in the Segovias, and that the General rejected these offers with the most noble indignation...I am interested in clarifying these points to establish the historical truth. And now, as I die, two steps away from execution, I solemnly declare that General Sandino is the greatest patriot of the world.”2

Sandino himself was to say of his separation from Martí: “We separated filled with sadness, in the greatest harmony: like two brothers who love but can-not understand each other.”3 With this evidence, Fonseca effectively eradicates any distance between Sandino and international communism; the national liber-ation which he sought was interchangeable with the principles of communism: “the Sandino sacrificed by imperialism was not only a patriotic Sandino, but a Sandino who considered himself a brother of the communists who are capable of offering their lives on the alters of justice.”4

With the growing isolation of his movement, Nicaragua’s “ideological back-wardness” favored those forces which sought to destroy the anti-imperialist movement. The US had left behind a “politico-military clique” led by the Direc-tor of the National Guard, Anastasio Somoza García. With Sandino’s assassina-tion, the centuries-old popular struggle is interrupted. Somocismo is seen to represent a “dark shadow,” a period in which the lack of anti-imperialist struggle is construed as an aberration in the context of Nicaraguan’s propensity towards rebellion. With a few notable exceptions, such as General Pedro Altamirano, it is

5. The American Revolutionary Popular Alliance. This organization was established in 1924 by the Peruvian nationalist Raùl Haya de la Torre (1895-1979).

1. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 74.2. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 70.3. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 81.4. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 82.

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not until the Cuban revolution that Nicaragua continues on its historical path of national and social liberation: “It is with the rising of the Cuban revolution of 1959 that Marxism reached the Nicaraguan rebel spirit. The Marxism of Lenin, Fidel, Ché, Ho Chi Minh, is taken by the Sandinista National Liberation Frontwhich undertakes a new guerrilla path.”1

The information gathered on Sandino during Fonseca’s exile in Cuba gave a new picture of the life of the guerrilla leader. The limits of the Nicaraguan peo-ple’s rebellious identity remain a constant from his early writings. However, the figure of Sandino himself had been transformed from the folkloric or bandit sta-tus which he occupied in the imaginations of most Nicaraguans.2 Sandino repre-sented a figure who had surpassed these limits, no longer simply a rebel but a proletarian guerrilla whose class-consciousness had led him to attempt to garner the Nicaraguan people to a project of social revolution, an objective which could only have been achieved through national liberation from Yankee imperialism. Fonseca, like Sandino before him, constructed a powerful narrative concerning the political identity of the Nicaraguan nation which would reactivate the tradi-tion of rebellion through an anti-imperialism brand of nationalism. On this occa-sion however, in the context of a growing urban proletariat, class conscious students, and the examples of Cuba and Vietnam, such a narrative could succeed in going beyond Sandino’s achievements in granting a social revolutionary dimension to the penchant of Nicaragua’s worker-peasants for rebellion. Sand-ino is presented as an individual whose class-consciousness was before its time. Alone, he could only hope for limited results. Under the conditions prevailing throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the FSLN found itself in a position to take San-dino’s ideology to its logical conclusion: socialist revolution as national libera-tion. The political difference between the Sandinismo of the 1930s and the Sandinismo of the 1970s is portrayed as virtually nil. The FSLN, despite the fact that its Marxist program was an amalgam of Cuban origin, was seen to share deep and abiding roots with Nicaragua’s history and its people in a way which no other political force of the period had managed to achieve.

6. THE NEW MAN: SANDINO, CHÉ, AND THE FSLN

Nationalizing the FSLN’s socialist program was not simply a political mat-ter. The FSLN’s historiography also played on a number of cultural sentiments designed to reinforce its moral authority. In Sandino: Guerrillero Proletario (1972),

1. Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 85.2. See Jaime Wheelock’s “Presentación” in Fonseca, C. (1985) Viva Sandino, p. 13.

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Fonseca makes repeated references to the moral qualities of self-sacrifice and dedication shown by Sandino, epitomized by his statement: “I want a free home-land or death.”1 Unlike the oligarchy, who could be bought, Sandino had no interest in personal gain and endured extreme privations: “giving up his privi-leged position as a skilled worker he decided to return to his country and take up a place in the struggle.”2 Thus it was until the end of his life, as Sandino reportedly told his executioners: “I don’t have a centavo because I have never taken money from the nation.”3 There was also an attempt to portray Sandino as an ascetic: “In his personal conduct he had an air of sobriety. On one occasion when he was offered a shot of liquor to make a toast, he refused, saying: Clear water of the mountain is the only thing that I have drank in these last few years.”4 Perhaps as an attempt to induce a certain sense of lineage between the two, this image was one which Fonseca himself, who did not smoke or drink alcohol, and who held very traditional ideas concerning sex and marriage, attempted to emulate.5 Indeed, Fonseca’s personal background did share a num-ber of similarities with those of Sandino. They were both the illegitimate sons of rich landowners who were brought up in extreme poverty by their mothers.6

Fonseca’s own thoughts, along with those of two other leading Sandinistas, Oscar Turcios and Ricardo Morales Aviles, on the moral attributes of a revolu-tionary were set down in a short pamphlet, Que Es Un Sandinista? (1982).7 For Fonseca, to be a Sandinista was to be “energetic and rigorous without forgetting respect, sincerity and fraternity…subordinate everything in the interests of the Sandinista cause, in the interests of the subjugated people of Nicaragua, in the interests of the exploited and the oppressed of Nicaragua.”8 As Hodges points out, Fonseca’s statement on the moral behavior of a revolutionary was not a philosophical text concerned about the nature of right or truth but a guide for everyday behavior.9 This emphasis on the importance of moral behavior in the making of a revolutionary was repeated in many post-1979 accounts. Those

1. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, pp. 266, 268.2. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 263.3. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 279.4. Fonseca, C. (1981) Bajo la bandera del sandinismo, p. 273. 5. Zimmermann, M. (1998) In the Footsteps of Ché and Sandino, pp. 337-338.6. This is true up to a point. Sandino lived in poverty with his mother until his early teens,

when he moved into his father’s household where he lived in relative comfort until 1924. Fonseca lived in poverty with his mother until he went to university. His father, however, was a wealthy Somocista who never really came to terms with his son, although on occasions he did help him.

7. Originally written separately, they were published in a single pamphlet after 1979. See Fonseca, C., Morales, R., and Turcios, O. (1982) ¿Que es un sandinista? (Managua, Depar-tamento de Propaganda y Educación Política del FSLN).

8. Fonseca, C. “¿Que es un sandinista?” in Fonseca, C., Morales, R., and Turcios, O. (1982) ¿Que es un sandinista?, pp. 9-10.

9. Hodges, D. (1986) The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, pp. 257-8.

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moral attributes identified by Fonseca were seen to be acquired through the struggle, especially in the mountains. La Montaña would transform the guerrilla, of whatever class background, into a true revolutionary: “the Montaña was like a furnace...the cadres which are forged there are true examples of the revolution.”1

In another account about becoming a Sandinista, Omar Cabezas talks of the morally transformative effect of La Montaña through which the New Man, in the image of Ché Guevara, would be born: “When he starts to forget he is tired, to forget himself, to put his own self aside — that’s where you’ll find the new man.”2

There is much that is striking between Fonseca’s concept of a Sandinista militant and the Christian ethics practiced by the Christian Base Communities which had spread throughout Latin America from the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and the Latin American Bishops conference in Medellín (1968). The recognition by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that the oppressed had a right to seek salvation in the here and now, provided a theological basis for Christians to become involved in the struggle against Latin America’s dictators. Many radical Christians had already discovered an affinity between Ché Gue-vara’s New Man and the teachings of St Paul on the renovation of Man.3 Despite its contradictory sources, especially the often uneasy marriage of Marxism with Catholicism, and the voluntaristic nature of a concept based on the particularis-tic reactions of human will to privation and struggle, the New Man provided precisely what Mariátegui prescribed, a popular revolutionary myth. The image of Sandino and, by the 1970s, Fonseca himself, as a mythical redeemer of the peo-ple which played on deep seated religious beliefs allowed the FSLN to capture the ideological leadership of the country.

7. CONCLUSION

The Sandinista revolution owes more than an intellectual debt to Fonseca.4

His objectives in developing his ideas were informed by his acute awareness of the need to simultaneously mobilize the nation against Somocismo, whilst reconstructing the image of the nation in order to win it over to a socialist

1. Ruíz, H. “La montaña era como un crisol donde se forgaban los mejores cuadros” in Nica-ráuac (May-June 1980) No 1, p. 18.

2. Cabezas, O. (1985) The Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista Translated by Weaver, K. (London, Jonathan Cape), p. 94.

3. Interview with Ernesto Cardenal; Managua 16 July 1997.4. Fonseca did not live to see the consequences of his efforts. He was killed in an ambush

by the National Guard in Zinica, near Chontales on 7 November 1976. His remains are now buried in Revolution Square (now Republic Square) in Managua.

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agenda that had no historical precedence in Nicaragua. Fonseca’s unique contri-bution was to go beyond Sandino and define a counter-history that would turn Nicaraguans into revolutionary subjects, capable of being the bearers not only of anti-imperialism but of socialist revolution. In his writings on Nicaraguan his-tory, Fonseca depicts the Sandinistas’ revolutionary program as something that looms out of an immemorial past. Their program’s concern for equality and the poor is seen to have a timeless presence within Nicaragua, which is itself also portrayed as a timeless entity, despite its provenance going back no further than the third decade of the nineteenth century. Fonseca’s historical writings bind together disparate events, places and people into a single nationalist narrative, creating an ordered teleology where there was originally none. Linking Benjamin Zeledón, Augusto Sandino and other figures who resisted imperialism replaces the contingency of their actions with a sense of historical continuity uniquely belonging to Nicaragua. Since none of these protagonists met, spoke to each other or planned their respective acts of rebellion, the link between them rests on two important factors: their common nationality and a common enemy. By linking the Sandino rebellion to a historical teleology of rebellion within a national territory, its regional, class-specific nature, tied as it was to the violent political culture and geographical region of the Segovias, is replaced by a more generalized context with national limits. The fact that most Nicaraguans at the time of the rebellion seem to have supported the US Marine presence is filtered out of the account. The legitimacy of the Sandinistas’ political program is rooted in the imagining of the Nicaraguan nation through the historical writings dis-cussed in this chapter. Sandino comes to represent the rebelliousness of Nicara-guans in general rather than poor Segovianos, a portrayal which transforms him and his rebellion into an archetype which was to become the historical patri-mony taken up by the FSLN some twenty-eight years later.

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CHAPTER 4. REVOLUTIONARY NATION-BUILDING: IMAGINING THE SANDINISTA NATION THROUGH HISTORY AND LITERACY

Inventing Nicaragua from the ruins of the Central American Unionist project had been one of the major preoccupations of the mestizo élites of León and Granada, a task arrested by imperialist intervention during the nineteenth century and which had been completely reversed as part of the realization of the Manifest Destiny of the US during the twentieth century. The revolutionary overthrow of the Somocista dictatorship in July 1979 by the FSLN ended that process. For the first time since the Zelaya administration, political agents were to consciously use the state in the construction of a sovereign, independent nation, one that would pursue its own distinct interests. Unlike Zelaya, how-ever, the Sandinistas rejected the nineteenth-century liberal image of Nicaragua as a capitalist nation and, instead, attempted to reconfigure Nicaragua’s class identity. Those subjects who were seen as being most appropriate to carry the political and economic project embodied by the revolutionary state were often depicted as worker-peasants. Although the new regime had made an alliance with what was referred to as the patriotic bourgeoisie, this group was to feature very little in the re-presentations of the nation. Personal wealth, especially when it was coupled with membership of the traditional oligarchy, placed a person in an ambiguous position in relation to a national identity that was one of humble poverty and humility, one forming a contrast to the wealth and power of Nicara-gua’s absolute Other, the United States.

How the Sandinistas attempted to portray such an image of Nicaragua can be illustrated by assessing one of the revolution’s earliest undertakings: the National Literacy Crusade. It was in every sense a project of national scope that

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had no historical precedent in terms of scale and reach. Few Nicaraguans could have remained unaware that 1980 was El Año de Alfabetización. Whilst most commentators see this event in terms of either a pedagogic project or as a process of conscientization, few have recognized its real value, having as it did crucial implications for imagining the nation. The Crusade always had an explicit polit-ical dimension, something which was openly acknowledged by those involved in its planning and implementation. However, concentrating on the political nature of the lessons learned by students, or indeed the reduction of illiteracy, has led to a misunderstanding of the longer-term impact of this project. The Cru-sade was an imagining process that created a perceptible sense of a revolution-ary, anti-imperialist community which was seen in exclusively national terms. From an analysis of the support materials, and the very process of its implemen-tation, it can be seen as providing the basic framework for imagining a commu-nity in anonymity which, according to Anderson, forms the hallmark of modern nations.1 Contrary to much of the mystique carried by the Crusade in the histor-ical memory of the Sandinista Revolution, its longer-term impact was not the spread of mass literacy.

The wider intellectual process of re-writing Nicaraguan history which ran contemporaneously with the Crusade also provides valuable insights into how the Sandinistas attempted to reimagine Nicaragua, and can be used to illustrate a number of points made by Anderson (1991) concerning the role of literature in imagining the modern nation. The ways in which these points relate to the case of Nicaragua will be examined through a critical review of the short popular story El Muchacho de Niquinohomo by Sergio Ramírez, who became a member of Nicaragua’s ruling Junta Government for National Reconstruction (JGRN) and later vice-president of Nicaragua. The discussion will also use the ideas devel-oped by the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin (1994), especially his concept of the chronotope, to show how this story evokes a sense of time and space which was uniquely and distinctively national in character.

1. PEDAGOGY AND LIBERATION

Mass popular literacy campaigns were in no sense specific to the Sandinista revolution. Examples of literacy campaigns as part of a wider developmental process occurred in a number of countries during the post Second World War period, many of which took place under the auspices of the United Nations Edu-cational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Criticism of such


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Chapter 4. Revolutionary Nation-Building: Imagining the Sandinista Nation Through History

campaigns emerged on the grounds that they were primarily concerned with functional literacy rather than dealing with ideas of political, economic and social development.1 More radical approaches were adopted in Algeria, Cubaand Tanzania, where mass literacy campaigns attempted to provide the founda-tions for a more equitable society and were used to transform the national politi-cal culture by instilling and nurturing attitudes and values reflective of the new revolutionary or post-colonial society.

This increasing political orientation within literacy campaigns coincided with new ideas that saw education as a potentially liberating process that could stimulate a critical consciousness of the world with the objective of changing it. The humanist pedagogy developed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was to become a particularly important source of ideas in the Nicaraguan Crusade. In common with Marxist humanism, Freire’s pedagogic method was based around the belief that human existence represented a process of praxis, acquiring a con-sciousness about the world which is then used to transform it. Despite such praxis being part of the human condition, it is often distorted by oppressive forces seeking to maintain the status quo from which they derive material bene-fits. This is often achieved through tactics such as populism or paternalism, which prevent the emergence of any critical consciousness by promoting a nar-row definition of social justice which the oppressed have had no role in formu-lating.2 Populism, like paternalism, is only a substitute for praxis and could never form a part of truly liberational politics. Even radical political action, such as revolution, may lack liberational tendencies if it continues to alienate humans from what is seen to be a natural condition of their existence. For Freire, libera-tion is not about the representatives of the oppressed occupying the former posi-tions of an old oppressor but about resolving the division between oppressor and oppressed. As long as such a division remains the process of alienation will per-sist and human beings will continue to “express fatalistic attitudes towards their situation.”3

Restoring human praxis will be the result of what Freire called conscienti-zation, where the oppressed become subjects who affirm themselves in their own right through the discovery of the political and economic causes of their oppression.4 This process of uncovering takes place through a liberational peda-gogy which, unlike propaganda or traditional education, rekindles that critical consciousness that Freire saw as forming part of the human condition.5

1. Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope: The Nicaraguan Literacy Crusade (Colorado, West View Press), p. 7.

2. Freire, P. (1990) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Middlesex, Penguin), p. 41.3. Freire, P. (1990) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 37.4. Freire, P. (1990) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 43.5. Freire, P. (1990) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 44.

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2. LITERACY AND CONSCIENTIZATION: THE NICARAGUAN EXPERIENCE

The eradication of illiteracy had been an enduring theme within the Sandin-ista movement since the time of Sandino, who had established literacy classes for peasants and members of his army during his campaign against the US Marines. Two important policy documents, The Historic Program of the FSLN (1969) and the Tercerista statement Why The FSLN Struggles In Unity With The People (1979), both acknowledged the FSLN’s commitment to eradicate illiteracy. In his prison writ-ings on Carlos Fonseca, Tomás Borge recalled the importance which Fonseca also attached to literacy, ordering him to teach peasants to read whilst training them in guerrilla warfare.1 It is not surprising therefore that a commitment to eradicate illiteracy formed one of the objectives in the new government’s provi-sional program of 1979, which stated that: “A national crusade will be launched to mobilize all the country’s resources to eradicate illiteracy entirely.”2 Educa-tion, then, carried a certain mystique, marking a common historical thread from Sandino to the Sandinista revolution.3

Given this background, the Crusade is often assumed to have formed a cen-tral theme in Sandinista thinking which carried universal support. However, interview data suggests otherwise. There appears to have been a lack of consen-sus about the nature and purpose of the Crusade. The Crusade itself was the brainchild of intellectual sectors within the Sandinista alliance; particularly the Minister of Education Carlos Tünnermann and the Jesuit priest Fernando Cardenal. Tünnermann had been rector of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) for ten years and had spent some years working for UNESCO in Colombia before being invited to San José by Sergio Ramírez to join Los Doce, a group of twelve pro-Sandinista intellectuals and business men. Fernando Cardenal had worked at the Jesuit-run Central American University(UCA), where he taught philosophy. Their vision went well beyond the admin-istrative-institutional benefits which would accrue from mass literacy. Heavily influenced by Freire’s pedagogy, Cardenal saw the principal objective of the Cru-sade as the creation of a New Man and New Woman which possessed an atti-tude of service towards the poor which would rid Nicaragua of the egotistical individualism of the Somocista period:

It was a process of conscientization, a process which would transform the con-science of individuals to a critical conscience. This was an educational process which had political consequences because, if someone learns to read and write, they

1. See Borge, T. (1984) Carlos, the Dawn Is No longer Beyond Our Reach, p. 76.2. Program of the Provisional Government of National Reconstruction of Nicaragua

NACLA Update 9 (Sept-Oct 1979) Vol. XIII, No.5, p. 15.3. Interview with Carlos Tünnermann, Managua, 20 August 1997.

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begin to understand the causes of poverty. They can begin to understand the history of their country. When they begin to understand the differences between natural phenomena and historical phenomena, they understand that poverty is man-made and due to economic structures. 1

The humanism of the Crusade’s main exponents was not shared by more senior members of the government. Whilst both Fernando Cardenal and Carlos Tünnermann had been vocal critics of Somoza, they had had few connections with the FSLN until the mid-1970s.2 Thus, they were not members of the politi-cal-military core of the FSLN as other ministers clearly were and, as such, did not carry much political weight.3 Others saw the Crusade in terms of enabling the people to become citizens in the participatory democratic model which the Sandinistas favored, and attracting international support and solidarity for the revolution. With the rate of illiteracy estimated to be around 50% in 1979, it was recognized that citizen participation would be impossible to carry through into practice.4 From this perspective, ideas concerning the creation of a New Manand New Woman were not particularly important. Furthermore, such humanis-tic concepts did not fit easily into the agendas of those who favored structural modernization. For ministers such as Jaime Wheelock, who had led the debate favoring technologically-centered economic development, the creation of this new subjectivity was never an objective of the revolution at all:

Some sectors within the Sandinista Revolution did attempt this, but from a glo-bal perspective we were never interested in this concept. We tried to overthrow Somocismo and construct a new society with political liberty and free expres-sion...we tried to defeat illiteracy and bad health. This was the great work of the revolution. This was material change rather than intellectual change. Within the Sandinista movement there were diverse elements: business, evangelicals, Catho-lics, and Marxists with different ideologies and ideas. To shape the New Man was not our target...I like the idea, but it’s not politically practical. People can be good or bad, but struggle for a just cause together.5

Fear of Contra attacks was also in the minds of other members of the FSLNNational Directorate, such as Henry Ruiz, whose years as a guerrilla in the

1. Interview with Fernando Cardenal, Managua, 15 August 1997.2. Even by the mid-1970s Carlos Tünnermann saw the FSLN as “A small group of ideal-

istic young men who had no chance of winning against the dictator.” Although he joined Los Doce, he was initially unaware that it was an FSLN-Tercerista initiative. Interview with Carlos Tünnermann, Managua, 20 August 1997.

3. Interview with V. Fitzgerald, Oxford, 22 November 1999.4. A more accurate measure was that of “effective illiteracy,” which refers to the number of

illiterates who were capable of being taught literacy skills. Arnov (1986:27-28) suggests that, owing to illness, blindness or senility there were approximately 130,000 Nicaraguans who were deemed unteachable. According to Miller (1985:59), taking these exceptions into account, Nicaragua’s effective illiteracy rate stood at 40% of all Nicaraguans aged 10 years or over in 1979.

5. Interview with Jaime Wheelock, Managua, 15 August 1997.

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mountains of northern Nicaragua made him aware of the security risks involved in sending literacy workers to those same areas.1 There is no doubt that a massa-cre during the first major project undertaken by the new government would have been disastrous for its future mobilizational capacity. Added to these differ-ences, there were the general problems of growing US hostility to the revolution and a serious lack of funds which all projects had to face. As a former official in the Ministry of Planning told me, under these circumstances, plans for the Cru-sade were not well received:

The Sandinistas were not convinced at all by the literacy campaign. We had to fight for the literacy campaign. They said there were no resources. We said we will get the resources. They said it was too risky. We said don’t worry...I was Director of National Planning and I invited Carlos Tünnermann and Fernando Cardenal to present the literacy campaign to the board of the planning office. There was no enthusiasm at all…The literacy campaign was a key area; we had to convince the Directorate that the literacy campaign would be one of the key factors to obtain a substantial amount of external aid. This was important as the government had almost nothing. I am personal witness that we found in the Central Bank $3.5 mil-lion. That was all that Nicaragua had in spite of the fact that the IMF had recently provided Nicaragua with $64 million. All that disappeared, there was nothing. No reserves, nothing. Then under these conditions, to get involved with these cam-paigns was risky but it also consolidated the process.2

The conviction towards liberational and humanistic Christianity amongst members of the new government is not surprising in itself. However, given its relatively marginal position within senior bodies, especially the National Direc-torate, what is surprising was the fact that a project like the Crusade ever became a major undertaking at all. As noted previously, literacy campaigns had occurred in a number of countries, yet few had actually constituted the kind of conscientization projects which the Crusade had always been conceived as being by its main sponsors. Public statements committing the Sandinistas to the eradication of illiteracy were actually very different from what was being pro-posed by Carlos Tünnermann and Fernando Cardenal. There were certainly other priorities, the general issue of survival and the more specific policy com-mitments relating to economic modernization and agrarian reform, all of which competed for limited funds and human resources. From the beginning, a number of figures expressed a degree of skepticism concerning the philosophy behind the proposal. Thus, despite the euphoria which surrounded the Crusade at the time of its implementation, and the mystique which it still carries today, in 1979 the case for a national literacy project based on Freire’s concept of conscientiza-tion clearly had to be won.

1. Interview with V. Fitzgerald, Oxford, 22 November 1999. In the event six brigadistas were killed by Contras throughout the five-month Crusade.

2. Interview with Xabier Gorostiaga, Managua, 21 August 1997.

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A number of factors led to the eventual adoption of the Crusade. Although the total budget for the Crusade was estimated at the substantial sum of $20 million, it appealed to a number of sympathetic countries and organizations which were prepared to make significant financial contributions.1 The final cost has been estimated to have been nearer $12 million, although there were many hidden costs which could not be included in the figures, such as the cost of host-ing brigadistas, which were largely shouldered by peasant families.2 The idea of a literacy crusade had attracted a donation of $1 million from the Swedish Trade Union Congress during its planning stage and continued to draw in further funds from Holland, Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany.3

The project also convinced thousands of young Nicaraguans who had not taken an active part in overthrowing the dictatorship that they had a role to play in furthering the revolutionary process, sentiments summed up by one literacy worker in the following terms:

I was 13 years old. There were many people who were younger than I was who were involved in the literacy crusade. It was a time when there was a lot of enthusi-asm for the revolution...Two months after the revolutionary government took power, they began to organize the literacy crusade. They called upon the young and the majority of young people enthusiastically got involved with the desire to con-tinue the process of liberating the people. They understood literacy as a further pro-gression of liberation from the dictatorship, from obscurantism.4

Under the circumscribed conditions faced by the revolutionary government, where little room for maneuver existed, the success of the Crusade in garnering both domestic and international support legitimized it to the JGRN.5 Without inferring any cynical manipulation of the good will shown by many of the inter-national allies of the Sandinista revolution, the Crusade appeared to be feasible and politically fortuitous; pragmatism rather than long-term strategic planning played the deciding role to go ahead with such an ambitious project.6 A certain degree of ambiguity may have existed over the objectives which the Crusade was designed to achieve: the creation of a literate work force for the new industrial enterprises planned by some in the government, the attraction of international solidarity for the Sandinista revolution or a process of conscientization. But this ambiguity did not make the project unfeasible. In so far as these differing objec-

1. Figures quoted in Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope, p. 61. 2. Interview with Roberto Saenz, Managua, 19 August 1997.3. Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope p. 62. Interview with Carlos Tünnermann,

Managua, 20 August 1997.4. Interview with Roland Anglin, Managua, 28 May 1997. 5. Interview with V. Fitzgerald, Oxford, 22 November 1999.6. Interview with V. Fitzgerald, Oxford, 22 November 1999. Interview with Xabier Goros-

tiaga, Managua, 21 August 1997.

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tives did not fundamentally conflict with each other, the Crusade seemed to con-tain something for everyone.

3. MOBILIZATION, TRAINING, AND THE TEACHING PROGRAM

Seventeen years after the event, a number of figures involved in the Sandini-sta government remembered the Crusade more in terms of the lasting conse-quences of participation rather than its effects on levels of illiteracy. Out of the interview data from four former ministers and former vice-president Sergio Ramírez which I collected during fieldwork, only one cited the reduction of illit-eracy as being the most important aspect of the Crusade.1 Fernando Cardenal, on the other hand, seemed to have a more general view about the long-term conse-quences of the Crusade, emphasizing the learning of history and its contribution to the unification of a pluralistic society like Nicaragua.2 As one former senior official within the FSLN reflected, the Crusade brought the culture of the peas-ants out of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth cen-tury. Thus, although he conceded that many of those who had learned to read and write during the Crusade subsequently forgot, nevertheless “culturally speaking, they were left with a distinct vision of the world.”3 The teaching of Nicaragua’s history was commonly referred to as one important factor in this process, a factor which is vividly demonstrated by a cursory examination of the literacy primer El amancer del pueblo. The other major factor which many of the interviewees identified was the interchange between urban and rural Nicara-guans which the Crusade had made possible.4 These points suggest that the actual teaching of literacy, whether seen as a pedagogic project or as a process of conscientization, constituted only one dimension of the Crusade. I am not mak-ing a new point here; other more experienced commentators have observed that learning was bound up with the process rather than, the content of the lessons taught.5

As was often said at the time, Nicaragua became one big school during the Crusade. The effort required a massive mobilization of people and resources, and

1. Interview with Jaime Wheelock, Managua, 15 August 1997.2. Interview with Fernando Cardenal, Managua, 15 August 1997.3. Interview with Aldo Díaz, Managua, 11 August 1997.4. Interviews with Aldo Díaz, Managua, 11 August 1997, Fernando Cardenal, Managua, 15

August 1997, Xabier Gorostiaga, Managua, 21 August 1997, and Serigo Ramírez, Managua, 4 September 1997. Both Serigo Ramírez and Xabier Gorostiaga told me this was a completely unplanned consequence.

5. See for example Arnov, R. “The Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade of 1980” in Comparative Education Review (June 1981) Vol.25, No. 2, p. 255.

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a major coordination effort on the part of various ministries and mass organiza-tions. Given the scale of the effort, few people could have remained untouched by the Crusade. Yet the lesson learned should not be taken to refer to literacy or conscientization but relates instead to a new cultural consciousness analogous to imagining the nation. The first step in the creation of this consciousness was the establishment of the administrative infrastructure that would enable the Crusade to be planned and executed. A number of bodies were formed which were concerned with the gathering and dissemination of knowledge about Nica-ragua and its people. A new National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INEC) was set up which undertook a new census. A National Coordinating Committee (CCN) directed by Fernando Cardenal was established which brought together the activities of several ministries, such as transport, health, and education. The CCN’s first task was to direct the INEC to undertake a new census to establish an official rate of illiteracy and locate both those who were illiterate and those who were prepared to help in the Crusade. The operation acted as a small-scale rehearsal for the Crusade proper, employing young volun-teers and taking just one month to complete.1 Data from this census revealed that 722,616 Nicaraguans of ten years or older were illiterate.

The Crusade celebrated the revolutionary victory over Somocismo by self-consciously employing military metaphors, itself bearing the full title: The National Literacy Crusade: Heroes and Martyrs of the Liberation of Nicaragua. Literacy workers, or brigadistas, were organized into the People’s Literacy Army (EPA), which was deployed along the same six battlefronts which had developed during the insurrection, each named after a fallen martyr of the revolution. Each briga-dista was trained through a multiplier strategy, with eighty teachers training 2,400 brigadistas, who in turn trained up to 120,000 other brigadistas.2

After a number of discussions, which included the direct participation of Paulo Freire, and a pilot study, the literacy primer was completed. Its first page was composed of a map of Central America with Nicaragua clearly highlighted. The second page showed the Nicaraguan national flag alongside that of the FSLN with the full title of the Crusade printed underneath. The remainder of the primer consisted of twenty-three lessons, or generative themes, each composed of a photograph which provided a theme for discussion and a short phrase or sentence which contained a syllable family. All the lessons related to revolution-ary themes, such as the Nicaraguan people’s historic struggle against imperial-ism and the role played by Sandino and the FSLN in that struggle. Lesson 1, for example, contained a photograph of Sandino and the statement: Sandino: Leader

1. Hirshon, S. with Butler, J. (1983) And also Teach Them to Read, (Westport, Lawrence Hill), p. 10.

2. Hirshon, S. with Butler, J. (1983) And also Teach Them to Read, p. 11.

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of the Revolution. The phrase La Revolución was then broken down to show all the vowels of the Spanish alphabet. Subsequent lessons touched upon the agrar-ian reform, the pillage of imperialism, and the exploitation of women.1 Each les-son was taught following a ten-step method which, apart from reading and writing, encouraged the students to discuss the photographs, analyze the situa-tion and relate it to their own lives and that of their community.2

After five months in the field brigadistas began to return home having reduced illiteracy to 12.96%.3 On the 23rd August 1980, the Ministry of Educa-tion declared Nicaragua a “Territory Victorious Over Illiteracy.” The Crusade had not been without its problems; Contra attacks, accidents, desertions and personal differences had all been part of the life faced by brigadistas.4 Political differences, too, had emerged over the whole pedagogic slant of the Crusade, culminating in the resignation of JGRN-member Alfonso Robelo, who subsequently conducted a tour of Nicaragua during which he denounced the Crusade as an exercise in domestication. There also remained around 200,000 people who had not been reached by the Crusade or had not completed the primer.5

4. HISTORY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND TIME: THE ORIGINS OF A NEW NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

To possess a notion of popular sovereignty there must be a sense of the peo-ple: an entity whose cohesiveness is acknowledged by those who make up its membership. Following the ideas of Anderson (1991) this entity was fundamen-tally the product of two coincidental factors; the spread of print through the development of capitalism and a consequent re-apprehension of time. Both were to facilitate the emergence of a shared sense of simultaneous progression through time “measured by clock and calendar” of a mass of anonymous people.

1. Ministerio de Educación (1980) El amancer del pueblo (Managua, Ministerio de Educación).

2. For a detailed discussion of the method and pedagogy of the Crusade, as well as tech-nical problems the CCN encountered in this planning stage see Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope, pp. 75-93. On completion of the primer, a learner was consid-ered literate after passing an examination which consisted of writing his or her name, reading a short text aloud, answering questions based on the reading, writing a dictated sentence, and writing a piece of comprehension relating to the revolution.

3. Figures quoted in Ministerio de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 16, p. 2. If the effective illiteracy measure is used then illiteracy fell to the rate of 13%. See Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope, p. 198.

4. For an in-depth personal account of brigadista life during the Crusade see Hirshon, S. with Butler, J. (1983) “And also teach them to Read”(Lawrence Hill, Westport).

5. Arnov, R. “The Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade of 1980” in Comparative Education Review (June 1981) Vol. 25, No. 2, p. 254.

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The daily reporting of events through, for example, newspapers, fosters a sense of homogeneous empty time which is contingently filled with the activities of a diverse range of people who may be geographically dispersed. However, despite the diversity, dispersion and anonymity of the characters in the reports, the familiarity of the activities which they contain, alongside an awareness that there are other readers who experience the same recognition of familiarity, pro-duces a sense of communion.1 The development of a common affinity between reader and subject, as well as amongst readers, is reinforced by the boundedness of the people, towns or places depicted in novels and articles which clearly relate to a limited social space. The assembled landscape contained in articles and nov-els does not simply refer to just anywhere but to a given society and one which bears a definite relation to the reader. People, towns and places used to summon up a sense of Mexico, for example, will invoke a self-identification with Mexican readers that they are our people, towns and places. This is exclusively so since, no matter how vivid the ensemble, for the non-Mexican reader there will only be a sense of the Other. The re-apprehension of time along the lines of temporal coin-cidence provided the means to link the seemingly atomizing characteristics of human existence such as diversity, dispersal and anonymity into a meaningful association, which enabled the imagining of communion and commonality to emerge:

The idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which also is conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history. An American will never meet, or even know the names of, more than a handful of his 240,000-odd [sic] fel-low Americans. He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity…fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality, creating that remarkable confidence of community in anonymity which is the hallmark of modern nations.2

Anderson’s comments on time and place approximate to what Bakhtin (1994) described as the chronotope in modern novels: the fusing of temporal and spatial relations in order to create a limited, fixed world which forms the back-ground for making a particular sense, or producing a particular representation, of narrative events. Speaking of the modern novel, Bakhtin suggests that by fix-ing narrative events into limited and definite temporal and spatial locations, they gain a concrete, lived “flesh and blood” quality which permits the “imaging power of art to do its work.”3 This is the unique feature of the chronotope con-tained in modern literature, and one which, in agreement with Anderson, is

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, pp. 24-26.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 26-36.3. Bakhtin, M. (1994) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, University of Texas

Press), p. 250.

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absolutely essential for the imagining of the national space, rather than any other form of space, and a lived relation to it on the part of the reader:

We cannot help but be strongly impressed by the representational importance of the chronotope. Time becomes, in effect, palpable and visible; the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes blood to flow in their veins. An event can be communicated, it becomes information, one can give precise data on the place and time of its occurrence…It is precisely the chronotope that provides the ground essential for the showing forth, the representability of events. And this is so thanks precisely to the special increase in density and con-creteness of time markers — the time of human life, of historical time — that occurs within well-delineated spatial areas...Thus the chronotope, functioning as the pri-mary means for materializing time in space, emerges as a centre for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel.1

All these observations are pertinent in imagining Nicaragua as an indepen-dent, national and anti-imperialist entity. Anderson’s emphasis on the impact of print does not fit easily with the conditions prevailing in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas assumed power. Whether deliberate or not, the legacy of Somocismowas an illiteracy rate which stood at around 50%. Apart from the limited demand which existed in the cities, there was no substantial market to stimulate the print industry. Indeed, one of the immediate problems encountered by the Crusade was the limited capacity of Nicaragua’s printing infrastructure, which could not cope with the task of producing the literacy primers and other materi-als, most of which had to be printed in Costa Rica.2 In the Nicaraguan case, imagining the nation through a re-apprehension of time would be more directly attributable to the deliberate, conscious efforts of the Crusade. This was not simply because greater literacy increased the audience over which the literary devices so central in imagining the modern nation would have an effect. While the Crusade’s pedagogy held an importance in this regard, it was the accompa-nying mobilization and participation which were to generate a sense of temporal coincidence as never before. This point can be illustrated through the analysis of two pieces of evidence. The first will be the support literature which surrounded and sustained the massive participatory effort involved in the successful comple-tion of the Crusade. Secondly, the analysis will turn to the popular short story by Sergio Ramírez El muchacho de Niquinohomo which represents the Sandinistas’ anti-imperialist version of Nicaraguan history through a biographical account of the Sandinista hero-cum-Nicaraguan archetype, Augusto César Sandino.3

1. Bakhtin, M. (1994) The Dialogic Imagination, p. 250. Original emphasis.2. Miller, V. (1985) Between Struggle and Hope, p. 126.3. This was first published in Germany in 1975. It was subsequently published as the

introduction to volume I of Sandino’s collected works Augusto C. Sandino el pensamiento vivo, the publication of which was contemporaneous with the Crusade.

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5. LA CRUZADA EN MARCHA

Imagining the nation through what Anderson described as a sense of tempo-ral coincidence was invoked through the Crusade with its national organiza-tional and coordination structures. These structures were deliberately designed to promote a sense of temporal coincidence, since the appearance of the simulta-neous progression of the whole country through a specific period of time staged around the unfolding of the Crusade was a necessary part of maintaining the momentum required for its success. This was done through a number of means: newspapers, radio programs and journals. The official bulletin of the Crusade published by the Ministry of Education La cruzada en marcha can be taken as just one example of how this occurred. Its purpose was the following:

…with the purpose of bringing information and the words of encouragement from the National Coordinating Committee to every last municipality of the coun-try, La Cruzada En Marcha has been published, whose pages will reflect all the activities which have been held and the same creative impetus of the people shown in the decisive hours of the victorious War of National Liberation.

The bulletin will arrive punctually every fifteen days to the national depen-dencies, departments and revolutionary municipal governments, and to Crusadecoordinators at these levels and to those involved in sustaining its direction. It offers guidance for action and dissemination of the best experiences of the masses. Furthermore, it will promote the widest interchange between the rele-vant institutions to inform people about the advances of the educational labors, such as those of the brave kids of the Popular Literacy Army and the popular lit-eracy teachers in the countryside and the city led by their technical directors.1

In the context of the present discussion, the most important sections of this bulletin are those reporting the activities held in every department across the country relating to the Crusade. Thus, in bulletin 2, the departmental feature contained 35 short summaries of events organized in support of the Crusade, reported through a department-by-department format. The reader is informed that, in Rio San Juan, an assembly was held on 23rd February, attended by the municipal government, the FSLN and the Sandinista People’s Army (EPS), which organized boats with outboard motors in order to carry out the tasks of the Crusade in an area where communications largely take place by river. In the same feature, the reader is also informed that, in Managua, workers at the Victo-ria Brewery decided to donate one day’s salary per month to the CCN for the duration of the Crusade. In León on the morning of the 26th February, a march of students and teachers took place, which culminated in an assembly in Juan

1. Ministerio de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 1, p. 2. See also No. 2, p. 2.

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Quezada Square. In Matagalpa, the recently-formed literacy commissions of the ten municipalities which make up this department, along with some from other departments, met and called for efforts to consolidate themselves in order to guarantee effective participation in the Crusade. In Jinotega, a workshop involv-ing 200 teachers took place on 24th February. These workshops will begin in the rest of the country on Monday, 25th February 1980.1

In May bulletin 7’s departmental feature shows how the Crusade is proceed-ing using the same format. In Rio San Juan a workshop was held from the 13th to the 21st May, for new literacy workers. Fifteen people had learned to read and write. In Managua on Saturday 10th May the inhabitants of Ciudad Sandinogathered to support the CCN and were addressed by Commander of the Revolu-tion Carlos Núñez, who reminded them that it was the task of every Nicaraguan to protect literacy workers. In Matagalpa the first assembly of municipal coordi-nators was held on the 10th and 11th of May to evaluate the work of the CCN. In Jinotega, brigadistas situated in San José del Bocay were reported as enthusiasti-cally facing the hard living conditions of the peasants of that area, at times hav-ing no more to eat than plátano with salt.

Departmental features formed part of almost every subsequent bulletin and followed much the same format. The activities of each mass organization were often, although not always, reported following a format based around organiza-tion-by-organization summaries. Thus, in bulletin 3, readers are informed about the tasks undertaken by the Rural Workers’ Association (ATC) to locate accom-modation for urban brigadistas coming to work in the countryside, whilst the Sandinista Youth (JS19) were responsible for gaining parental consent for their members to participate in the Crusade.2 Other features consisted of editorials by the CCN, declarations on the Crusade by members of the government, the FSLNand brigadistas themselves. Examples of the writing skills of newly literate Nic-araguans were also given, as were the numbers of people who had passed the lit-eracy examination, the figures being broken down department by department.3

The last bulletin in the series (No 16) contains the pronouncements of ministers and the FSLN National Directorate on the success of the Crusade and deals with provisions for post-Crusade adult education. Taken together, these bulletins form a step-by-step account of the efforts of those individuals and mass organi-zations involved in the Crusade, from training to the final offensive, to the decla-ration of Nicaragua as a territory victorious over illiteracy.

1. Ministerio de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 2, pp. 5-8. Examples here are random selections from a 4 page feature.

2. Ministerio de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 3, p. 3.3. See for examples Ministerio de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 6, p. 8 and No.

14, Cover Page.

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Anderson’s discussion on the role of the newspaper in imagining the nation provides a useful framework from which to analyze the role which such report-ing played in creating a sense of nation-ness. For most newspapers the decision to include articles on one story rather than another is derived from a straightfor-ward “calendrical coincidence”: “The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection — the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time.”1 The second point made by Anderson concerning the importance of the newspaper in imagining the nation was that of “simultaneous consumption.” With a one-day shelf-life, the contents of newspapers are generally consumed at particular times of that day, in the mornings or evenings, and each reader, seeing other readers, knows they share the same news and the same experience of consuming it through the same clocked and calendrically measured time as thousands of others:

We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day…It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the cere-mony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion…What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imag-ined community can be envisioned?2

Although La cruzada en marcha is not a newspaper, as a bulletin its format is journalistic and novelistic in the sense that features report on the characters in the on-going plot of the Crusade at measured intervals of around fifteen days. This calendrical measure forms one basis for linking the events occurring across Nicaragua into a single bulletin. The fact that these activities rather than any others are placed side by side in the same bulletin and are consumed together in the act of reading simply reinforces their association with one another in the mind of the reader. It is not at all clear, however, whether such news was con-sumed at particular moments of particular days in a “mass ceremony.” Such are the differences between a daily newspaper and a bi-monthly bulletin, yet this does not mean that the role which Anderson suggests is performed by the mass ceremony of newspaper reading is entirely absent. According to Anderson, see-ing others consuming the same features and plots reassures readers that this news is indeed part of the everyday reality in which they live: “the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life.”3 The unique circumstances under which

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 33.2. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 35.3. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, pp. 35-36.

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La cruzada en marcha was published ensured that it played precisely this role of rooting the imagined world into everyday life. Whilst calendrical coincidence linked the events reported in each bulletin, it was the Crusade itself which linked those events to the everyday reality of the reader. Given 1980 had been declared El Año de Alfabetización, the bulletin’s contents deliberately coincided with events connected to a process which would have been unavoidable in the daily lives of readers. Whether a brigadista, a student, a coordinator, the family of a brigadista, or a critic, and of whatever social standing, the massive popular mobilization on which the Crusade depended ensured that it occupied a highly visible position in the daily experience of all those living in Nicaragua. However anonymous the figures in the features remained, just as in the life of the reader, they shared some kind of relation to the Crusade. Linking socially and culturally diverse people, who were largely anonymous from one another and dispersed across the country, represents the kind of imagining process through which the image of communion begins to live in people’s minds, and forms what Anderson saw as one of the essential pillars of modern nations: “that remarkable confi-dence of community in anonymity.”1

This process involved more than creating a community in anonymity how-ever. Through the use of departmental features, as well as the visual imaging of the republic through maps, flags and scenes of everyday life in markets, literacy classes and workplaces, La cruzada en marcha underlined the fact that the Crusadebelonged to Nicaragua in a way that it did not belong to any other space. Fur-thermore, whilst international solidarity made a significant contribution to the Crusade, it was by and large visibly carried out by Nicaraguans. Regardless of the persistence of the class and ethnic inequalities, as well as an urban-rural divide, which had undermined nation-building projects in the past, the Cru-sade’s mobilization of everyone willing and capable of taking part attempted to create a “deep, horizontal comradeship” based around a single common denomi-nator, the nation. Seen as an imagining process, rather than a pedagogic project, the community which was being imagined here is of an exclusively national character.

It would, I think, be an over-inflated claim to suggest that a single publica-tion had made this possible. By deciding to use the everyday material which accompanied the Crusade to illustrate its contribution to imagining the nation, it is almost inevitable, given the shear volume of such material, that selection takes place. The Crusade created the opportunity to engage in an extensive range of intensive interpolative practices which were required to sustain the mobilization of a significant proportion of the population over a five-month


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period. Amongst these were included countless public meetings, government declarations and newspaper editorials. There was also a logo-ization of the theme of the Crusade throughout the country: the statements printed in every government publication declaring 1980 to be El Año de la Alfabetización, the stamps depicting scenes of brigadistas and their campesino students, the Cru-sade’s official logo of a man and woman reading above the flags of the republic and of the FSLN and the numerous plaques commemorating the event which occupied prominent positions on public buildings. La cruzada en marcha repre-sents one example of such practices, and one which illuminates some of Ander-son’s comments concerning the role played by print in imagining community in anonymity. As the official organ of the Crusade published by the Ministry of Education, La cruzada en marcha targeted a wide general audience. It should not be isolated from the process that it formed a part of however, which together gave it the ability to articulate that sense of space and of a people moving through it together, and consciously so, in the same direction, at the same measured rate of calendrical time and with a common objective in mind.

Accompanying these cultural mechanisms for imagining community in ano-nymity were those of a more overtly political character, what Anderson tended to refer to as being of a “Machiavellian spirit.” This was the official type of nationalism diffused by the state which embodies the vision of the nation pos-sessed by hegemonic political agents.1 Whilst the liberation theologists who provided much of the early input had sought to create a New Man and New Woman based on Christian humanism, these subjectivities came to be more directly identified with the Sandinistas’ anti-imperialist project as the process progressed. Although the characterization of the New Man and New Woman continued to embody the selfless virtues attributed to it by liberation theolo-gists, they came to be directly equated with the qualities of the heroes and mar-tyrs of the revolution, especially Sandino and Carlos Fonseca. The fight against illiteracy was portrayed as the same fight engaged in by the fallen martyrs of the revolution, against the same enemy, and required “the same heroic attitude” which achieved national liberation.2

The Crusade took on the status of a morally transformative process through which the anti-imperialist patrimony of the Nicaraguan people could be redis-covered. Helped by the paraphernalia of war, and through the images of Sandino, Fonseca and other martyrs of the revolution, the Crusade sought to interpolate a certain ideological milieu through which a national subject could emerge charac-terized by a propensity to struggle against what were seen to be the conse-

1. Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 159.2. Tünnermann, C. ‘La educación, derecho fundamental de nuestro pueblo’ in Ministerio

de Educación La cruzada en marcha (1980) No. 5, p. 2.

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quences of imperialism. On this occasion, it was illiteracy but in the future it would be ill health, the Contra War and the general condition of underdevelop-ment and dependence.

This story begins at the dawn of independence from Spain, with a Nicaragua portrayed as suffering from the double impediment of foreign intervention and a divided oligarchy, who, in pursuit of personal wealth, were disposed to indulge the imperialist pretensions of world powers. Episodes such as the destruction wrought by the US mercenaries led by William Walker, the naked exploitation of Nicaragua’s natural geography by Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company and the US dismissal of the Zelaya administration, all of which occurred with the complicity of Nicaragua’s political élites, formed the historical panorama of Nicaragua in the 1920s. The maneuvers by Liberals and Conservatives to ingrati-ate themselves with the US in their quest for the office of the Nicaraguan presi-dency provided the antecedents for Sandino to become a rebel.

6. THE NATIONALIST TROPE: EL MUCHACHO DE NIQUINOHOMO

The caudillos only defended the interests of their class domination and fought civil wars for personal benefit, access to power to make deals, buy land and control taxes. Submitting unconditionally to the dictates of foreign domination and the all-powerful will of consortiums and bankers, their patriotic demands and nationalis-tic or constitutional pretensions were nothing other than rhetorical window-dress-ing for their ambition, which endangered the lives of thousands of campesinos who never understood why they were fighting and dying…Adolfo Díaz, Emiliano Chamorro, José María Moncada; thanks to them, Nicaragua appeared to the eyes of the world as a North American protectorate for a quarter of a century, and contin-ued to be a North American protectorate, although without occupying troops, long afterwards.1

Throughout the story, the main protagonist was portrayed as nothing exceptional, a kid from a typical Nicaraguan village, whose boyhood was recog-nizably Nicaraguan, being much the same as the other major players in the unfolding drama which would immortalize him as national hero. Regardless of their anonymity from one another and the subsequent contrariety of their desti-nies, the lives of Sandino, Moncada, and Somoza were instantaneously fixed into a bounded time and space by their geographical proximity and the quaintness of Nicaraguan village life at the end of the nineteenth century:

Augusto César Sandino had been born on the 18th May 1895, in the small village of Niquinohomo, composed of mud and straw huts, and of campesinos who worked

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El Pensamiento Vivo: Tomo I, pp. 41-42.

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as agricultural peons on the coffee plantations; a place where they also grew maize, tobacco, and plantain, located in the Department of Masaya, the most densely pop-ulated of the republic. Next to the colonial church that faced a humble square there were a few tile-roofed houses belonging to comfortable ladinos who owned a cer-tain amount of land and traded in cereals which they bought from small producers before the harvest. (It was an irony of destiny that within a small territorial radius of no more than ten kilometers Sandino was born in Niquinohomo, while in other small towns just to the south were born José María Moncada, in Masatepe, and Anastasio Somoza in San Marcos.)1

Special attention is also paid to the description of the area which was to become the major theatre of war, the mountainous region of the Segovias. The Segovias were to occupy a special place in the national imaginings of the Sandin-istas. This mythical place which gave birth to the Sandinista struggle sits firmly at the heart of the national space, through a description of its physical features within a landscape made recognizable both by its poverty and by numerous place names. This is the land of plurals spoken of by Anderson which are repre-sentative features of a definite space, helping to fuse “the world inside the novel with the world outside”:2

“Over there” were the Segovias, the mountainous region of Nicaragua that descends from the frontier of the Republic of Honduras in the north towards the forests and swamps of the Atlantic littoral and westward toward the plains of the Pacific littoral. Its high peaks covered with thick pine forests, century-old tall trees forming gigantic natural caverns of vegetation; its rivers crashing through jagged outcroppings of rock; and its ravines and narrow passes cover various departments of the country: Nueva Segovia, Estelí, Madriz, Matagalpa, and Jinotega…

Somewhere in that region, near the Honduran border, was that mythical place, El Chipote,...On its heights rustic palm-thatched huts had been built, living quar-ters, storehouses, horse and cattle corrals, and workshops to repair weapons and make ammunition, clothing, or footwear, all in keeping with the poverty of the region.3

The sense of Nicaragüanidad (Nicaraguan-ness) is immediately conjured up through an adjacent construction of the Otherness represented by the US marines, their physical appearance and their activities, which contrasts so sharply against the landscape they find themselves in. As Nicaraguans, the mountains offered protection to the Sandinistas, whereas for the Marines they only offered betrayal:

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El Pensamiento Vivo: Tomo I, p. 43.2. Anderson comments on a quotation from the Mexican novel El Periquillo Sarniento (1816):

“Nothing assures us of this sociological solidity more than the succession of plurals. For they conjure up a social space full of comparable prisons, none in itself of any unique importance, but all represen-tative (in their simultaneous, separate existence) of the oppressiveness of this colony.” Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, p. 30.

3. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 50-51.

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The well-trained and elegantly uniformed Yankee soldiers found only one phrase to describe that nightmare: a damned country! Rains, mosquitoes, swamps, swollen rivers, wild animals, fevers, and the horror of suddenly falling into an ambush, but never a visible enemy.

A fallen tree branch, a rock placed in the road, a sound like an animal cry or bird song — these might be signals in the Sandinistas’ language of war, warning of the Yankees’ approach or giving the order to open fire. Every noise of the mountain was the invaders’ enemy.1

The nation was as much a social and political space as it was a geographical one. The Marines not only had to face Sandino but Nicaragua itself. Not even “their maps” could help them find their way around, for, despite such devices, the hostile socio-political landscape, which the country’s physical features were depicted as representing, kept Sandino’s hideout of El Chipote secret: “such a place did not appear on their maps, under that name or any other. El Chipote, they decided, did not exist. It was a name created from the imagination of the campesinos.”2 By contrast, the relationship between the Sandinistas and Nicara-gua was unproblematic; they formed part of the fabric of that space and used it as their ally in the fight against an alien invader: “Any campesino whose house they approached to ask for water or directions could have been a Sandinista who sowed his little patch of maize by day and served as a courier by night, or as a soldier on alternate days.”3 The map was a thing used by the Yankees which affirmed their status as stranger and alien. El Chipote was simply “known” through a belonging to the socio-political landscape of the Segovias. Unlike the Marines, Nicaraguans had no need for maps. The language of the map was of no use in contrast to the language of a space with which the Sandinistas, as Nicara-guans, expressed a fluency.

An understanding of how and why Sandino decided to rebel is put forward which depends on a simultaneous apprehension of his own actions and those of his soon-to-be enemies, those other Nicaraguans who, faced with the same choices, decided to sell their country’s interests to US imperialism. Here, the story employs the literary device noted by Anderson so central to thinking the modern nation, that of “simultaneity in homogeneous empty time.” The standpoint of the reader is ubiquitous, for, unlike the main protagonists who act out their parts in different places, the reader comprehends how they each face the dilem-mas of US intervention simultaneously, in a meanwhile fashion. Indeed, con-structing this contrasting image of the sell-outs of Moncada and Somoza against the hero Sandino constitutes the central plot of the story, and largely depends upon a simultaneous apprehension of a series of events which retain a sense of

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 49-50.2. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 50.3. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 50.

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ordered progression, since they unfold “at the same clocked, calendrical time” under the all-seeing eye of the reader:

On May 2, when Moncada was preparing to surrender to Mr Stimson, Sandinooccupied Cerro del Común which faced the city of Boaco…While there, Moncada sent a messenger to search for him and inform him of the armistice conditions, but by the time Sandino arrived at the headquarters the council of generals had already agreed to disarm.

Returning to Cerro del Común, Sandino secluded himself from his men so they wouldn’t see him cry as he bitterly pondered the nation’s eternal destiny of betrayal and surrender. As Moncada had done when confronted with Mr. Stimson’s demand, Sandino examined two alternatives during that long night of meditation on Cerro del Común: surrender his arms and demobilize his men, or resist to the death the powerful army of the United States which had warships, airplanes, artillery, and infinite resources. Considering the interests traditionally at stake in these civil wars, it seemed like madness to resist. They had offered Sandino mules, horses, money, and a post as governor of the Department of Jinotega. And they also offered shame. That night, he remembered the mocking voice of the worker friend in Tampico who had called him a country-seller. He recalled that he had not come so far to fight for a political party, but for a country. That what mattered was not who would be the candidate for president in the upcoming elections which the Marines would conduct as it suited them, but that the United States had no right at all to invade a small country and impose such a humiliation.

That night, Sandino decided to resist, more from a desire to serve as an example for the future than with any illusions about achieving a military victory.1

Whilst the main protagonists are portrayed as sharing the childhood of Nic-araguan village life, the subsequent divergence in the course of their lives is explained through a process of metamorphosis into something other on the part of Moncada and later Somoza. Both were to lose all the attributes which distin-guished them as Nicaraguan through a corrupting association with the US. This association allowed them to move from their humble origins into the oligarchy where they were to acquire all of the duplicitous characteristics which Nicara-gua’s oligarchy had exhibited towards imperialism since independence. The praise received by Moncada from US envoy Stimson was interpreted as an implicit endorsement on the part of the US of his suitability for the office of the presidency: “Such signals did not go unnoticed by Moncada, who returned to Boaco, where he met with his council of generals and recommended they accept the terms of surrender.”2 As for Somoza, educated in Philadelphia, familiar with “taxi driver” American-English, an “habitué of the US Embassy” and having “given himself the title of general,” he was to become the “US ambassador’s can-didate to head the National Guard,” and he was duly elected in November 1932.3

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 46-47.2. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 41.3. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 59.

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Just like Moncada before him, Somoza later used the favored position he had gained from his association with the US to occupy the presidency of Nicaragua.

For Sandino, there was no such metamorphosis. It is precisely because he remained what he had always been that he rebelled: a humble Nicaraguan kid who was a worker-peasant rather than a member of the oligarchy. His view of the world was quintessentially Latin American, formed in the idyllic village life of his boyhood and in post-revolutionary Mexico, where he encountered the “galloping socialism of the Bolshevik Revolution”:1

But there would be an abstemious, timid kid, short in stature, who had come from a tiny Nicaraguan village situated on a coffee-covered plateau where the foot-hills of the Andean cordillera descend towards the Pacific littoral, who had been to the banana plantations and sugar mills on the north coast of Honduras and Guate-mala, and the oil fields of Mexico. One who, becoming a military caudillo in this (Constitutionalist) war, confronted all those schemes of betrayal. Working as a peon, lathe operator, foreman of a street cleaning crew, artisan, and agricultural laborer, he eventually arrived in Mexico along with many other young Latin Americans seeking a better life.2

The political characterization of Sandino is inextricably bound-up with his status as a humble worker who was just like so “many other young Latin Ameri-cans.” This child, born at the cusp of US imperialist intervention in Latin Amer-ica, just at the time when “José Martí fell in Cuba struggling for the independence of his country,”3 was learning about the “anguish, poverty, and deprivation” which was the lot of most Nicaraguans. Like Nicaragua, and indeed the whole of Latin America, Sandino was a victim of circumstance, whose des-tiny had been forced upon him by the machinations of a cynical oligarchy and foreign powers which, as a true Nicaraguan, left him no choice but to resist. On Sandino’s decision to return from Mexico to Nicaragua to join the Constitution-alist War, the reader is informed that he was unable to forget the accusation that Nicaraguans were nothing more than “a bunch of country sellers” that had been leveled at him by a fellow-worker over the situation in Nicaragua: “thinking that if the politicians of his country were country sellers, so were those who remained silent in the face of such ignominy.”4 This is the same dilemma which Sandino was to ponder over on the Cerro del Común. His decision to reject US demands, as well as his decision to return to Nicaragua, share a common basis. What dis-

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 42. 2. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 42. 3. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 43.4. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 43. The story tells how he used his saving

to “finance the beginning of an armed resistance against the occupation of Nicaragua, where he returned on 1 June 1926.” In fact, Sandino returned to join Sacasa’s Liberal forces, who were engaging government troops loyal to the Conservative, Adolfo Díaz. The occupation of Nicaragua by US Marines did not start until December 1926.

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tinguished Sandino from those who had accepted the humiliation of the Treaty of Tipitapa was that, whilst he was a “man of the people” who remained faithful to his humble Nicaraguan origins, they were part of an oligarchy which had always sold their nationality to US imperialism, and owed their very existence to a foreign power.1 The theme of a man of the people is constantly evoked to legiti-mize Sandino’s actions. Even his position of general had emerged from the peo-ple, as the reader is informed by his reply to Moncada’s enquiry over who had made him a general: “‘My men did, sir,’ was the humble but firm reply.” Indeed, being of the people was a general attribute of the Sandinista army, with the social origins of Sandino’s Estado Mayor being that of campesinos and artisans.2

This contrasts sharply with the figure of Moncada, who told Sandino: “Why do you want to die for the people?…The people don’t care; all that matters is to live well.”3 Those campesinos who became Sandinistas did so because they remained true to Nicaragua, uncorrupted by the ill-gotten privileges enjoyed by those who had sold out to US imperialism:

In the midst of this traditional civil war, Sandino appeared as a general of the people who, far from shunning battle, participated in it shoulder-to-shoulder with the soldiers of his column…

That decision (to resist) transformed a civil war of oligarchic factions into a long war for national liberation. It transformed a war of soldiers recruited by force and of opportunist generals into a war in which generals and soldiers would be the poor and children of the people, wearing rags and calling one another brother... 4

Sandino’s split from the Liberals can thus be seen as a natural progression of pre-existing differences based around both the class and national position of the Sandinistas in contrast to that of Moncada and the oligarchy which he is taken to represent. The political message is clear: Nicaragua, like its people, was a sim-ple, humble country of rivers, forests, mountains and campesinos, which had its rights to remain so continuously infringed by a United States of “warships, air-planes, artillery, and infinite resources” and an oligarchy which had lost these humble Nicaraguan attributes by growing rich through selling their nationality to this absolute Other.5 The oligarchy itself occupied the position of the Other

1. Sandino’s character in the story equates to the literary category of a “man of the people” described by Bakhtin as “bearers of the wisdom of the common folk and of their idyllic locale. A ‘man of the people’ appears in the novel as the one who holds the correct attitude toward life and death, an attitude lost by the ruling classes...” Bakhtin, M. (1994) The Dialogic Imagination, p. 235.

2. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, p. 51.3. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 46, 47.4. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 46-47.5. Nothing could sum these sentiments up more accurately than the favored derogatory

label attached to the oligarchy by the Sandinistas, that of vendepatrias (country-sellers).

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because it gained its wealth through selling their country and its people to the US. Having done so, they were no longer seen to be Nicaraguan:

For many, this general of the humble, the hardships of the struggle etched on his boyish face, had conquered a right which the politicians serving the Yankee compa-nies had never been concerned with: that of nationality, the power to call oneself a Nicaraguan, a Central American…It had been repeatedly stated that the source of Sandino’s anti-imperialism was the clamor for justice so long buried in the hearts of Latin Americans who had been oppressed for centuries. This oppression has not simply been the result of foreign domination. It was no accident that those who took up arms against the powerful US Marines had been landless peasants, serfs of United Fruit or the domestic landowners, day laborers, sharecroppers, and field hands since colonial times.1

El muchacho de Niquinohomo clearly forms a major part of the narrative, first established in the writings of Carlos Fonseca, about Nicaragua’s anti-imperialist history and national identity. Within it can be found those literary devices noted by Anderson which made it possible to imagine the modern nation. Whilst there is a clear nationalist message to the story which establishes the class and anti-Yankee nature of the Nicaraguan nation, it emerges from the complex narrative work carried out to give flesh and blood to the particular time and space through which the story’s nationalist content comes to be seen as a true representation of reality. The story’s time is homogenized primarily through the calendar, which, together with the weaving of a definite landscape, form the essential techniques of its chronotopic ordering; simultaneity binds what would otherwise remain individual fates into a story about the fate of a nation. Without that sense of society, of the apprehension of dispersed characters simultaneously moving cal-endrically through a bounded space, the plot contained in the story would be incomprehensible. The plot constitutes a nationalist trope by effectively conjur-ing up a sense of nation-ness: a unique, bounded space and a people living within it. It is not just about any space, however, or any people. Characterized by a unique history that belongs exclusively to a specific geographical area, what is being represented is the story of a nation, one whose defining feature was the fight against US imperialist intervention. Fiction does, indeed, seep “quietly and continuously into reality.”

1. Ramírez, S. (1984) El pensamiento vivo: Tomo I, pp. 60, 64.

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7. STRETCHING THE LIMITS OF THE STATE: RIGHTS, SURVEILLANCE, AND THE LIFE-ADMINISTERING POWER OF THE STATE

The scale of the effort in terms of the mobilization and coordination of peo-ple and resources was to stretch Nicaragua’s infrastructure to the limit and in many ways acted as an impulse towards modernization. Planning infrastructure and statistical data collection were modernized as a first step to implementing the Crusade. The brigadistas made their own contribution to the gathering of such information by collecting data on their students’ age, sex, occupation, place of residence and general health. The hunt for Sandino by the US Marines had inadvertently acted as an anchorage point on which to extend the power of the state during the 1920s, increasing its administrative surveillance capacity over traditionally marginal areas of the country. Given the range of knowledge-gath-ering activities engaged upon during the Crusade, the “war against ignorance,” like the war against Sandino, can be said to have had a similar effect of increasing the visibility and knowledge of the population. No longer hunting bandits, an attempt was now made to extend the Nicaraguan state’s administrative reach through the language of rights. It was an altogether less coercive approach, and one which emanated from the population itself. The demand for the right to land, to health, to education and to opportunity legitimized the increasing pres-ence of the state and its agents in the daily life of the general population.

There is nothing cynical in this dual-edged process of extending the state’s authority through the delivery of rights. The satisfaction of rights by the state necessarily entailed an extension and perfection of its administrative capacities. However, since demands for this kind of intervention originated from the peo-ple, the power effects of the state’s increasing ability to regulate everyday life were masked. Administrative power, as Foucault suggested, “is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.”1 Its agents were no longer the National Guard but a network of census-takers, doctors, teachers and brigadis-tas, whose knowledge-gathering activities on the health, age, gender, ethnic, economic, cultural and linguistic attributes of the population created the rudi-mentary foundations on which the administrative power of modern states rest. The proliferation of research institutes, the reorganization of the census and the sponsoring of national projects like the literacy and health crusades indicates the attempt, conscious or not, to effectively penetrate Nicaragua’s population and thoroughly subject it to processes of governance. By “processes of governance” I am thinking specifically of the use of surveillance to stretch the state’s authority

1. Foucault, M. (1987) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Middlesex, Peregrine Books), p. 86.

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across the national space and enable its application to occur continuously through time to coordinate and govern human activities.1

Yet states are not just administrative locales; they also embody and express the hegemonic projects of the political élites who occupy them. The state’s spon-soring of the Crusade, amongst other activities, is illustrative of it playing the decisive role of “educator” as described by Gramsci, one which “urges, incites, solicits, and ‘punishes’” in its attempts to naturalize its political project.2 Thus, the official nationalisms of many twentieth-century regimes which Anderson sees as being of a Machiavellian spirit could be more accurately seen as inherent features of all states, and of all nationalisms in a world of nation-states. Whether Nicaragua was to be portrayed as a liberal, progressive, capitalist nation or as an anti-impe-rialist, worker-peasant nation, the state remained the central vehicle through which these respective versions would be diffused and naturalized. Every state tends to “create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen.”3

Whilst some may be more successful than others in this endeavor, there is noth-ing Machiavellian in this: “Every State is ethical in as much as one of its most important functions is to raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level.”4 This form of moral regulation legitimizes certain politically useful identities and subjectivities over others by portraying them as part of the natural, inherent identity of the nation and is something undertaken by all states of whatever political persuasion.5

8. CONCLUSION

Much of the existing literature on the Crusade tends to over-emphasize its importance as an educational project. As such, criticism usually gravitates around the political nature of the lessons taught as well as the levels of literacy attained. However, such preoccupations fail to assess the Crusade’s role as a pro-cess which made it possible to imagine the nation, not only in terms of a bounded community but also as a community with a definite political identity. Whereas Anderson identified the spread of print capitalism as an essential mechanism for meaningfully linking people dispersed over a given territory into

1. Giddens, A. (1985) The Nation-State and Violence. See chapter 7 Administrative power, Internal Pacification, pp. 172-197.

2. Gramsci, A. (1986) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, Lawrence & Wishart), p. 247.

3. Gramsci, A. (1986) Prison Notebooks, p. 246.4. Gramsci, A. (1986) Prison Notebooks, p. 258.5. Corrigan, P. & Sayer, D. (1985) The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution

(Oxford, Basil Blackwell), pp. 5-8.

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a national community, the weakness of both capitalist relations and the state in many parts of Nicaragua meant that another vehicle would have to be found. The Crusade appears to have been just such a vehicle, taking the form of a political mobilization that condensed many of the devices cited by Anderson as crucial in the re-apprehension of time and bounded space that form the basis for national imaginings.

The process was not unproblematic or wholly successful however. Whilst it is true that the US played a critical role in fermenting the Contra War, the roots of this war lay in the inability of the Sandinista conception of the nation to become part of the natural, lived reality of a number of groups, a factor eagerly exploited by the regime’s enemies. However, the de-linking of the Nicaraguan state from US imperialism made the idea of the nation a critical one. Whilst the Somocista state did indeed undertake a series of reforms to improve its adminis-trative power, this remained a partial and fragmented process. And inherently so, since the limited interests it served did not require an extensive knowledge of the population. Thousands of Nicaraguans simply remained unknown, with the governing of their lives being unnecessary in serving Somocismo’s US patron. With the removal of this foreign patron from the politics of the state, govern-ment came to be legitimized by exclusive reference to the nation.

When the Sandinistas gained power in 1979, they faced a critical hurdle. The novelty of the idea of the sovereign nation in the context of weak capitalist rela-tions and a state which did not exercise its administrative power over the whole national territory made the garnering of the population into active participation, or passive acceptance, of the Sandinista project highly problematic. The Crusadewas to offer one possible vehicle to counter these deficiencies. Not only did the Crusade extend the stretch and coordination of governmental power but it also granted a greater consciousness of communion amongst anonymous, dispersed groups: a consciousness based around the idea of the nation.

What the Crusade did was to provide an alternative vehicle to print-capital-ism in bringing about a re-apprehension of time in terms of temporal coincidence as a first step in building the primary foundation on which to operationalize the Sandinistas’ developmental project. The writing of popular stories and the administrative coordination of the process of mass mobilization precisely imaged a community proceeding through time together in pursuit of a common cause: “providing the technical means for “re-presenting” the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”1 It is also in these routines that the political con-tent of the Sandinistas’ project began to be imagined as part of that community,


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with the books, histories, plaques and stamps associated with the Crusade repeatedly seeking to portray specific subjectivities as part of the national char-acter. This point should be stressed further. The imagining of the nation is not simply ideological but cultural. Whilst the Sandinistas clearly used the state to sponsor projects such as the literacy campaign, its ability to act as a national imagining process became largely autonomous from the state.

Given these observations, perhaps the longer term significance of the Sand-inista revolution should not be judged as an attempted transition to socialism, as it is often assumed to have been. It should instead be viewed as an attempt to complete the nation-building project embarked upon by nineteenth-century Liberals. The Crusade was the first step of many undertaken by the Sandinista government to make it possible to imagine Nicaragua as a self-determining sov-ereign nation, characterized by a political identity and history that was uniquely its own. Just like their Liberal predecessors, the Sandinistas recognized that, if their developmental aspirations were to be realized, Nicaragua first had to become a fully-fledged member of that “fragmented, pluralised, and territorial-ized” world of nation-states.

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CHAPTER 5. INDIANS, CREOLES, AND MESTIZOS: THE ATLANTIC COAST AND VISIONS OF THE NICARAGUAN NATION

Whilst Spanish colonization began to take place in the Pacific areas of what is now Nicaragua during the mid-sixteenth century, it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that European explorers, pirates and Puritan colonizers began to establish settlements on its Atlantic shores. A combination of disease, inhospitable terrain and fierce resistance by indigenous Indians had prevented the Spanish moving eastwards and colonizing the region. By the time of the fall of the Spanish colony, two distinct groups remained on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. Some will be referred to as indigenous since their origins can be traced to pre-Colombian times, whilst others will be referred to as ethnic, being racially distinct from Nicaragua’s predominantly mestizo population, yet having their origins in the arrival of European colonizers.

Politically and numerically, the most important indigenous and ethnic groups on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast have been Creoles and Miskitu Indians.1

Each has, at different times, occupied the apex of the racial hierarchy of Coastal society, having been the favored allies of the major imperialist powers present on the Coast, Britain and the US. Following the ideas of Hale (1994), understanding the relationship these two groups shared with both British and US imperialism, the competition it generated between them and the historical myths which it enabled them to draw upon in their dealings with the Nicaraguan national authorities, is vital to the present discussion. Without a clear knowledge of Costeños’ experience of non-Iberian imperialism, there is a danger that essential

1. There are two other Indian groups living on the Atlantic Coast, the Sumu and Rama.

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points would be missed concerning the pervasive impact which Anglo-American imperialism has had on the ideological dispositions and self-identity of these two groups. All those approaches in which the effects of Anglo-American impe-rialism remain silent lead to the mistaken conclusion common to mestizo nationalist discourses that the ambivalence and opposition expressed by Costeños towards attempts to integrate them into national life are the result of the uncivilized attitudes of primitive peoples.

1. THE MISKITU

British imperialism had not followed the Spanish model in its objectives of total, and usually forcible, replacement of existing civilizations and the appro-priation of land, labor and resources. Instead, it took on a mercantilist form, with its main interests centering on extractive industries that were facilitated by friendly relations with the local population. An alliance was made with the Mis-kitu Indians, who became the major trading partners with British merchants in the region. In return for rubber, mahogany and turtle, the Miskitu received fire-arms, which allowed them to become the dominant group on the Atlantic Coast, exercising political dominion over other Indian groups and successfully defeat-ing military incursions into the region by Spanish forces from the Pacific.1 This alliance was formalized in 1687 when the Governor of Jamaica crowned the first Miskitu King and created the Kingdom of Mosquitia. The lack of coercion involved in British-Miskitu relations, and the benefits the Miskitu derived from these relations, vis-à-vis other indigenous and ethnic groups, led to the absence of any sense of being a colonized people. Indeed, by embracing Anglo culture and institutions not only were the Miskitu able to distinguish themselves from Span-iards but these factors also provided an ideological basis which justified their hegemony over other indigenous and ethnic groups.

This affinity towards the British was strengthened with the spread of Prot-estant Christianity by Moravian missionaries who arrived in 1849. Of particular importance was the provision of educational instruction in Miskitu by Moravi-ans, who gave the Miskitu language its first written form. However, Christianiz-ing the Miskitu also radically altered many of their traditional practices. Animist religions and shamanism, for example, were pushed to the margins of Miskitu society. Although Moravian missions gave the Miskitu an important cultural asset which helped maintain their distinctive group identity, that of a written

1. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History: The Atlantic Coast in the Nicaraguan Revolution(London, Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign), p. 18.

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Chapter 5. Indians, Creoles, and Mestizos: The Atlantic Coast and Visions of the Nicaraguan

script to their language, these missions were often motivated by paternalistic and civilizing pretensions which were based on a view of the Miskitu as being like children.1 Relations with the Moravians were, therefore, contradictory; at once substantially altering traditional Miskitu ways of life, whilst at the same time empowering them as a group vis-à-vis other groups.

Although the British formally ceded sovereignty over the region to Spain in the Treaty of Versailles (1783), the military capacity of the Miskitu frustrated the consolidation of Spanish authority in the area. Jane Freeland (1988) suggests that this first British withdrawal marked the beginnings of Creole political and economic ascendancy over the Miskitu. However, Charles Hale (1994) says this process occurred some thirty years later. Creole ascendance is not in doubt here but the significance of this relatively short period of autonomy from any imperial power is critical in understanding Miskitu claims to nationhood during the twentieth century. From 1793 to 1820, the real political power in the region was exercised by the Miskitu King and his Council of Chiefs, who successfully pre-vented Pacific Coast Spaniards from gaining a foothold in the region.2 The his-torical memory of this period provides the founding myth of the independent nationhood of the Miskitu people. In fact, Miskitu hegemony was assisted throughout this period by the waning of the Spanish Empire and continuing contacts with British merchants upon whom they remained dependent for their economic well-being and supply of arms. With the collapse of the Kingdom of Guatemala and the internecine civil wars that characterized the period of the United Provinces of Central America, the British returned and re-established their authority over the area. In 1844, a new British Consul-General was appointed in Bluefields and the Mosquitia was declared a British protectorate. It was during this period that the Miskitu were to lose their favored position as intermediaries of British interests, their place being taken by English-speaking Creoles.

The weakness of both the Unionist and national governments meant that they could offer little effective opposition to the British. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the main challenge to the British presence in the region came from the US, which saw Nicaragua as a potential site for an inter-oceanic canal. With diplomatic backing from the US, Nicaragua pushed its claim to the Atlan-tic Coast, leading to the signing of the Treaty of Managua (1860) and the defini-tive renunciation of the British Empire’s interests in the region. In return, the Nicaraguan government agreed to the establishment of the Miskitu Reserve over part of the territory which would be governed by the Miskitu King and his

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State: 1894-1987(Stanford, Stanford University Press), p. 49.

2. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 39.

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Council. Despite British efforts to maintain Miskitu authority, these arrange-ments largely failed. The Miskitu lost control over strategic ports such as San Juan del Norte (Greytown) in the south and Puerto Cabezas in the north, which the Nicaraguan government ensured were left outside the Reserve’s boundaries. Furthermore, expanding US enterprises increasingly tended to employ Creolesin administrative and management posts because of their ability to speak English. The undermining of Miskitu authority was also assisted by the transfer of the King’s residency to Bluefields, the major Creole population center. According to Freeland (1988), the English education of successive Miskitu mon-archs had led to their gradual cultural separation from the majority of Miskitu. In dress, language, and culture, Miskitu kings acted more like Creoles than Mis-kitu.1 Even the King’s Council established by the British before they left had a majority Creole membership.

This situation may shed light on the ways in which Miskitu representatives reacted to the Reincorporación carried out by the Zelaya administration under the military auspices of general Rigoberto Cabezas. The Nicaraguan government had again received tacit backing from the US, who preferred the unification of the territory under a single state in order to make any future negotiations over an inter-oceanic canal easier. In February 1894, after King Robert Henry Clarence began to voice his opposition to the planned Mosquito Reserve, Nicaraguan forces occupied Bluefields and deposed him. The King’s requests for British pro-tection went unheeded. Because the Miskitu Council became the center of oppo-sition to the Reincorporación, it has been assumed that this represented Miskitu sentiments in general. The subsequent signing of the Decree of Reincorporation by eighty village headmen seems contradictory in this context, and has often been interpreted as a sign of the backwardness, ignorance and even drunkenness of these representatives. Hale (1994) rejects these explanations and suggests that the decision to sign the decree probably reflected the alienation of the Mis-kitu villages from their governing Council in Bluefields, which was, by this time, predominantly Creole. Whilst most of the petitioners to the British government were Creoles, Miskitu communities generally remained silent.2 Rather than por-traying them as “passive victims of deception,” then, the signing of the Decree by village headmen may more accurately be attributed to a careful appraisal of the political and military reality. Miskitu villages had become alienated from their government, the Nicaraguan government promised to respect Miskitu rights, and the prospects of militarily resisting the Reincorporación were virtually nil.

1. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History, p. 22.2. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, pp. 42-45.

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Although the Reincorporación led to increased taxes being imposed by Nic-araguan authorities and land expropriations by mestizo immigrants, the real power on the Coast passed into the hands of the US companies. US backing for the Conservative rebellion that overthrew the Zelaya administration in 1909 even brought US Marines to the Coast. The US presence in the region offered Costeños employment, dollar wages and access to imported consumer goods from company stores. These insights lend weight to Hale’s conclusion that anti-Nicaraguan sentiments were not simply based on negative experiences with the Nicaraguan national state but an affinity towards Anglo-American civilization built around an idealized past of no taxes, no land expropriations, and no mili-tary service under the British, and of income and imported consumer goods with the presence of US companies. Despite the repeated failure of their Anglo-Amer-ican allies to protect the Miskitu militarily against the encroachment of the national government, nothing distinguished the Miskitu more from their Span-ish Nicaraguan foe than their embrace of Anglo-American culture.1

Affinities towards Anglo-American culture and institutions were not unproblematic however, as the Miskitu attitude towards Sandino illustrates. The events that led to the Sandino rebellion had their origins in long-established animosities amongst mestizo political parties. Although the major theatres of conflict were located in the Pacific, Sandino did maintain a presence in the north Atlantic Coast along the Coco River, a center of Miskitu populations. The milieu of the Miskitu did not favor their participation in Sandino’s struggle. Sandino’s anti-US stance clashed with the Anglo-affinity so central to Miskitu identity, as did his essentially mestizo nationalist discourse of uniting the nation. The decapitation of the German Moravian pastor Karl Bregenzer in 1931 by Sandinis-tas who suspected him of being a North American spy also turned the powerful Moravian Church against the rebellion.

Yet many Miskitu were to join the rebellion. The Great Depression and the withdrawal of US companies from the Coast had led to increasing unemploy-ment and a degree of animosity towards these companies. Sandino’s social pro-gram of providing schools, hospitals and land seemed to offer an alternative to the unemployment caused by this recession. This was especially true for the Miskitu communities along the Coco River, since their isolation had led them to be neglected by both the Nicaraguan state and the Moravian Church, the tradi-tional provider of such services on the Coast. Furthermore, Sandino did actually fulfill these promises.2 Anglo-American affinities amongst these Miskitu were weak, due to the failure of the Moravians to penetrate the area effectively, whilst

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, pp. 51-52.2. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 54.

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the socio-economic position of Sandino’s soldiers, mainly poor landless campesi-nos, coincided with those of the Coco River Miskitu. Added to these factors was the contrast in Sandino’s attitude towards the Miskitu and the racist attitudes expressed by many US Marines in their dealings with both mestizos and Indi-ans. These factors have generally been forgotten, a deliberate product of the demonizing efforts of the Somocista state and the Moravian Church which transformed the historical memory of Sandino from a popular guerrilla leader into one of a bandit.1

2. THE CREOLES

Creole history has been closely bound up with that of the Miskitu. They are associated with the history of Anglo imperialism, first through slavery, and then through their favored status on the return of the British authorities to the Mos-quitia during the 1820s, a status which continued when British imperialism was displaced by US imperialism. Although miscegenation was common on the Mos-quito Coast, Gordon (1998) ties the genesis of the contemporary Creole commu-nity to a group of escaped African slaves who established themselves in Pearl Lagoon. These slaves had been owned by an important British colonist, Colonial Robert Hodgson, Jr., who was resident in Bluefields at the time of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles (1783) which led to the first British withdrawal. Whilst other British colonists left, taking their businesses and slaves with them, Colo-nial Hodgson remained to become Governor of the area for the Spanish Crown. His plans to divide the Miskitu and win fractions of them over to the Spanish backfired however, when, in September 1790, a Miskitu army ransacked his holdings. Although Hodgson’s slaves were initially claimed by the officers who commanded the Miskitu forces, by 1800 most of them were free. This group established small communities in Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon and formed the antecedents of today’s Creole communities.2 Under the protection of the Mis-kitu King, these communities were safe from a number of adventurers sent to recover the Hodgson slaves. The prosperous trading activities that they estab-lished throughout the Caribbean attracted other freed slaves after the Emancipa-tion of 1834.

By the 1820s, the term Creole had come into common usage as a description for “the entire free English Creole-speaking nonwhite population born in the Americas and living in the Mosquitia.”3 This non-white population included

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 56.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 37.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 39.

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both those of African descent and those of mixed Miskitu/British/African descent. The common denominator that bound them together in their own eyes and the eyes of visitors was their Creole English language.1 During the interreg-num of 1790-1820, when imperial power was supposedly absent from the Mos-quitia, Creoles began to govern their own communities under the military protection of the Miskitu King. The British return in the 1840s and the transfer of the seat of the Miskitu King from Waslala to Bluefields shifted the political and economic gravity of the region to the major centers of Creole population. This point marked the Creolization of the institution of the Miskitu monarchy and the political ascendance of the Creole population.2

The Creoles’ English language and emulation of Anglo-American culture were essential for their high status within the racial hierarchy of the Mosquitia. Just like the Miskitu before them, the Creoles believed that their Anglo culture made them superior to other non-white groups and entitled them to occupy a leading position in Coastal affairs. Amongst the white Anglo-American commu-nity of the Mosquitia, there was, however, a degree of racist disdain towards the perceived African-ness of Creoles: “For whites in the Mosquitia, Creoles, no mat-ter how Anglo-cultured, were inferior because they were, at least partially, racially identified as African.”3 Given the racist attitudes of many Anglo-Ameri-cans, Creole affinities towards Anglo culture and institutions initially appears contradictory. Whatever its subordinating affects vis-à-vis white Anglo-Ameri-can colonizers, Creoles, like the Miskitu before them, used their Anglo culture to distinguish themselves from Spanish Nicaraguans, a process which became more pronounced with the increasing presence of the Nicaraguan national state.

Whilst Moravian missionaries reported resistance to their teachings, after the second and final withdrawal of the British in 1860 this resistance declined, culminating in the Great Awakening of 1881. Large numbers of Costeños con-verted to Christianity, swelling the ranks of the Moravian Church. Membership of the Moravian Church entailed the adoption of a strong Protestant work ethic and a strict moral code that together constituted a distinctive way of life. As the national Nicaraguan state began to encroach on Coastal society, the emulation of this Protestant way of life became an act of resistance. Whatever the contradic-tions entailed in the adoption of a culture and institutions that were, at the same time, a source of racial subjugation, their adoption should be seen as an act of resistance against the mestizo culture borne by the national state.4

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 40.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 43.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 47.4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 56.

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Anglo-American imperialism provided a shared set of values which helped unite Costeños in general in their opposition against mestizo authorities who claimed the right of dominion over them, be it the Spanish Empire, Central American Union or the Nicaraguan national state. As the encroachment of mes-tizo civilization became more palpable, so too did the sense of national identity amongst Creoles, along with a militant willingness to defend it, as illustrated by the rioting in Bluefields in 1894.1 Such were the sentiments of autonomy and proto-nationalist imaginings, the Reincorporación is still referred to as the Over-throw in Creole’s historical memory.2 Owing to both racism and business con-flicts, however, the Mosquito Reserve government did not gain the support of the white US entrepreneurs that would have been vital for its survival. As a Reserve, rather than a state, its governmental institutions were seen as too rudi-mentary to facilitate the expansion of the local economy. Calls began to be made amongst US residents for the incorporation of the Mosquito Reserve into the Nicaraguan state. The very sectors that Creoles had drawn upon to strengthen their distinct group identity and their claims to autonomy were now favoring the antithesis of both.

Unlike the Miskitu population, Creoles reacted violently against the Rein-corporación/ Overthrow. Although Nicaraguan troops initially managed to sup-press rioting in Bluefields, they were run out of town a few months later. On this occasion, similar revolts took place in El Bluff, Pearl Lagoon, Corn Island and Prinzapolka, with the King’s Council resuming its position. The rebellion was ended by the US government, which sent troops to assist Nicaraguan authorities restore order. The Reserve Council, along with the last Miskitu King, fled.3

After the Reincorporación/Overthrow, Zelaya used the region as a source of income, both national and personal, usually through the granting of licenses and concessions to US companies for mining, rubber tapping, coconut and lumber exporting or fishing rights. Since these concessions established monopoly rights, they often resulted in competing Creole businesses being unable to continue trading.4 Money was also made by selling land grants, with sales rarely taking into account traditional Indian lands. In a move which directly undermined Cre-ole power and prestige, Creoles were replaced by mestizos within the local gov-ernment administration.5 The subjugation of the local population to the national state was no more clearly expressed than through the imposition of Spanish as the sole language of instruction in schools. Being unable to teach in Spanish,

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 58.2. Interview with Hugo Sujo, Bluefields, 19 April 1999.3. Robert Henry Clarence fled to Jamaica where he died some years later.4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 63.5. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History, p. 26.

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Moravian schools that had successfully spread literacy in Miskitu and English had to close. The corruption practiced by mestizo officials, the monopolistic concessions, the undermining of the authority of the Moravian Church and Anglo-American culture and institutions in general, and an over reliance on coer-cion due to the administrative weakness of the Nicaraguan state, created a sense similar to that of colonial subjugation rather than national belonging. In the eyes of many Creoles, the Mosquito Reserve, now renamed the department of Zelaya, had become an internal colony of the Nicaraguan state.1

Creole resistance to the Reincorporación/Overthrow took many forms. Civil organizations were established and became a focus for Creole culture and poli-tics. Economic resistance was also evident, firstly in the form of a reluctance to provide labor in the new monopoly industries and later in the form of union organizations.2 Creoles were also to play a role in the US-backed Conservative rebellion against Zelaya in 1909. Although the rebellion began in Bluefields, it did not express separatist sentiments, since it was initiated by mestizo Conser-vative caudillos who used the relative isolation of Bluefields as a base from which to organize their military campaign in western Nicaragua. Yet, as Gordon (1998) points out, Creole support for the rebellion represented a significant step towards becoming more involved with national politics in their attempts to address their grievances.3

Although marginal within Creole political culture, more radical opposition currents emerged during the second decade of the twentieth century. Immigrant black labor from Jamaica and the US brought the ideas of Marcus Garvey’s Uni-versal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) to the Coast’s Creole communi-ties. The Constitutionalist War (1926-27) also saw Creole mobilization, with a group of Creoles led by General George Montgomery Hodgson known as the Twenty-five Brave leading an attack on the military garrison of Bluefields in response to the overthrow of the Liberal government of Juan Bautista Sacasa. Although the Liberal Party assimilated these events to its own struggle for national power, General George’s signature on a petition addressed to the US asking for assistance in the establishment of an independent country suggests that his agenda was not the same as that of the Liberal Party. It was only after the US failed to respond that the Twenty-five Brave joined the Liberal forces.4

Creole attitudes towards the Sandino rebellion were less ambiguous. Many Cre-oles resented Sandino’s attacks on local US businesses, since they posed a danger

1. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History, p. 26.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 71.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 75.4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 78. General George died from an illness in 1927.

According to Gordon (1998:78), all hopes of Coast autonomy died with him.

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to their livelihoods. Furthermore, most of the funds for the Moravian Church’s welfare and educational services also came from the US.1 Thus, support for Sand-ino amongst the Creoles was virtually non-existent.2

The major points of this history of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast can be sum-marized as follows. Before the Reincorporación, the dominant ethnic and indige-nous groups on the Mosquitia were firstly the Miskitu and then, with the ascendance of US imperialism, Creoles. Mestizos remained in the minority well into the twentieth century. In contrast to Spanish colonialism, which was based on the coercive imposition of direct rule and domination, Anglo-American impe-rialism managed to dominate through gaining active consent for its rule.3 Indeed, Anglo-American culture, industry, and institutions were empowering, helping to create distinctive group identities and assisting in the organization, arming and economic viability necessary to resist the colonizing aspirations of mestizos from the Pacific. Consequently, when Costeños wished to distance themselves from Spaniard Nicaraguans, they tended to emphasize their Anglo-American affinities. Anglo-American affinities and ethnic militancy were mutually rein-forcing. Whenever the Spaniard national state became too overbearing and threatened the integrity of those institutions established by the British and US imperialism, Costeños reacted by asserting militantly their affinities towards these institutions and the Anglo world in general.

The adoption of Anglo culture had its contradictory aspects however. Whilst granting Creoles a sense of empowerment vis-à-vis other groups, the deeply racist sentiments of that culture, particularly towards the perceived Afri-can-ness of Creoles, was also a source of subjugation, since it simultaneously affirmed their inferiority in relation to white colonists who saw them as incapa-ble of governing themselves. Miskitu and Creoles were used as imperial interme-diaries, a position from which they derived political, cultural, military and economic advantages. Yet British and North American imperialism always refused to support the idea of their self-government. However contradictory, these affinities towards Anglo culture offered the only channel of resistance. After the short-lived military attempts to maintain their autonomy in 1894, Costeños expressed their resistance by drawing closer to Anglo-American insti-tutions. This is what both Gordon (1998) and Hale (1994) describe as the politi-cal common sense of the Miskitu and Creoles, an issue which forms the central focus of their respective studies. Despite its contradictions, the development of

1. Freeland, J. (1998) A Special Place in History p. 27. During World War I the headquarters of the Moravian Church moved from Germany to North America.

2. Interview with Hugo Sujo, Bluefields, 19 April 1999. 3. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity in Nicaragua: Capitalist Modernization and Revolu-

tionary Change on the Atlantic Coast (Boulder, Lynne-Reinner), p. 14.

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this common sense resulted from a negotiation of the political reality facing Costeños, and should be seen to represent an act of resistance rather than acqui-escence.1 Costeños, then, were not hapless or politically inert, as is often put for-ward in mestizo histories, but active political subjects, carefully negotiating a hostile political reality and playing the game of politics at every turn, first with the British, then with the North Americans and finally with the Nicaraguans. When the circumstances arose, this cultural resistance could be translated into violent military resistance, as illustrated by Creole rebellions throughout 1894, Miskitu support for Sandino and the military exploits of General George and his Twenty-five Brave.

The consequences of Anglo affinities amongst Costeños over the long term was to instill a deep mistrust concerning their status as national subjects in mes-tizo discourses, a common theme from Zelaya to the Sandinistas. Under the Reincorporación/Overthrow, those who possessed affinities towards the Anglo-American world were seen as of an ambiguous national status, having a culture more akin to the English-speaking black diaspora of the Caribbean and US than Spanish-speaking Nicaraguans. The Creoles’ double foreignness of Anglo and African cultures left this group in particular to occupy the space of the Other within mestizo nationalist discourses.2 Breaking the bases which sustained Costeños’ affinities towards Anglo-American culture would remove the main barrier to the integration of the ethnic and indigenous groups of the region into the Nicaraguan nation. It was this assumption which led to Zelaya’s policies to mestizo-ize education, public administration and politics, and replace Creoles with mestizos as local economic actors. Mestizoization was equated with nationalization; only mestizos could be national subjects who possessed the level of civilization to bear the liberal political project embodied by the Nicara-guan state. Being made to feel like outsiders in their own land and unable to pre-vent the undermining of their own culture, institutions and economic position, Costeños were subjected to a condition of internal colonialism exercised by the national state.

1. An example of this “common sense” was given to me in an interview with Dr Roberto Hodgson, former president of the Progressive Costeño Organization (OPROCO): “In the sixteenth and seventeenth-century, when you had this trouble with the British and Spanish Empire, we were part of the sandwich. At first, the English were better here on the Atlantic Coast. The Spanish Empire was more dominant, more abusive you would say. They were more or less the same but you make the best of it. The treat-ment was more humane with the English than the Spanish. The English were about ‘You use the guy for my purpose.’ Not as a friend and not as an enemy.” Interview with Dr Roberto Hodgson, Bluefields, 15 April 1999.

2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 121.

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3. MESTIZO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SOMOZA PERIOD

With the ending of the Sandino rebellion and the consolidation of the Somocista dictatorship, the Coast experienced a period of political acquiescence. Gordon (1998) attributes this to the withdrawal of the older generation of Costeños from public life and the emergence of a new generation that accepted their Nicaraguan nationality as an established fact.1 Somoza’s Nationalist Liberal Party managed to garner some consent from Creoles with an appeal to liberal values which coincided with some of their own values, especially those of prop-erty rights and laissez-faire economics. Somocismo’s anti-communism also coin-cided with the strong anti-communist teachings of the Moravian Church. The populism and patronage which became a hallmark of Somocista rule elsewhere in the country was also applied to the Atlantic Coast, and generally met with the same degree of success. During his visits to the Coast, Somoza addressed crowds in English and, to a lesser extent, in Miskitu. A number of Miskitu and Creoles were recruited into the National Guard, finding it offered an avenue of secure and profitable employment.2 Indeed, Somocismo’s status as an intermediary of US imperialism reduced the potential for conflict between the national Nicara-guan state and Costeños. The interests of the three main political and economic forces on the Coast, the Nicaraguan state, the remaining US companies, and the Moravian Church, seemed to coincide and reduce the possibilities for political discontent. One Bluefileño, who had been a member of the Social Christian Party and had joined the Sandinistas after 1979, summed up his own memories of the Somozas on the Coast: “the best government we ever had was Anastasio Somoza. He used to give you work, as long as you didn’t dabble in politics.”3

The Somoza period was characterized by attempts to modernize the Coast’s economy and infrastructure which were largely the result of new demand stimu-lated by the US war effort and post-war anti-communist development programs, such as the Alliance for Progress. The spirit of this modernization process remained integrationist, with the Atlantic Coast being viewed as a potential market for goods from the Pacific and as a region of natural abundance whose exploitation would benefit the whole nation.4 State agencies, such as the Insti-tute for National Development and the Commission for the Development of the Atlantic Coast, were established to promote the colonization of new lands, infra-structural projects and the preservation of natural resources. Few projects ever

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 82.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 83.3. Interview with Eduardo Argüello, Bluefields, 15 April 1999. Argüello was to become the

first president of the Autonomy Assembly in the South Atlantic Region. 4. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p. 61.

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got off the ground, yet, as Vilas (1989) points out, these efforts testify to the modernizing intent of the Somocista state towards the Coast.1 The major obsta-cle to the success of state-sponsored modernization projects appears to have been the patrimonial practices of the Somocista state itself. The state’s develop-ment initiatives were never permitted to impede the pursuit of personal enrich-ment by the Somocista clique, whose acquisitiveness of land and resources from the Coast was to become rapacious.2

The Somoza period did not differ in terms of its attitudes towards Costeños. The Miskitu, for example, were seen as stereotypically Indian, both backward and indolent.3 Despite this negative characterization, the Miskitu’s pre-Colombian status provided the raw material from which they could emerge as Nicaraguans. Unlike the Creoles, as an indigenous group, the Miskitu had always been there and, at least within the myth-making nationalist discourses of Nicaragua’s mestizos, shared some kind of historical heritage with the nation. Having their origins in Nicaraguan, or Central American, territory, assimilation into national life was seen as an unproblematic process premised on greater con-tact with mestizo culture. The process would be much the same as had occurred with the Indians of western Nicaragua.4

The position of Creoles in Somocista nationalist discourses was more prob-lematic. Their blackness visibly associated them with Africa, an historical heri-tage that was not shared with mestizos and which most mestizos viewed with contempt. There was nothing for mestizo nationalist discourses to draw upon within Creole history which could be used to give them a place within the nation. Imagining the nation had always entailed an identification with white European civilization, with Indian identity being acknowledged, although kept at a safe historical distance. Blackness had never been a part of this imagining process: “Persons of African descent as opposed to Amerindians stood as radi-cally other, non-nationals to the Nicaraguan racial and cultural identity.”5 Gor-don (1998) suggests that, as a consequence of the mestizo tendency to use race rather than culture as the defining criteria of Creole subjectivity, they remained largely invisible in Somocista visions of the Atlantic Coast.6

Similar constructions can be found in the counter-hegemonic project of the anti-Somocista bourgeois opposition. Under the leadership of Pedro Chamorro, the Conservatives began to resist the strategy of co-option into the Somocista system, whilst, at the same time, developing an alternative political project

1. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p. 70.2. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p. 79.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 124.4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 125.5. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 126.6. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 126.

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based around a liberal democratic polity and market economy around which sec-tors of Nicaraguan society could be won. The Conservatives took care to repre-sent Costeños by visiting the Atlantic Coast and publishing a series of articles on Costeños in La Prensa. As with existing mestizo nationalist discourses, the Con-servative opposition characterized the region’s tenuous integration into national life as a major problem, whilst also characterizing it as being abundant in natural resources. However, the cultural Otherness of Costeños is down-played as a causal factor of this lack of integration by emphasizing the negative impact of the Somocista state.1 According to Gordon (1998), the attribution of problems such as underdevelopment to the ineptitude of the Nicaraguan state rather than the Costeños themselves represents a new focus within mestizo nationalist dis-courses.2 The causes of problems facing both mestizos and Costeños were per-ceived to have been one and the same: Somocismo. In this way, an attempt was made to win Costeño political sympathies towards the Conservative’s program and involve them in national political struggles.

Regarding the Miskitu, Pedro Chamorro portrayed them in the pages of La Prensa as having their origins in tribes which had migrated eastwards from the Pacific, suggesting some historical relationship to the rest of the country. Not only does this connect the Miskitu to the rest of the nation, it also reduces the problematic presence of African-ness amongst the Miskitu due to miscegena-tion. Being depicted as indigenous Indians who had maintained their language and tribal unity, they were essentially Nicaraguan despite such miscegenation.3

But Pedro Chamorro went much further. Writing in La Prensa in 1970, he praised their tenacious resistance against colonization as a symbol of patriotism. In his attempts to represent the Miskitu as part of the Nicaraguan nation, Chamorro presented them in the light of a Rousseauian noble savage, maintaining a culture, language and social structure in the face of colonizing pressures. In a similar vain to Sandino’s appeal in his Manifiesto de julio (1927), the anti-Somocista bourgeois opposition depicted the Nicaraguan nation as Indo-Hispanic, one which pro-vided a space in the nation’s past for the Miskitu.4 Their inclusion in contempo-rary Nicaragua, however, depended on becoming mestizo. On this point, Chamorro’s image of the Miskitu did not radically differ from that of Somocismo.

Despite the problems which Creole racial characteristics presented to mes-tizo visions of the nation, Creoles did become targets in the counter-hegemonic discourses of the anti-Somocista Conservative opposition. Since black African


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slaves had arrived during the initial phase of colonial subjection, blackness was always present in the process of mestizoization. Creoles were portrayed as hav-ing historical connections equal, in terms of historical time, to those of Europe-ans. Miscegenation with Spaniards and mestizos gradually led to the Blanqueamiento (Whitening) of the population in the Pacific. Efforts were made to identify mestizo cultural practices which had their origins in the long-since disappeared African slave populations of the Pacific. The identification with African culture, however flimsy, of pasturage systems and music was subse-quently used to provide a number of common links between Atlantic Coast Cre-oles, whose African-ness remained pronounced, and the rest of the Nicaraguan population which had lost all racial traces of African-ness.1 Creole’s association with Anglo culture and institutions did pose some problems in this linking of Creoles to Nicaragua. Articles in La Prensa overcame this obstacle by suggesting that any association with Anglo culture was not deeply held at all. Contact with mestizo civilization would easily reverse such affinities.2 Nevertheless, despite these efforts, Creoles’ African and Anglo heritage continued to cause problems in their nationalization. Their non-indigenous status made them more akin to an ethnic minority present within the nation. Although the Conservative opposi-tion had more to say about the Creoles than the Somocistas had done, Creoles remained relatively marginal in opposition representations of Costeños.3

The FSLN’s view towards the Atlantic Coast before 1979 can be found in its Historic Program of the FSLN (1969). Despite the FSLN’s repetition of established Mestizo characterizations of the Atlantic Coast as undeveloped and in need of integration, it also developed a distinct position insofar as it attributed this sta-tus to US imperialism. By stating the intention to “encourage the flourishing of the region’s local cultural values,” the document both acknowledges and legiti-mizes the continued existence of the distinct cultures of the region. However, the Historic Program’s qualification that only those cultures which are local and original would be encouraged to flourish stands in an ambiguous relation to Costeños’ affinities towards cultural forms and institutions introduced during the Anglo-American presence on the Coast.4 Defining the criteria of legitimate culture through reference to the idea of its perceived autochthonous status pre-sents a rigid understanding of culture in general which fails to acknowledge the tendency for historical evolution and transformation. Finally, there is a direct condemnation of racism against Indians and Creoles, the latter being radicalized


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as blacks. This anti-racist stance was generally absent from other mestizo visions of the Atlantic Coast.

Although Gordon (1998) correctly points out that the Historic Program is the only official FSLN party document which makes sustained reference to the Atlantic Coast before 1979, a number of other sources exist which disclose the Sandinistas’ vision of Costeños. Positive references towards indigenous groups in Sandinista texts usually referred to descendants of Pacific Indian tribes such as those found in the barrios of Monimbó in Masaya and Subtiava in León, yet these had largely assimilated to mestizo culture.1 Atlantic Coast Indians, how-ever, either remained invisible or were characterized as essentially backwards and as objects of imperial powers. In order to gain a firm understanding of Sand-inista approaches to the Atlantic Coast and its inhabitants, the discussion will now turn to the works of three leading figures within the Sandinista movement: the future Minister of Defense Humberto Ortega, the future Minister of Culture Ernesto Cardenal and the future Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform Jaime Wheelock.

In relation to the present discussion, Humberto Ortega’s history of the anti-imperialist struggle in Nicaragua 50 años de lucha sandinista (undated) is interest-ing in the sense that it fails to acknowledge the role of Costeños in Sandino’s army. Whilst the presence of two Sandinista columns on the Atlantic Coast is acknowledged, the presence of Miskitu Indians in these columns remains com-pletely unacknowledged. Although Ortega uses the term Creole to describe those who joined the National Guard, the context in which he uses this term suggests that he is referring to those of Spanish-Indian decent and not the Afro/Anglo/Amerindians of the Atlantic Coast.2 In contrast, the role of peasants, workers, students and intellectuals as the historical bearers of the anti-imperial-ist struggle remains highly visible throughout Ortega’s work. Whilst there is no doubt that Miskitu did participate in Sandino’s army, their presence is never mentioned. This silence suggests that the idea of Indian participation in national political struggles remains problematic for Ortega. Peasants, workers, students and intellectuals were part of the nation, being enmeshed in modern economic and political relations through their exploitation by capitalism, imperialism and the oligarchic state. Indians stood outside these relations and thus remained marginal to any struggles between the “exploited and exploiters” which arose from them. For Ortega, Sandinistas were workers and peasants whose subjectiv-

1. See for example Cabezas, O. (1985) The Fire From The Mountain: The Making of a SandinistaTranslated by K. Weaver (London, Jonathan Cape).

2. Ortega describes those Nicaraguans who joined the National Guard as “tropas criollas.” Ortega, H. (Undated) 50 años de lucha sandinista (Managua, Secretaria Nacional de Propaganda Y Educación Política FSLN), p. 67.

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ities bound them to the struggle against oppression. Indian subjectivities, being bound up with non-national, tribal and pre-modern structures, remained out-side the exploitative relations which formed the basis of Nicaraguans’ anti-impe-rialist political identity. Indians, it seems, could never be Sandinistas.

The Nicaraguan Canto (1972) by Ernesto Cardenal forms a eulogy to Nicara-gua’s anti-imperialist history in poetic form. Within this work, two predomi-nant themes are present in Cardenal’s representation of the Atlantic Coast and the indigenous groups who inhabit it: that of an idyllic Arcadian existence full of natural abundance, and the underdevelopment of both people and Coast by US imperialism. The Arcadian status of the Miskitu and Sumu, naked, living in huts and singing love songs in native languages, shows them in a state of nature where no discernible civilization is present. Consequently, they remain inert, unconscious, passive objects who offer no resistance in the face of the exploita-tion of US imperialism. Their status as passive objects also makes them unwit-ting accomplices in their own demise: “If he is a Sumo or Miskito Indian he goes home, infects his village. Whole villages have been wiped out this way.”1 They are not so much unwilling as incapable of resistance.

This disparaging representation continues in Cardenal’s Mosquito Kingdom(1972). The idea of any kind of political structure belonging to the Miskitu is dis-missed. The Kingdom is a British invention, not only in terms of its dependence on British ceremony and authority but because the Miskitu’s primitive, uncivi-lized nature precludes any possibility of indigenous institutions. Not only is the King portrayed as a drunk, along with the rest of the Miskitu, he is also said to have been illiterate: ‘ “X his mark” (because the sovereign couldn’t sign)’.2

Indeed, Cardenal separates the Miskitu from Sandino’s struggle by explicitly associating that struggle with peasants by making a number of adjacent asym-metrical representations, of Miskitu living an Arcadian life, the passive victims of US imperialist exploitation, in contrast to industrious peasants “running great co-operatives.”3 There is no instance in the two poetic works discussed, as well as in Cardenal’s epic work Zero Hour (1956), which has not been included here, of Costeños being capable of bearing any political project of their own.

Cardenal’s treatment of the Miskitu is surprising, given the nature of his primitivist art and the Indian revivalist policies, known as Indigenismo, that he pursued as Minister for Culture. The heroic Rousseauian noble savage, repre-sented by the eternal struggle against oppression waged by the now-assimilated Indians of the Pacific, provided the raw material on which to base a contempo-

1. Cardenal, E. “Nicaraguan Canto” (1972) in Walsh, D. (ed.) (1980) Ernesto Cardenal: Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems (New York, New Directions Books), p. 28.

2. Walsh, D. (1980) Ernesto Cardenal: Zero Hour, p. 39.3. Walsh, D. (1980) Ernesto Cardenal: Zero Hour, p. 26.

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rary anti-imperialist, revolutionary subject. No such veneration was made of the Indians of the Atlantic Coast. Whilst Creoles are completely absent from Carde-nal’s works, Sumu and Miskitu were seen as being in a state of nature, lacking culture and civilization, whose child-like existence rendered them passive objects. Just as in the text by Humberto Ortega, Cardenal perceived only nation-alized subjects, such as campesinos, as being in possession of any kind of politi-cal agency.

The work of Jaime Wheelock presents a more detailed historical analysis of the Atlantic Coast and Costeños. His work essentially reinforces the dominant myth concerning the demise of Indian populations with the emergence of Nica-ragua as a national entity. As a Marxist, however, his account rejects the notion that this process was one of gradual assimilation and emphasizes the violent conflict which this process entailed. The history of the emergence of the mestizo population is a history of struggle, rebellion and resistance which began with the arrival of the Spanish and ended with the War of the Indians (1881) in Mata-galpa.

His most developed ideas on the struggles of indigenous Indians can be found in his work Raíces indígenas de la lucha anti-colonialista en Nicaragua: de Gil González a Joaquín Zavala 1523 a 1881 (1974). Although its main focus remains the Spanish conquest of Indian tribes found in the Pacific region of Nicaragua, chap-ter two specifically addresses the Atlantic Coast. Wheelock describes the area as the “eastern plain” or “eastern region” rather than the more conventional descriptions of the Atlantic Coast or Mosquitia. Furthermore, unlike most other texts, Wheelock’s discussion tends to downplay the role played by the Miskitu in resisting Spanish colonialism by attributing such resistance to the general cat-egory of Caribs.1 They had their provenance in various tribal branches: Sumu, Wawas, Tonglas, Toakas, and Rama, and existed in a state of the “most primitive civilization.”2 The arrival of English, Dutch and French pirates signaled the beginnings of a greater differentiation amongst these tribes as a consequence of the growing conflict with the Spanish which the trading and contraband activi-ties of these pirates brought about. Assistance from these pirates transformed what had largely been defensive resistance by the Caribs against Spanish incur-sions into offensive actions against nearby Spanish settlements.3

This process was also augmented by the arrival of other foreign actors in the form of “negro slaves,” who, Wheelock suggests came from other places in the Caribbean, or Antilles, rather than directly from Africa. For Wheelock, miscege-

1. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas de la lucha anti-colonialista en Nicaragua: de Gil González a Joaquín Zavala 1523 a 1881 (Managua, Editorial Nueva Nicaragua), p. 39.

2. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas, p. 39.3. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas, p. 46.

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nation amongst Indians, negroes, and whites led to the formation of “new peo-ples equally hostile to the Spanish,” whom he refers to as “Zambos,” whom he clearly distinguishes from the more indigenous Caribs.1 Zambos were to become the dominant tribe in the region from the seventeenth century onwards and were “politically known as Mosquitos,” who later “came to constitute a kind of nation governed by a type of parliamentary monarchy, recognized and protected by the English.”2 The Mosquitos’ alliance with the Caribs, their knowledge of the terrain and English military assistance made them invincible for almost two hundred years, turning the Mosquito Coast into a virtual independent nation.3

This separation and the institutions it gave rise to, as well as recurrent military conflict with the Spanish, were the natural outcome of the imperialist competi-tion between Spanish and English colonialism, which retarded development on the Atlantic littoral and created “noticeably different” conditions of existence in terms of their harshness for the majority of negroes, Zambos, Mulattos and Car-ibs.4

Wheelock’s work establishes a common thread that runs through Sandini-sta texts on the Mosquitia. Imperialism played a central role in creating divisions between western and eastern Nicaragua. In particular, the English were respon-sible for playing on existing hostilities amongst local tribes against the Spanish. According to Wheelock, English intervention in the region radically changed the nature and extent of this hostility. The Caribs had a history of self-defense against Spanish colonizing expeditions, yet Carib and Zambo offensives against major Spanish settlements such as El Castillo and San Carlos only occurred after the arrival of the English and were designed to further English imperialist inter-ests in the region. Indeed, as already noted, English imperialism radically changed the ethnic composition of the region by creating “new peoples,” who, unlike the Caribs or any other Indian tribes before them, came to form a separate nation with their own political institutions. Disparate, unorganized resistance against Spanish colonialism by various tribes was transformed into organized assaults against Spanish towns and the unification of tribes into a single people with political institutions and a nascent national consciousness. In this process,

1. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas p. 47. Zambo refers to one of two sub-groups which make up the Miskitu, the other being the Tawira (heavy hair). The Zambos were the politically dominant of the two, living in Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon and had more contact with the British. The Miskitu Kings tended to be drawn from the Zambos. See Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp. 34, 36.

2. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas p. 47. There is some inconsistency in Wheelock’s treatment of the relationship between Zambos and Mosquitos. In the above quote he seems to present them as one and the same, yet at other times he chooses to treat the two as distinct.

3. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas, pp. 61-62.4. Wheelock, J. (1985) Raíces indígenas, pp. 67-68.

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the English had acted as the catalyst. Whilst these tribes had successfully resisted the Spanish, they had also simultaneously failed to develop beyond the “most primitive civilization.” Without the English, these tribes had proven inca-pable of any conscious political activity. As such, it is very difficult to portray them as political subjects in their own right. This view is endorsed by the con-tradictory consequences which the Mosquitos’ active support for English impe-rialism had. The English may have fostered the idea of nationhood and independence, yet this was simply an illusion which enabled English merchants to exploit the region more effectively, rendering the living conditions of the Indi-ans extremely difficult. What could symbolize the subjected status of the Mos-quitos more clearly than their support for the separatist project of a foreign patron whose exploitative practices actively underdeveloped the region and left the Indians in a more primitive situation than in other parts of Nicaragua?

For Wheelock, as with Ortega and Cardenal, the inhabitants of what he refers to as eastern Nicaragua were subjected but not subjects, incapable of con-tributing to the formation of an anti-imperialist, revolutionary subject which Wheelock, amongst other Sandinistas, believed to have been the true political identity of the Nicaragua nation. Nationalization would rid these Indians of the last vestiges of imperialist subjection by destroying the illusion of Mosquito nationhood, invented by the English to serve their imperialist interests. Trans-formation into national Nicaraguans would allow them to become the bearers of their own true interests rather than the interests of others, particularly non-national imperialist actors.

4. COSTEÑO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SOMOZA PERIOD

Recent studies have attempted to challenge mestizo characterizations of Costeños by acknowledging the existence of various civic organizations, clubs and societies which operated on the Coast during the pre-revolutionary era. Although most were not directly concerned with promoting a distinct Costeño political agenda, many did engage in political discussions and some even became the vehicle through which to criticize the Somocista state. In the case of the Mis-kitu, the major organization was the Alliance for the Progress of the Miskitu and Sumu (ALPROMISU). In the case of the Creoles, societies such as the Progres-sive Costeño Organization (OPROCO) and the Southern Indigenous Creole Community (SICC) became important sites for the promotion of Creole political ideas. A smaller current of anti-imperialist ideas also existed amongst the Cre-oles of Bluefields, which Gordon (1999) suggests provided the basis for the emer-gence of what he referred to as the Black Sandinistas.

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Although the post-war era saw growing economic opportunities on the coast, Miskitu communities found themselves ill-disposed to take advantage of these new economic opportunities. Whilst the Miskitu produced marketable goods, the marketing, transport and trading of these goods was in the hands of mestizo and Chinese merchants who exploited their strategic position in the commercial chain by buying Miskitu produce at low prices. Resentment at this situation led to efforts on the part of the Miskitu to establish the first trading and marketing co-operative, the Association of Farm Clubs on the Coco River (ACARIC) in 1967.1 ACARIC disbanded in 1972 and was succeeded by ALPROMISU in 1973. ALPROMISU worked closely with the Somocista state from the beginning.2 In what was an unusual step at the time for Nicaragua’s Indian organizations, its leadership also established contact with international Indianist or Fourth World organizations.

Many of these initiatives had been assisted by Capuchin priests and Mora-vian pastors. Reforms in the Moravian Church led to the nativization of its lay pastors, most of whom had previously been North Americans. The growing influence of liberation theology which a number of pastors had encountered dur-ing training at the Seminario Bíblico Latinoamericano in Costa Rica encouraged them to depart from the traditional non-political stance of the Moravian Church and become involved in the socio-economic issues affecting the well-being of their congregations.3 At least one author attributes the pressure towards nativ-ization, together with the establishment of new links to international Indianist movements, to increasing mestizoization and the disruption this caused to tradi-tional Miskitu community life.4 Both Hale (1994) and García (1996) suggest that capitalist modernization during the Somoza period led economically successful Miskitu to reject their Indian identity as they became more affluent. 5

As the modernizing tendencies of the Somocista state began to make their presence felt in the formation of ALPROMISU, the nativization of the Moravian Church and the assimilation of Fourth World, Indianist ideology can be seen as an attempt to re-value Miskitu Indian identity as an act of self-preservation.6

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction pp. 121,125. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p.70.

2. Vilas (1989:90) suggests that despite this accommodation with the regime, the National Guard placed ALPROMISU under constant surveillance.

3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 152.4. García, C. (1996) The Making of the Miskitu People of Nicaragua (Dept of Sociology, Uppsala

University), p. 100.5. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 124. Whereas Hale suggests upwardly

mobile Miskitu assimilated to either Creole or Mestizo culture, García’s emphasis on Mestizoization (she uses the term hispanization) is attributable to the fact that her study concentrates on Miskitu communities along the Coco River where Mestizos rather than Creoles form the majority of the non-Indian population.

6. García, C. (1996) The Making of the Miskitu People, p. 101.

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Within this re-valuation process, the maintenance of the Miskitu language was to become critical.1 The potential for these factors to act as the rudimentary foundations for more militant ethnic political demands amongst the Miskitu was not realized however. Somoza’s patronage networks managed to co-opt many of ALPROMISU’s leaders and, as the political-military situation in west-ern Nicaragua began to deteriorate, the ever-present threat of repression at the hands of the National Guard was not lost on these leaders.2 For Hale (1994), these factors were secondary in relation to Somoza’s ability to appeal to the Anglo-American affinities of the Miskitu. Somoza’s reputation as a friend and ally of successive US administrations, his frequent visits to the Coast, where he addressed crowds in English, and the confluence between his anti-communist rhetoric and Moravian teachings encouraged quiescence. The social and educa-tional activities of the Moravian Church were funded by donations from North American congregations, whilst memories of the US companies on the Coast were generally associated with opportunities for wage labor and access to high-status consumer goods. Accommodation with the regime was easier when it was seen to embody the same interests as a benevolent foreign actor associated with the good times. Indeed, these factors may also have made Somoza’s identity as a Spaniard ambiguous.3

The Somoza period also saw a growing political consciousness on the part of the Creoles. In a similar vain to García’s ideas on the impact of the nativization of the Moravian Church amongst the Miskitu, Gordon (1998) sees the increasing number of Creole pastors as rekindling “a sense of Creole pride and self-worth.”4

Creole pastors joined members of Bluefields’ professional classes, most of whom had been educated in the Moravian High School in Bluefields, in the creation of a number of social movements during the 1960s. The majority of these movements promoted a reformist agenda within the confines of the Somocista state. The main demand of these Creole organizations was the Creolization of Coastal institutions. The Progressive Costeño Organization (OPROCO), for example, was established in 1964 to lobby for greater Creole participation in local institu-tions and government agencies.5 It adopted a developmentalist program in tune with the modernizing character of the Somocista state and many OPROCO

1. García, C. (1996) The Making of the Miskitu People, pp. 101-102.2. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History, p 53. Vilas, C. (1988) State, Class & Ethnicity, p.

90.3. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 140.4. Gordon, E. Disparate Diasporas p. 155. Although Vilas (1989:92) claims that not much

information exists about the activities of OPROCO, or its successor organization SICC, Gordon’s use of the Bluefields’ weekly newspaper La Información and interview data collected from former members builds up a coherent picture of the activities and attitudes of these organization.

5. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp. 155-156.

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members maintained close links with Somoza’s PLN. Harmony between OPROCO and the Somocista state was not always constant however. According to Gordon (1998), the crisis caused by the earthquake in 1972 formed the back-ground to some of the most radical statements by OPROCO members being published in the Bluefields paper La Información, which criticized the regime for corruption and discrimination against Creoles.1

OPROCO began to decline in influence and popularity during the mid-1970s. Although Vilas (1989) exclusively attributes this to the perception that the organization had been co-opted by the Somocista state, Gordon suggests its decline was also due to the emergence of alternative ethnic and cultural agen-das.2 The work of Creole historian Donovan Brautigam Beer represented a new culturalist approach to understanding Creole-mestizo relations. Publishing a series of articles in both La Información and La Prensa, Brautigam Beer docu-mented the European, and especially English, cultural heritage of Creoles. According to Brautigam Beer, Creoles no longer belonged to any racial group because of generations of miscegenation. Using the term Costeños, rather than Creoles or Indians, he suggested that it was more appropriate to see culture as underpinning Costeño identity.3 Given the shared European provenance of mes-tizo Iberian culture and Creole Anglo culture, his work was designed to portray Creoles as equals to mestizos.4 The marginalization of Creoles was due to a mis-understanding on the part of mestizos, who saw Creole culture as being predom-inantly African in origin, something that was viewed with a large degree of disdain by mestizo society. The problem, then, was mestizo ethnocentrism and cultural chauvinism, rather than racism. Misapprehending Creole culture as African, and therefore primitive, led to a felt need on the part of mestizos to civi-lize the Coast, which resulted in the national state treating the region as an internal colony.5

Insofar as Brautigam Beer’s culturalist approach provides a legitimate space for Creoles within the nation, it did so by appealing to the same sentiments which Creoles had always appealed to when resisting mestizo oppression, their Anglo affinities.6 If Creoles were to overcome the marginalizing effects of mes-tizo ethnocentrism they would first have to identify themselves as Anglophiles, and then construct a legitimate space for Anglo culture within the nation. In

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 164.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 168. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p. 92.3. Gordon points out that, although Brautigam Beer’s work refers to Costeños in general,

its main focus were Creoles rather than Indians. Henceforth I shall use the term Creole.

4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 172.5. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 172. 6. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 174.

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pursuit of this objective, Brautigam Beer’s work portrayed Nicaragua as a hetero-geneous multicultural society rather than a homogeneous mestizo one. As this culturalist critique of mestizo-Creole relations was generally a reformist posi-tion which emphasized greater cultural awareness, it did not create major ten-sions with the Somocista state. Such ideas became more problematic under the Sandinista regime however, since the Anglo culture which formed the basis of Brautigam Beer’s claims for Creole equality had its origins in the system of impe-rialism and colonialism, something that was not easily reconcilable with the anti-imperialist nationalism of the Sandinistas. Creole affinities towards the cul-ture of imperialist powers were seen as incompatible with their status as Nicara-guans.

Although this culturalist approach broke new ground in explaining the ine-quality between mestizos and Creole, it tended to deny the role played by racism in this inequality. Indeed, the emphasis on culture rather than race only served to illustrate that the disdain which Anglo-American imperialism had shown towards black Africans had been internalized by Creoles themselves.1 Asserting Anglo cul-tural affinities not only led Creoles to deny their racial identity as blacks but also denied the harsh economic exploitation which Anglo-American imperialism had subjected them to. According to Gordon (1999) the emergence of the Black Power movement in the US and internationally recognized black politicians and sporting figures did go some way in revaluing Creoles’ black racial identity. Like the Sandin-istas, a number of Creoles began to see the legacy of Anglo-American imperialism as the major problem facing them. Creoles associated with this critique replaced the idea of internal colonialism with US imperialism in a new explanation of unequal relations between mestizos and Creoles.2 Gordon (1999) refers to those who adhered to this position as Black Sandinistas. It would be this group who took the political and military initiative in July 1979 by seizing power in Bluefields in the name of the revolution.3

A fourth trend in Creole political consciousness emerged during the late 1970s and can be associated with the organization calling itself the Southern Indigenous Creole Community (SICC). Established in 1978, SICC’s position combined the issues of socio-economic development, internal colonialism, and racism. For the members of SICC, Costeños were not marginalized owing to mestizo ethnocentrism, but exploited because of mestizo racism. Despite Brauti-gam Beer’s attempts to portray mestizo attitudes towards Costeños as non-racial, mestizo discourses did racialize Creole identity, deliberately associating them with low-status African culture. Racializing Creoles as blacks explicitly asserted their inferior uncivilized status, which justified the total disregard of Creole rights by a superior civilizing white, culturally Iberian, mestizo national state.4 This analysis led SICC to recover Creoles’ black identity. Yet, in the act of

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 177.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 177.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp. 177-178.

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re-valuing this black identity they associated it with the black Caribbean diaspora, whose English language and origins in Anglo imperialism made it cul-turally Anglo.1 As with previous trends in Creole thought, African culture was systematically downplayed. Yet, unlike organizations such as OPROCO, which tended to center its activities on lobbying the central government, SICC concen-trated on organizing grass-roots self-help groups amongst Creoles themselves. By organizing Caribbean carnivals and history lectures recounting the legacy of Anglo-American imperialism, slavery, General George and the activities of Mar-cus Garvey’s UNIA, and the study of various treaties which Nicaragua had made, and broken, with the British, black identity was revalued by simultaneously associating with the English-speaking black diaspora of the Caribbean. At times this association led some SICC members publicly to compare the Atlantic Coast to Belize, an independent Creole nation on the Central American isthmus. It was an analogy which fostered the implicit notion of the viability of separate nation-hood and one which alarmed both the Somocista state and Sandinista activists.2

The absence of major conflict on the Atlantic Coast as the Somocista regime crumbled has often been cited as evidence for the portrayal of Costeños as pas-sive subjects. However, this review of Costeño organizations shows an increas-ing tendency towards socio-economic and political activism as part of the general process of modernization initiated by the Somocista state. Indeed, as this modernization tended to augment the mestizoization of the Coast, such activ-ism was gradually transformed into ethnic/racial consciousness. The dictator’s ability to convincingly occupy a position within the cultural worldview of Costeños, particularly in the form of his anticommunist rhetoric and close rela-tions with the US, prevented this process from reaching the point of militant mobilization. In this context, the assertion of Anglo-American affinities on the part of Costeños as a sign of their opposition to encroachments by the Spanish national state became nonsensical. With the exception perhaps of the Black San-dinistas, Costeños held a similar anti-communist, pro-US stance to that of the dictatorship. Quiescence could not be sustained under the new circumstances which emerged from the victory of the FSLN in 1979. There could be no sharper contrast between Costeño accommodation with the Somocista regime and the militant ethnic/indigenous mobilization that characterized Costeño relations with the Sandinista regime.

4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 178.1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 180.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp. 181, 187-88.

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5. CONCLUSION

A common thread can be identified in all mestizo nationalist discourses on the Atlantic Coast that has cast Costeños as politically inert and uncivilized subjects. The solution to this perceived problem has universally been one of greater integration into the rest of the nation. Such integration, by implication, also signified an assimilation of Costeños to mestizo culture. Although the Sand-inista position contained a radical class and anti-imperialist dimension, the San-dinistas did not essentially challenge the myth of mestizoization which had been an inherent feature of Nicaraguan nationalist discourses since the formal cre-ation of Nicaragua. The concept of Anglo cultural affinities developed by Hale and Gordon has provided the basis for more recent accounts to challenge many of the assumptions made by mestizo Nicaraguans regarding Costeños, especially their supposed political passivity. The positive historical memories of Anglo-American colonialism on the Coast explain Costeños’ general acquiescence towards the Somocista dictatorship. However, the concept of Anglo affinities also provides a very powerful analytical tool for a thoroughgoing explanation of why Costeño acquiescence towards the Nicaraguan state during the Somozaperiod was transformed into violent resistance against the Nicaraguan state dur-ing the Sandinista period, a subject that forms the theme of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6. FROM ACQUIESCENCE TO ETHNIC MILITANCY: COSTEÑO RESPONSES TO SANDINISTA ANTI-IMPERIALIST NATIONALISM

The anti-imperialist nationalism of the FSLN was to mark a significant shift from all previous forms of nationalism that had been sponsored by the Nicara-guan state. Being unaware of Costeño’s positive historical experience of Anglo-American imperialism, Sandinista nationalism unwittingly confronted deep-seated affinities that the region’s population held towards the Anglo-American world. The anti-imperialist discourses utilized by the revolutionary government to unite Nicaragua’s mestizos behind a common historical and cultural identity became a decisive factor in the alienation of Costeños from the revolution, and in, some cases, from the Nicaraguan nation itself. Here lay the foundations of the inherent enigma posed by the Costeños for nation-building projects in general and the Sandinista nation-building project in particular. Costeños bore non-national, diasporic and Anglo subjectivities, which were seen as antithetical to the anti-imperialist national visions of mestizo Sandinistas. This was clearly illustrated during the Literacy Project in Languages (1981). The Atlantic Coast’s very different encounter with imperialism, its isolation from mestizo culture, the low level of revolutionary struggle which took place in the region and the absence of Sandinista mass organizations made it impossible for the government to deploy the same implementation strategies for the Literacy Project as had been the case with the Crusade.

The sense of failure that has generally been attributed to the Literacy Projectshould, however, be carefully qualified. Such judgments belonged to a predomi-nantly mestizo point of view. If the nation referred exclusively to the idea of Nic-aragua, then the Literacy Project failed to galvanize a sense of community in

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anonymity, whose membership was defined and limited by reference to this idea. In agreement with Hale (1994), where mestizo Sandinistas saw only failure, the Literacy Project nonetheless had significant political consequences for many Costeños. Building on Hale’s observations on Costeño’s Anglo cultural affinities, a detailed account of how the Literacy Project irrevocably alienated Costeños from the revolution can be gained. In particular, it was the Literacy Project which showed the Miskitu that, as Indians, they had no place within the visions of nationhood held by the Sandinistas.

1. MESTIZO VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD

The idea of integration formed the axis around which the policies of the new government towards the Atlantic Coast would evolve, since it was seen as co-terminus with the process of economic development. Such development would entail, above all, a transformation from the ethnic identities that had been the basis of inequalities on the Atlantic Coast to class identities. Backwardness was associated with ethnic consciousness, which was limited to one’s locality and kin community, whereas development was equated with a modern class con-sciousness, which was enmeshed in modern economic and political relations extending beyond those of locality and kinship to include the anonymous national community. These points are illustrated by the following review of three pieces of documentary evidence: the first being an interview with the new military commander for the North Atlantic zone; the second being a policy state-ment issued jointly by the FSLN/JGRN and the third being a paper presented by the head of the Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast (INNICA), which took responsibility for the government of the Atlantic Coast after 1979.

In an interview for Intercontinental Press (June 29th 1981) Manuel Calderon, FSLN military commander for Northern Zelaya, outlined his ideas on the rela-tionship between racial divisions on the Coast and Somocismo.1 According to Calderon a racial hierarchy, with North American whites at the top and Rama Indians at the bottom, had been fostered by Somoza as a tactic of divide and rule. The importance of race was based on the nature of the enclave economic activi-ties of US companies in the region, which simply extracted natural resources and exported them to the US, precluding any internal development at all.2 Thus,

1. Calderon, M. “We Have The Job of Forging a Class Consciousness” in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution and Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), pp. 142-152.

2. Calderon, M. (1983) We Have The Job of Forging a Class Consciousness, p. 143.

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Chapter 6. From Acquiescence to Ethnic Militancy: Costeño Responses to Sandinista Anti-

the enclave industries did not provide the development necessary for a working class to emerge. Given the dominance of ethnicity over class, Calderon suggests that the population remained completely unorganized.1 Although the existence of ALPROMISU is acknowledged, its role as a center of resistance is dismissed, since it is presented as having been bought off by Somoza. The problems which the revolution was encountering on the Atlantic Coast were compounded by this racial consciousness. Racial consciousness made it impossible for the local population to understand why the General Director of MISURASATA, Stead-man Fagoth, had been arrested.2 As the Sandinistas saw it, Fagoth had manipu-lated this Indian mass organization to take an anti-government stance, an objective which was easy to achieve, given the ignorance of the people.3 In a con-cluding statement, Calderon is unequivocal about the urgent task of replacing racial consciousness, which is the source of division and isolation, with that of class consciousness, a transformation seen to be intimately linked with the pro-cess of material development.4

In response to the revolution’s deteriorating relations with the Miskitu, the FSLN/JGRN issued a policy statement entitled Declaración de principios de la revolu-ción popular sandinista sobre las comunidades indígenas de la costa atlántica. This docu-ment represented indigenous Indians as “exploited, oppressed and subjected to the rigors of brutal internal colonialism,” who have been deliberately confused by counter-revolutionary efforts to discredit the government.5 However, despite acknowledging the problem of internal colonialism, this document unequivo-cally restates the idea of Nicaragua as a single, unified entity.6 This does not pre-clude claims in relation to community lands which communities have traditionally inhabited and derived a living from, as stated in point five.7 Whilst point six acknowledges the rights of local people to benefit from the exploita-tion of local resources, it asserts the authority of the national government to make the final judgment on such matters. The document clearly identifies devel-opment as being key to the process of overcoming conditions of oppression, stat-ing: “The improvement of living conditions for the communities of the Atlantic Coast can only occur through the economic development of the region, and to this end we will promote every local and national project necessary for this

1. Calderon, M. (1983) We Have The Job of Forging a Class Consciousness, p. 145.2. MISURASATA was an Indian mass organization that stood for Miskitu, Sumu, Rama

and Sandinistas Together. However, although the organization was supposed to represent the Rama, no members of that group were present at this founding meeting.

3. Calderon, M. (1983) We Have The Job of Forging a Class Consciousness, p. 145.4. Calderon, M. (1983) We Have The Job of Forging a Class Consciousness, p. 147.5. FSLN/JGRN “Declaración de principios de la revolución popular sandinista sobre las

comunidades indígenas de la costa atlántica” in Nicaráuac (Oct 1982) No. 8, pp. 19-20.6. FSLN/JGRN (1982) Declaración de principios de la revolución, p. 19.7. FSLN/JGRN (1982) Declaración de principios de la revolución, p. 19.

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development.”1 As an attempt to heal some of the fissures that had developed by 1981, this declaration goes some way in acknowledging the rights of indigenous Indians. Yet it simultaneously sets strict parameters within the confines of a sin-gle Nicaraguan nation. Whilst Indians were acknowledged to have rights to own traditional communal land, they did not have the right to make territorial claims which threatened the territorial integrity of the nation.

The third piece of evidence is taken from a United Nations seminar in Man-agua in December 1981. In a paper entitled La amenaza imperialista y el problema indí-gena en Nicaragua, William Ramírez, an FSLN guerrilla commander who became minister of the Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast (INNICA), expressed similar sentiments to those of Manuel Calderon. Whilst he acknowledged the contribution of Europeans, Indians and Africans to the Nicaraguan nation, con-stant miscegenation had transformed Nicaraguans into mestizos, “The Nicara-guan people are a mestizo people, from both a racial and ethnic-cultural point of view.”2 Whilst Ramírez acknowledges the multicultural composition of Nicara-gua, he nevertheless portrays the nation as mestizo. Indeed, racial divisions are clearly equated to racism, something to be overcome through the integration and assimilation of all groups.3 Racial divisions, like class divisions, are seen as the consequences of imperialism, established both as a result of economic exploita-tion and as a means to facilitate the exploitation of indigenous peoples around the world.4 After independence, the continuation of exploitative class relations meant that ethnic and racial oppression also continued. Indeed, this structure was reinforced by US companies on the Atlantic Coast who imposed a system of apartheid on their plantations and in their mines. US imperialism favored whites over what he calls negroes; an apartheid from which Nicaragua’s oligarchy and the Somocistas, who were predominantly white, also benefited.

Costeño resistance to this system of apartheid depended on their integra-tion with the wider struggle against imperialism in general, as illustrated by Miskitu participation in Sandino’s army. Thus, whilst Ramírez acknowledges the role played by the Miskitu in Sandino’s army, he reinforces ideas concerning the need to assimilate Costeños into mestizo struggles as the only means by which they would gain a degree of political agency. Costeños’ ethnic and racial consciousness had to be replaced by the anti-imperialist national consciousness carried by mestizos in order to transform their state of political inertia into active political agency: “Actually it was only with Sandino that the Indians

1. FSLN/JGRN (1982) Declaración de principios de la revolución, p. 20.2. Ramírez, W. “La amenaza imperialista y el problema indígena en Nicaragua” in Nica-

ráuac (Oct 1982), No. 8, pp. 3-10.3. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 4.4. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 4.

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began to participate with mestizos in the liberation struggle of the Army for the Defense of National Sovereignty.”1

Since the war against Somoza was essentially an anti-imperialist one, the triumph of the FSLN signified the break up of those exploitative relations imposed by imperialism, and thus the ending of the basis of racial discrimination as well, “the elimination of the bases for the existence of social classes is, at the same time, the elimination of the bases of racism and ethnocentrism.”2 The anti-imperialist consciousness which developed with the revolution provided the basis for “the people to determine their own destiny.” However, such conscious-ness did not exist on the Atlantic Coast, since the revolutionary struggle had been absent from the area. It was this uneven development which the revolu-tionary government now sought to overcome, promoting “homogeneous devel-opment throughout the country which would definitively overcome the differences between the Atlantic Coast and the Pacific.”3 Costeños could play a part in this process but only through their integration into national politics. One example cited was the creation of MISURASATA, which gained a seat in the Council of State. But Ramírez pointed out that this organization had contradic-tory results, being critical in facilitating the Literacy Project in Languages for example, yet at the same time using this project to consolidate its power over the region. The general backwardness in the political consciousness of Costeños, increasing unemployment resulting from capital flight, and historical ethnocen-tric attitudes between the Atlantic and the Pacific, facilitated this process of manipulation. This culminated in demands for monopoly power to be exercised over the region by MISURASATA’s leadership, illustrated by their Plan of Action 1981. With MISURASATA being seen as vulnerable to imperialist manipulation, granting such demands could have jeopardized the revolution. These suspicions were validated when MISURASATA’s leadership subsequently joined counter-revolutionary forces in Honduras.

According to Ramírez, the revolution’s objective of abolishing class divi-sions had also created the conditions for cultural tolerance and the ending of racial discrimination. The major problem encountered in the pursuit of these objectives was the persistence of racist ideology, which he saw as a legacy of imperialism and underdevelopment. The answer to these problems then was development: “One of the principal means to combat racial discrimination, therefore, is economic development.”4 Due to a lack of political consciousness, the Miskitu were not capable of forming political positions of their own. Talk of

1. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 6.2. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 8.3. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 9.4. Ramírez, W. (1982) La amenaza imperialista, p. 8.

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autonomy, then, was seen as emanating from the machinations of imperialist powers and not the Miskitu. Given these assumptions, autonomy is seen as a smoke screen for the real intentions of its US mentors, who sought to divide the nation and thus undermine the revolution. Ramírez cannot distinguish between autonomy and separatism, a failure which appears to have been heavily influ-enced by his conception of the Miskitu as backwards.

Sandinista discourses after 1979 repeated the themes of backwardness and political inertia contained in works by Ortega, Cardenal and Wheelock. It should also be noted that discourses about the Atlantic Coast during the post-triumph period also reproduced the general silence towards Creoles which had existed previously. As illustrated by the documentary evidence outlined above, it was the status of the Miskitu which became the major preoccupation of the San-dinistas in relation to the Atlantic Coast. Despite the various organizations and cultural activities which both Creoles and Miskitu engaged in, this history of political activism remained invisible in the Sandinista vision of the Atlantic Coast. Calderon’s assumption that there had never been a political life on the Coast is clearly at odds with what has been noted previously concerning the for-mation of organizations such as OPROCO and SICC. Although ALPROMISU’s existence was acknowledged, it was dismissed as an organization concerned with welfare rather than political and economic matters. Instead of opposing Somocismo, it actually became complicit in imperialism’s exploitation of the region’s natural resources. There was certainly quiescence on the part of ALPROMISU, yet it would be wrong to attribute this to supposed backward-ness. Apart from Somocismo’s clientelism, which both mestizo and Costeño organizations were susceptible to, the positive memories amongst the Miskitu of the British and US presence on the coast was based on very real experiences of autonomy, dollar wages and high-status consumer goods, in contrast to the extermination of the indigenous peoples which was the hallmark of Iberian colo-nialism in the Pacific. If these historical factors are taken into account, the pres-ence of Anglo-American affinities amongst the Miskitu cannot be seen as a sign of ideological manipulation. Under these circumstances, Somocismo’s close association with the US made Costeño opposition to the dictatorship highly problematic. The failure of the Sandinistas to take adequate account of Costeño’s visions of themselves, their history and their relations with different forms of imperialism, led to an inability to move beyond long-established mes-tizo assumptions of backwardness and political inertia. Given these assump-tions, talk of autonomy was mistaken for a counter-revolutionary project which had its origins in Washington, whose ultimate goal was the separation of the Atlantic Coast from the rest of Nicaragua and the destruction of the revolution.

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2. CREOLE VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD

Despite the Sandinistas’ tendency to portray Costeños as politically passive, Costeños did engage in sporadic attacks against the crumbling Somocista regime. Bluefields became the center of Creole revolutionary activity, with young Creoles organizing discussion groups, committing acts of sabotage and estab-lishing contacts with the FSLN’s National Directorate in Costa Rica.1 In June 1979, a group led by Commander Abel (Dexter Hooker) attacked a fish-process-ing plant, taking supplies of food, money and arms up the Escondido River to Rama where they made contact with Commander Luis Carrión. Carrión desig-nated them the “legitimate vanguard group” in the area.2 However, the political situation was complicated by the bad relations which developed between Abel’s group and their mestizo counterparts in Rama. Furthermore, a delegation led by Moisés Arana arrived from Bluefields to dissuade Abel from returning owing to fears that this would result in an outbreak of violence. Ignoring Arana’s advice, Abel and his group returned to Bluefields on 18th July. The local National Guardgarrison surrendered to Abel without a fight. Abel’s group was then challenged by a group who were largely, though not exclusively, mestizos, who had taken over the Palacio (Town Hall). The Palacio group received the backing of an FSLN delegation from Chontales, which named an eight-person Junta. None of Abel’s group was on this list and he rejected its legitimacy. The Palacio group then contacted the FSLN leadership in Managua and informed it that Abel was promoting black power and racism.3 The revolution on the Atlantic Coast took on a racial/ethnic dimension almost from the beginning, as Creoles faced mesti-zos who drew their legitimacy from mestizo Sandinistas of western Nicaragua rather than the majority of Bluefileños.4

After a demonstration outside the Palacio degenerated into violent confron-tation and the eviction of the mestizo-dominated group from the Palacio itself, the FSLN in Managua sent troops to disarm Abel and assume political-military control. Although Sandinismo initially held some resonance with the cultural

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 209.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 212. According to George Howard, Mayor of

Corn Island, a similar situation arose on Corn Island. Young Creoles armed them-selves and took power in the name of the FSLN, yet they had few connections with the FSLN. This group robbed a number of wealthy islanders and gave the Sandinistas a bad name. Interview with George Howard, Corn Island, 26 April 1999.

3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp. 216-217.4. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, pp 217-218. According to Gordon (1998:220) there

was some kind of class/status dimension to this power struggle too. Many of the youths who joined Abel came from poor barrios and were seen as bad boys who smoked marijuana, listened to Reggae, wore dreds, and lacked the kind of education which would enable them to play a responsible role in public affairs.

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and racial thinking of Bluefields’ Creole community, the imposition of authority by mestizo Sandinistas and the concomitant loss of Creole political-military leadership appears to have broken what could be described as an organic link between Nicaragua’s Creoles and the revolution.

Early reactions towards the revolution amongst Creoles had generally been positive, however briefly. Creoles’ historical memory of the Overthrow in 1894 remains to this day one of a denial of the rights which they had enjoyed first under the British and then the North Americans. Abel’s group appear to have linked all the currents of Creole political thought which preceded the triumph: cultural pluralism, internal and external colonialism, and racial identity politics with the revolution’s overthrow of the Somocista state. With the dispersal of the Palacio group, Abel and his group of working-class Creoles seemed, for a time at least, to have realized what Gordon (1998) described as the Creole’s utopian vision of autonomy from mestizos.1 The failure to maintain this autonomy, and the fact that this failure was attributed to mestizo Sandinistas from the Pacific, led to a transformation of Creole attitudes towards the revolution which drew upon the same strategy of resistance against the mestizo national state invoked ever since the Overthrow; the assertion of Anglo-American affinities.

Although the increasing presence of the state on the Coast created many more job opportunities for Creoles, the revolution seemed to continue the his-toric practice of reserving the most senior state positions for Pacific mestizos. Thus, the new government appointed William Ramírez, a mestizo Sandinista commander who spoke only Spanish, as head of the INNICA. According to Gor-don (1998), most Creoles felt that this post should have been occupied by Com-mander Lumberto Campbell, a Creole from Bluefields.2 Management posts in fishing and public health were also monopolized by government-appointed mes-tizos, in some cases by removing Creoles from their existing posts.3 Deteriorat-ing relations between local Sandinista cadres and the Moravian Church led to the expulsion of the director of the Moravian High School in Bluefields on the suspicion of having been a Somocista informer. The fact that many of the teach-ers at the Moravian High School in Bluefields had been members of Somoza’s PLN raised suspicions about the political leanings of the education being pro-vided by this institution. Judging from most accounts, this High School appears to have been the pre-eminent, high-status institution of Creole society. Most Creole professionals attended this school and some went on to teach there. It

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 223.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 226.3. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 226. Carcache, D. “From Separatism to

Autonomy — Ten Years on the Atlantic Coast” in Envío (April 1989) Vol. 8, No. 93, p. 34.

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was responsible for the high rates of literacy that tended to exist amongst Cre-oles, allowing them to develop a sense of self-ascribed superiority towards less educated Indians and mestizos. This institution, more than any other, seems to have played a critical role in the formation of a self-conscious and relatively cohesive Creole group identity. More specifically, its services led to the forma-tion of a Creole intellectual block, something of which no other Costeño group could boast. Attacks against an institution so central to the intellectual, cultural, religious, and political life of Bluefields’ Creoles must have severely alienated them from the revolution, perhaps irreconcilably so.

The presence of Cuban teachers became the issue that was to ignite the sim-mering discontent. Added to the Sandinista’s affront to Creoles’ religious insti-tutions and economic status, the presence of Cubans and the more generalized policy of nationalizing ex-Somocista properties ran against the strong anti-com-munist sentiments contained in the teachings of the Moravian Church and of Anglo culture in general. In response to the flight of skilled personnel immedi-ately after the triumph, the new government sent Cuban doctors, teachers and technicians to the Coast. Fearing Cuban teachers were indoctrinating their chil-dren with anti-Christian, communist ideology and taking the jobs of local teach-ers, Creoles engaged in serious violent demonstrations in September 1980, which lasted for three days and were only ended with the arrival of the Internal Order Police from Managua.

The Reagan administration undoubtedly played a role in the forging of Cre-ole opposition by suggesting that the Sandinistas were attempting to establish a communist regime similar to those of Cuba and the Soviet Union. According to one Creole historian, the consumption of North American magazines and the “bombardment” of the region by radio stations such as the Voice of America meant an existing communication channel could be exploited by the CIA to propagate anti-Sandinista propaganda. This propaganda was endorsed by Mora-vian pastors, who repeated their characterization of the Sandinistas as “atheists who were going to put an end to their religion and their families… For them, it was practically a holy war.”1 Interviewing a member of the Palacio group in April 1999, I found that the themes of totalitarianism, communism and the presence of Cubans also featured strongly in his criticism of the revolution, factors which appear to have formed the basis for the interviewee’s own renunciation of the revolution.2

1. Interview with Hugo Sujo, Bluefields, 19 April 1999.2. Interview with William Wong, Bluefields 19 April 1999. Wong, a Mestizo of Chinese

descent, had been a member of the Palacio junta which was dispersed by Commander Abel. He went on to become a technical director in the Crusade on the Atlantic Coast.

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3. MISKITU VISIONS OF THE ATLANTIC COAST DURING THE SANDINISTA PERIOD

Very little is revealed in the existing literature or from interview data about military struggles between Miskitu communities and the Somocista state. To gain a sense of the Miskitu vision of the new regime, I will examine two docu-ments issued by the Miskitu-dominated mass organization MISURASATA: its founding statement General Directions (1980) and its Plan of Action 1981. The organi-zation had its origins in the efforts of Miskitu students attending university in western Nicaragua, including Steadman Fagoth, Hazel Lau and Brooklyn Rivera, who returned to the Coast after the triumph in order to revitalize ALPROMISU. The attempts to revitalize ALPROMISU were soon abandoned in favor of the establishment of a new organization, MISURASATA, a move adopted by a con-gress of community leaders in Puerto Cabezas in October 1979. Although the FSLN leadership initially wanted to integrate the Miskitu into national mass organizations, these Miskitu students persuaded the FSLN to endorse the cre-ation of a single Indian mass organization.

General Directions formed the first major statement of the new Indian organi-zation. What is perhaps most striking about this document is the way in which it attempts to realign Nicaragua’s indigenous peoples as natural allies of the San-dinistas. Not only does it condemn the exploitative activities of foreign conquer-ors but also blames “traitorous” liberal-conservative governments for Indians’ status as second-class citizens. Such criticism is especially stinging in relation to Somocismo, which was portrayed as having exploited and repressed the Mis-kitu.1 Furthermore, by disposition and custom, Nicaragua’s Indians are por-trayed as sharing the revolution’s nationalism, anti-imperialism and egalitarianism. The struggle for survival in the face of the marginalizing effects of colonialism, for example, has given the indigenous peoples “an inherent revolu-tionary vocation and a capacity to resist conquest and domination.”2

However, in contradiction to almost all Sandinista pronouncements on the issue, ethnic consciousness is presented as a viable basis for the formation of active political subjectivities. Indians, like mestizo campesinos and workers, were capable of becoming “the authors of our own destiny.”3 Indian conscious-ness, being shaped by the historic struggle against imperialism, constituted “a decisive power in the struggle against the many facets of imperialism.”4 The fact

1. MISURASATA “General Directions” in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution And Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), p. 50.

2. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 51.3. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 51.4. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 51.

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that they are indigenous is not judged to be a source of unconsciousness or polit-ical backwardness but qualifies them as quintessentially national subjects who, more than any other group, possess the nationalist and anti-imperialist political identity which was so central to the Sandinista vision of the Nicaraguan nation. This revolutionary potential is not restricted to the notions of nationalism and anti-imperialism, however. The traditional cultural and customary practices of Nicaragua’s indigenous peoples are presented as “useful in the task of building a more brotherly, human and egalitarian society,” mirroring the core values of the new regime, to create a classless society free from exploitation.1 It is on the basis of these shared values, as well as their shared history of exploitation, that MIS-URASATA represents indigenous peoples as analogous to those subjects who have occupied a central position in Sandinista discourses of revolution and liber-ation, the workers and the peasants; “the Revolution is for the workers and peas-ants. We belong to these broad groups; and so we believe that this Revolution will restore our rights and bring about the full and complete liberation of our peoples.”2

Although there appears to be much common ground, differences in under-standing concepts such as imperialism and egalitarianism clearly emerged which had their source in the ethnic, rather than class, world view of MISURASATA’s leadership. Unlike the Sandinista version, Indian notions of imperialism implied a critique not only of foreign domination and exploitation but also of internal colonialism practiced by the mestizo national state. Whilst US imperialism is identified as the primary source of exploitation and underdevelopment in the region, it is also juxtaposed with the notion of internal colonialism practiced by successive national governments.3

MISURASATA’s ideas on egalitarianism also held a potential for contradic-tion with the principles of the revolution, since they celebrated forms of commu-nal subsistence agriculture analogous to a classless primitive communism.4

However egalitarian the relations of production which this mode of production gave rise to, its non-developmental character clearly did not concur with the developmental objectives of the new regime. The contempt for “making a profit” expressed in the document, coupled with the prioritization of the production “of those goods necessary for our survival”5 suggests a disdain for marketable sur-pluses in general. The classless society which MISURASATA refers to, therefore,

1. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 52.2. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, pp. 58-59.3. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 51.4. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 52.5. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, p. 61.

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is one where ethnic differentiation matters more than class; a vision more in tune with a pre-class world rather than a post-class one.1

Thus, rather than dismissing ethnic consciousness as a source of backward-ness and political inertia, this document represents Nicaragua’s indigenous peo-ples as fully conscious subjects who can contribute to the revolutionary process in terms of consolidating the nation, fighting imperialism and establishing a society without exploitation. It does so, however, by attempting to reposition Indians in relation to the nation. Indians have suffered from the same imperialist exploitation as the workers and peasants and have engaged in a common strug-gle against it. This common heritage of exploitation and struggle affirms their identity as Nicaraguan. There remained a significant gulf, however, between the class-based rationale employed by the Sandinistas in the interpretation of these three objectives and the ethnic and customary rationale that informed MIS-URASATA’s position. There were clearly two very different, perhaps mutually exclusive, epistemes at work in interpreting the revolutionary project and the political subjectivities necessary to sustain it.

In December 1980 MISURASATA issued its Plan of Action 1981. This docu-ment signifies a perceptible shift in MISURASATA’s position that aroused the suspicions of state security forces over its separatist nature. Organizationally it planned to incorporate youth and women’s groups and promote the formation of a National Indigenous Confederation with Pacific Indians. It also called for the creation of a Council of Elders which would act much like a legislative body, efforts to promote education in indigenous languages, and the building of a Lan-guage Academy of the Atlantic Coast. More contentious were the demands relat-ing to the replacement of the INNICA by MISURASATA, the granting of an indigenous seat on the JGRN, and the replacement of all other mass organiza-tions by MISURASATA.2 It was felt that these measures would have effectively handed over Coastal government to MISURASATA. The question of land rights remained vague in this document. It was an issue “in the process of being legal-ized.”3 A map was under preparation and historic documents and titles were to be handed over to the government. To facilitate Indian land claims, the docu-ment suggested that an “intensive consciousness-raising campaign at the com-munity level” be initiated which would include mass demonstrations.4

The national state’s reaction to the Plan of Action 1981 was fuelled by rumor as much as the document itself. Two months after its publication, MISURASATA’s

1. MISURASATA (1983) General Directions, pp. 56-57.2. MISURASATA “Plan of Action 1981” in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983)

National Revolution And Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), pp. 90-91.

3. MISURASATA (1983) Plan of Action 1981, p. 92.4. MISURASATA (1983) Plan of Action 1981, pp. 92-93.

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General Director, Steaman Fagoth, was exposed as a former agent in Somoza’s secret police and had been placed under arrest.1 Furthermore, although the gov-ernment had agreed to consider Indian land claims, MISURASATA was rumored to have produced a map which designated a continuous piece of territory that roughly corresponded to the boundaries of the old Kingdom of Mosquitia.2

Given Sandinista views of Costeños as backward and susceptible to imperialist manipulation, they would never agree to those points contained in the Plan of Action 1981 which were seen to amount to a demand for self-government. Claims that MISURASATA planned to annex the Atlantic Coast to England seem exag-gerated, yet its demands to replace INNICA and all other mass organizations to govern the Atlantic Coast alone gave some credence to the accusation that it was attempting to break the “institutional unity of Nicaragua by creating parallel bodies” as a prelude to independence.3

4. THE LITERACY PROJECT IN LANGUAGES

The fact that the rupturing of MISURASATA-Sandinista relations coin-cided with the completion of the Literacy Project raises the question of whether this project played a contributory role in this breakdown. As with the Crusadein the Pacific, the process of staging and sustaining the Literacy Project carried more importance in the longer term than the actual teaching of literacy skills. However, unlike in the Pacific, this process led to the alienation of Costeños from the revolution. Amongst the Miskitu, this project appears to have acted as a catalyst in the revitalization of the Miskitu collective memories of the Kingdom of Mosquitia and autonomy from mestizos. With the dissemination of such an alternative national myth, the Miskitu were transformed from the acquiescent group that they had been during the Somocista period into what Hale (1994)

1. Under instructions from the PSN he had been recruited to Somoza’s secret police, the Bureau of National Security (OSN), in order to collect information about OSN infil-tration of the PSN. Evidence uncovered in OSN files from the dictator’s bunker, however, suggests that he had indeed been providing information about other polit-ical activists. For MISURASATA’s view on Fagoth’s relations with the OSN see Rivera, B. “Problems of the Indians with the Sandinist Revolution” in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution And Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), p. 125.

2. In July 1981, after Fagoth had joined the counter-revolution in Honduras, Brooklyn Rivera presented the much-rumored map on behalf of MISURASATA. It covered 45,000 square kilometers of land, including areas dominated by Mestizos and Creoles. See Carcache (April 1989) From Separatism to Autonomy Coast, p. 37.

3. Sandinista Popular Army “Counter-Revolutionary Plan Subdued In The Atlantic Coast” Patria Libre, No. 11, (February 1981) in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution And Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), pp. 99-105.

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described as a “proto-nationalist” group with aspirant ideas of nationhood of its own.

According to Pierre Frühling (1987), opposition existed amongst the Sand-inista leadership over the value of education in native languages from the begin-ning. Some described native languages as “linguistic prisons,” which only hampered communications between the Coast and the rest of Nicaragua.1

Frühling points out that this initial reluctance served to confirm the Sandinistas as Spaniards in the minds of most Miskitu.2 This mistrust was exaggerated when MISURASATA’s leadership represented the initiation of the Literacy Project as a victory for the Indians over the Sandinistas.3 Such a portrayal of events, however, does not tell the whole story. By establishing the right to edu-cation in English and Sumu, as well as Miskitu, the revolutionary government went further than MISURASATA had originally demanded in its General Direc-tions. Indeed, as an expression of Miskitu historical dominion over other indige-nous groups, MISURASATA actually opposed the inclusion of Sumu in the Literacy Project.4 By 1980, the Rama language was spoken by fewer than ten people, prompting the decision to teach them in English.5 There was also a ten-tative project to re-introduce Garifuna, which, as with the Rama language, had largely been replaced by Creole English.6

Census data identified a regional illiteracy rate of 75%. Literacy education in Spanish which had taken place in Bluefields, Puerto Cabezas, and Rama Cay as part of the Crusade reduced the rates of illiteracy in these areas to 30%.7 Plan-ning for the Literacy Project began in August 1980 and the implementation itself began in October 1980. The initiation of the project was followed by the promul-gation of the Law on Education in Indigenous Languages on the Atlantic Coast (1980). Although this law had been sponsored by MISURASATA, its preamble con-tained long-established mestizo preoccupations with the issues of integration and backwardness, stating the need to “integrate and develop those sections of the population which were plunged into backwardness and criminal neglect as a result of the former regime.”8 It established the right to education in the mother

1. Frühling, P. “The Reproduction of Mutual Distrust” in CIDCA/Development Studies Unit (1987) Ethnic Groups and the Nation State: The case of the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua(Stockholm, University of Stockholm), p. 130.

2. Frühling, P. (1987) The Reproduction of Mutual Distrust, p. 131. 3. Gurdián, G. & Hale, C. “¿Integración o participación? El proyecto de autonomia costeña

en la revolución popular sandinista.” in Encuentro (1985), No 24-25, p. 141. 4. Freeland, J. (1988) A Special Place in History, pp. 80-81.5. Shapiro, M. “Bilingual-Bicultural Education in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast Region” Latin

American Perspectives (Winter 1987) Issue 52, Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 72.6. Freeland, J. “Nicaragua. Afro-Central Americans: Rediscovering the African Heritage”

Minority Rights Group International Report (1996) No. 3, p. 18.7. Arnove, R. (1986) Education and Revolution in Nicaragua (New York, Praeger Publishers), p.

26.

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tongue and a commitment to bi-lingual and bi-cultural education up to fourth grade. By February 1981, the Literacy Project taught a further 12,500 Costeños to read and write in Sumu, Miskitu and English, reducing the overall rate of illiter-acy on the Atlantic Coast to 22%.1

From the outset, however, implementing the Literacy Project seems to have been a radically different experience from the Crusade in the Pacific. Few of the class-based mass organizations which had grown out of the struggle in the Pacific had any significant presence on the Atlantic Coast. Whilst these organi-zations had played a critical role during the Crusade, other organizations whose provenance lay outside the revolution were deployed to carry out the Literacy Project. Given the fact that the main provider of education in English and Mis-kitu had historically been the Moravian Church, most of the brigadistas who taught in these languages during the Literacy Project had received a Moravian education, with all its affinities towards Anglo-American culture and anti-com-munism.2 Furthermore, the generative themes contained in the literacy primers held little currency amongst Creoles and Indians. Although Arnove (1986) sug-gests the literacy materials were revised to reflect “the people, terrain, economy, and culture of the Atlantic Coast”3, the evidence suggests that only minor alter-ations were made to the literacy primers. The literacy primer in English entitled The Sunrise of the People contained the same lessons as the Spanish version, with its emphasis on figures such as Sandino and Carlos Fonseca, the insurrection against Somocismo, anti-imperialism and the role of the mass organizations. Only one additional lesson was included which related exclusively to the Coast entitled “The FSLN promotes cultural survival.” The brigadista manual was also equally similar to its Spanish version.4 Owing to the passage of time, smaller print runs, and, in the case of Miskitu materials, their association with the counter-revolution, literacy primers in Sumu and Miskitu are now quite rare and I have only had access to fragments of these materials. However, these fragments also suggest a high degree of similarity with the Spanish literacy primer.5

In terms of the support literature, no equivalent to the brigadista’s bulletin La cruzada en marcha existed in English, Sumu or Miskitu. Literacy teaching which occurred on the Coast in Spanish during the Crusade was covered in the depart-

8. JGRN “Law on Education in Indigenous Languages on the Atlantic Coast” in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution And Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), p. 79.

1.Arnove, R. (1986) Education and Revolution in Nicaragua, p. 26.2. Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, p. 134.3. Arnove, R. (1986) Education and Revolution in Nicaragua, pp. 36-37.4. See Ministerio de Educación (1980) The Sunrise of the People: Teacher’s Guide (Managua,

Ministerio de Educación), pp. 16-17.

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mental features of La cruzada en marcha. Barricada, the official newspaper of the FSLN, did publish a weekly edition in Miskitu, yet, according to Hale (1994), it was discontinued in 1980 before the Literacy Project began due to financial pres-sures and the recognition that it had little impact.1 I have not encountered any popular literature which presents the Sandinista version of Nicaragua’s history in Miskitu, Sumu or English published contemporaneously with the Literacy Project. There were, however, some attempts made to give symbolic representa-tions of the link between Costeños and the revolution, with the painting of murals on public buildings and the renaming of streets after revolutionary heroes.

In an early commentary on Sandinista-Miskitu relations, Bourgois (1981) made a positive assessment of the Literacy Project’s contribution to national integration, seeing the project as the basis for “greater trust for the central gov-ernment” amongst the Miskitu.2 Arnove (1986), whose work specifically addresses the revolution’s educational policies, was even more positive about the results of the Literacy Project. For Arnove, the emergence of conflict between Sandinistas and Miskitu during the Literacy Project was due primarily to its deliberate manipulation by Steadman Fagoth, who saw the project as an oppor-tunity to disseminate demands for autonomy and territorial rights.3 Fundamen-tal problems exist with the views of the Literacy Project presentation by both Arnove and Bourgois. As the following analysis will demonstrate, these conflicts had their origins in the Costeños’ historic affinities with Anglo-American cul-ture and institutions, which made mestizo nationalism in general, and Sandini-sta anti-imperialist nationalism in particular, appear both alien and threatening to the integrity of Costeños ethnic/indigenous identity. Fagoth may have skill-fully exploited this alienation but he did not create it.

5. Correspondence with Jane Freeland 12 April 2000. This is also confirmed by other sources. Former YATAMA commander Uriel Vanegas stated in an interview for Envíothat “Like the Spanish readers, the Miskito version included Sandino and Carlos Fonseca, and the history of the Frente Sandinista.” Envío “The Atlantic Coast — Two Leaders’ Paths Rejoin” in Envío (Sept/Oct 1988) Vol. 7 No. 87, p 17. Examples of lessons from the literacy primer in Miskitu can be found in Ohland, K. and Schneider, R. (eds.) (1983) National Revolution and Indigenous Identity: The Conflict between Sandinistas and Miskito Indians on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast (Copenhagen, IWGIA), pp 87-88 which also confirm its similarity to the literacy primer in Spanish.

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 95, footnote 6.2. Bourgois, P. “Class, Ethnicity, and the State Among the Miskitu Amerindians of North-

eastern Nicaragua” in Latin American Perspectives (Spring 1981) Issue 29, Vol. 8, No. 2, p. 37.

3. Arnove, R. (1986) Education and Revolution in Nicaragua, p. 37.

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5. CREOLE RESPONSES TO THE LITERACY PROJECT

Amongst Creoles, disappointment with the revolution had begun after the disarming of the commander Abel and the national state’s tendency to under-mine Creoles’ economic and political status. Whereas Creoles had initially embraced the revolution, subsequent events led them to re-value their ethnic identity as a means of distancing themselves from something which they felt acted against their group interests. There was nothing new in this. However, with the additional factors of a Cuban presence on the Coast, the nationalization of Somocista properties, conflict with the Moravian church, and the deteriorat-ing relationship with the US, Creoles began to read the Sandinista’s anti-imperi-alism as a rejection of individual property, Christianity and, more generally, the “American way,” factors that led Creole demonization to go beyond the labeling of the national government as Spaniard. Seen through the lens of Anglo-Ameri-can affinities, the Sandinistas’ anti-imperialism became synonymous with com-munism and was, therefore, alien to almost every facet of Creole society.1

The Literacy Project did little to dispel such growing animosities. Lessons in the English primer which introduced students to Sandino took no regard of the fact that the Moravian Church had spent the previous forty years branding San-dino a bandit and communist. Other lessons dealing with the insurrection, National Guard repression, and the role of the mass organizations had little bearing on the historical memory or existing reality of most Costeños, since these themes had their origins in the Pacific. The primer’s general anti-imperial-ist and anti-US sentiments, summed up with lesson thirteen announcing the revolution as “An Imperialist Defeat: Yankee Domination Is Over” were unlikely to invoke much sympathy amongst students who possessed greater cultural affini-ties and historic sympathies with Yankees than with communist Sandinistas.

Those attempts to represent symbolically the link between Costeños and the revolution seem generally to have had an ambiguous impact. The Sandino Sun-rise mural painted on the Palacio in Bluefields, for example, depicted a semi-naked black man with arms raised in a worshipping posture towards a sun con-taining an image of Sandino. This seemed to portray Creoles as primitive and subservient to mestizos.2 Other examples include the placing of banners in bar-rios displaying pro-Sandinista slogans, such as “We March Onward with the Sandinist Front!”3 According to one interviewee, everything from schools to streets to towns was given a Sandinista names: “You couldn’t call something Santa Maria because it was religious. Instead you had to call it Sandino. It was an absurd

1. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 251.2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 230.

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ideological struggle.”1 By contradicting Creoles’ Anglo-American affinities, the Literacy Project could never have played the decisive role that the Crusade had done amongst Pacific mestizos.

Creole political responses to growing fears about the communist nature of the revolution were contradictory. Members of SICC had clandestine meetings with CIA operatives to discuss the idea of separation.2 Support for this idea was far from universal, however, and it seems to have been a minority position. Gor-don (1987) cites evidence from a survey he conducted in 1984 which suggested that 66% of Bluefileños questioned did not believe in separation from Nicara-gua.3 This view was also reflected in interview data collected in 1999. Dr Roberto Hodgson, former president of OPROCO, attributed separatist aspirations to the Miskitu in the north rather than Creoles. Being English-speaking, Creoles could “ship out” to the US, but the Miskitu, having nowhere else to go, began to push for separation and even the return of the English.4 Identification of separatism with the Miskitu “in the north” was repeated in interviews with the former Social Christian activist Eduardo Argüello and historian Hugo Sujo.5 For Creoles, sepa-ratism was problematic on two counts. Firstly, the Creole opposition forged national alliances with opposition mestizos based around anti-communism rather than concerns about racism, ethnocentrism and internal colonialism.6

Their new mestizo allies would never have entertained such flirtations with sep-aratism. Secondly, the separatist vision of Miskitu leaders such as Steadman Fagoth engendered a Miskitu-dominated nation, where Creoles, as a non-indige-nous group, would occupy a subordinate position to that of Indians.7 Separat-ism, therefore, was perceived as potentially threatening to Creole interests and perhaps in part explains why Creoles and the Miskitu never forged strong alli-ances despite their mutual hostility towards the revolution. Despite the feeling

3. Photographs of these two examples can be found in Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 201. Both of these examples are taken from Bluefields. Other examples were the huge billboards in Managua describing the Atlantic Coast as an “Awakening Giant.” However, it seems that the primary audience for such symbolic representa-tions were Mestizos rather than Costeños.

1. Interview with William Wong, Bluefields 19 April 1999. Wong went on to directly attribute the cause of this “absurd ideological struggle” to the Marxist views held by the Sandinistas.

2. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 234.3. Gordon, E. “History, Identity, Consciousness, and Revolution: Afro-Nicaraguans and

the Nicaraguan Revolution.” in CIDCA/Development Studies Unit (1987) Ethnic Groups and the Nation State: The case of the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua (Stockholm, Univer-sity of Stockholm), p. 152.

4. Interview with Dr Roberto Hodgson, Bluefields April 15 1999.5. Interview with Eduardo Argüello, Bluefields, April 15 1999. Interview with Hugo Sujo,

Bluefields, 19 April 1999.6. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 240.7. Gordon, E. (1998) Disparate Diasporas, p. 239.

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of alienation which the Creoles felt towards the revolution, their response was mixed. Although some Creoles joined the counter-revolution, there was no large scale Creole military mobilization as happened with the Miskitu. Given the existing opportunities for effective opposition open to Creoles at this time, many languished between indifference towards government initiatives and pragmatic alliances with the mestizo-dominated constitutional opposition.

6. MISKITU RESPONSES TO THE LITERACY PROJECT: “SITTING ASTRIDE A TIGER”

Although MISURASATA was supposed to represent the Sumu and Rama Indians, in effect it was an organization of, and largely for, the Miskitu. The pre-vious discussion of its founding document General Directions illustrated how the organization had aligned itself with the Sandinista’s anti-imperialist version of the Nicaraguan nation. What is unusual about this document is the absence of the dominant themes of Miskitu history relating to the positive impact of the British Empire, the Kingdom of Mosquitia, and the resentment felt at the Rein-corporación by the Nicaraguan national state. Perhaps in an effort to ingratiate themselves with the new government, MISURASATA’s leadership opted to include a stinging criticism of North American imperialism in its General Direc-tions, which did not accord with the Miskitu’s historic relations with both Anglo-American colonizers and the Nicaraguan national state. In the following years, both Fagoth and Rivera showed themselves to be opportunists in their dealings with the Sandinistas, the CIA, and Nicaragua’s Miskitu. It should also be noted that MISURASATA had emerged from the efforts of Miskitu students attending university in the Pacific. Their relative isolation from the Atlantic Coast may have led them to lose touch with community-level Miskitu political consciousness. Whatever the reasons for the anti-US overtones contained in the General Directions, amongst Miskitu communities, the memory of an independent Miskitu Kingdom and Spanish oppression seems to have been still very much alive.1

Having been given the responsibility of organizing literacy teaching in indigenous languages, MISURASATA swelled its ranks, as most of those recruited to become brigadistas joined MISURASATA at the same time. MIS-URASATA may have used the Literacy Project to increase its influence in the region, yet this does not mean it also deliberately set out to use it to promote Miskitu demands for autonomy, or separatism. The shift away from a strongly pro-Sandinista position may have been initiated by the increasing interaction


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with MISURASATA’s base constituency, where the myth of Miskitu indepen-dence and nationhood had a greater resonance. Both Fagoth and Rivera opportu-nistically exploited these aspects of Miskitu consciousness, yet they clearly did not invent them.1 To attribute the rise of an alternative Miskitu nationalism to the machinations of individual political leaders, as Arnove and Bourgois appear to do, provides an over-simplistic explanation. The role of leaders such as Fag-oth, together with CIA propaganda, may have been important, yet the transfor-mation of the Literacy Project into an imagining process, where thinking the Miskitu Nation became more salient than thinking the Nicaraguan nation had its roots within deep and abiding aspects of Miskitu collective memory.

Moore (1986) sees the establishment of MISURASATA as the critical factor in this process of national imagining on the part of the Miskitu. By sanctioning its formation, the Sandinistas had unwittingly provided the political and organi-zational framework necessary to generate Miskitu national consciousness:

as MISURASATA began to develop, the Sandinistas discovered that they were sitting astride a tiger, the tiger of national consciousness. In fact, they had supplied the only missing element for the rise of a new Miskitu Nation. The Miskitus already had a national territory, although it was split between Nicaragua and Honduras, and they had a shared language. But they were widely dispersed and had no inte-grating political structure. It was this that the Sandinistas provided through MIS-URASATA.2

There are a number of problems with this explanation. Firstly, Moore’s approach does not take into account the reasons why ALPROMISU had failed to generate Miskitu national consciousness. Indeed, Moore fails to acknowledge this pre-revolutionary indigenous organization at all. Repression and co-option and a shared affinity with the US all played a part in securing Miskitu acquies-cence during the Somocista period. Secondly, Moore ignores the fact that MIS-URASATA had initially taken a strongly pro-Sandinista stance, with its leadership promoting the organization as the bearer of Sandinismo on the Atlan-tic Coast. Rather than seeing MISURASATA’s promotion of Miskitu national-ism as inevitable, its incremental shift away from Sandinismo was the result of the radically different political environment during the post-triumph period, which proved more conducive for the promotion of militant indigenous demands. Miskitu Anglo-American affinities had undermined the potential for conflict with Somocismo, yet, by 1979, these affinities provided the basis for growing conflict with Sandinismo. The increasing presence of an alien national state re-ignited the historic tendency of the Miskitu to re-value their language,

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 160. 2. Moore, J. “The Miskitu National Question in Nicaragua: Background to a Misunder-

standing” Science & Society (Summer 1986) Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 141.

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their Protestant religion and elements of their collective historical memories relating to the idea of Miskitu independence under Anglo-American imperialism which was ended by Spaniard Nicaraguans. As MISURASATA began to interact with Miskitu communities, this re-valuation of Miskitu identity became more pronounced within the organization. The antagonism of Miskitu Anglo-Ameri-can affinities to the Sandinistas’ anti-US stance constituted one element which transformed MISURASATA into a conduit through which the “tiger” of Miskitu collective memories was organized and expressed. The other key element which had been absent during the Somocista period was that of the mass mobilization of the Miskitu people. This key element was provided by the Literacy Project.

Informed by Freire’s ideas, Miskitu brigadistas were dispersed throughout the region, busily engaging in a process of conscientization supposedly based around the themes included in the literacy primer. However, the whole tone of the project at the community level appears to have been dominated by issues of indigenous rights. As one Miskitu brigadista put it: “We prepared our brigadis-tas as militant political cadres. We put literacy within the framework of the indigenous struggle, and our main objective was to deepen the sense of indige-nous autonomy.”1 Owing to the very isolation of the Miskitu world from the symbols and events contained in the literacy primers, it is hardly surprising that the discussions initiated by brigadistas drew upon Miskitu historical memories. As Miskitu brigadistas began to work across the region, these discussions both re-valued Miskitu identity and gave an increasing sense of cohesion and com-munion to dispersed Miskitu communities. However important MISURASATA was in organizing the Literacy Project, the mobilization of the Miskitu people sparked a growing consciousness of a shared history, language and culture which was exclusive to the Miskitu. The Literacy Project led to the awareness that Miskitu historical memories went beyond the individual community level and held a currency amongst the Miskitu people in general, and only the Miskitu people.2

The process of mobilization was not without its problems. MISURASATA’s Plan of Action 1981 gives an indication of high rates of desertion and a lack of disci-pline, commitment and morale amongst brigadistas, which led to the issuing of regional communiqués and the convoking of assemblies in an attempt to sustain the mobilization.3 Thus, although no equivalent to La cruzada en marcha existed, means of communicating the progression of the project to brigadistas did exist. The Plan of Action 1981 makes it clear that these efforts were intensified during the Final Offensive, which was concluded by assemblies of brigadistas held through-

1. Uriel Vanegas in Envío (Sept/Oct 1988) The Atlantic Coast — Two Leaders’ Paths Rejoin, p. 17.2. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance And Contradiction p. 134.3. MISURASATA (1983) Plan of Action 1981, p. 93.

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out the region in February 1981. The positive experience which the Literacy Project represented to the Miskitu is summed up by MISURASATA leader Hazel Lau: “The literacy crusade was the first time our young men and women had done something for their people. For the first time, our communities were really excited about doing something that had been impossible before.”1 Impor-tantly, Lau also links this positive experience to the revolution: “The very partic-ipation of indigenous youth in such a project for the first time enriched the Sandinista revolution, the platform of the Frente.”2

Yet it was at the conclusion of the Literacy Project that Sandinista-Miskitu relations broke down. The tendency to invoke Miskitu memories of an indepen-dent Kingdom of Mosquitia under Anglo-American protection raised suspicions amongst mestizo Sandinistas that the Literacy Project was being used as a vehi-cle to promote separatism. Relations had already deteriorated since the publica-tion of Plan of Action 1981, and MISURASATA’s seeming shift from a discourse of communal land claims to territorial rights. This existing mistrust was only added to with the disclosure of Fagoth’s associations with Somoza’s secret police. For the Sandinista leadership, what had been a project designed to con-solidate the territorial and political integrity of the revolutionary nation, had resulted in an imagining process dominated by the myth of the Miskitu nation.

At a ceremony in Puerto Cabezas to mark the end of the Literacy Project, MISURASATA had planned to present president Daniel Ortega with a map out-lining Indian land claims. It was felt that, given that the ceremony would have been packed with Miskitu brigadistas who had been radicalized through their participation in the Literacy Project, Ortega would have had little option but to accept the legitimacy of these extensive territorial claims. In a pre-emptive move, Sandinista security forces arrested MISURASATA’s directorate and those who had risen to leadership positions during the Literacy Project. During one opera-tion to arrest brigadista Elma Prado, Sandinista troops entered the Moravian Church in Prinzapolka. The incident turned violent and four soldiers and four Miskitu were killed. Hazel Lau, who had herself been arrested, pinpointed the incidents surrounding the conclusion of the Literacy Project as the defining moment when the revolution lost the Miskitu:

We were freed after fourteen days, on February 19, 1981, but the rebelliousness, especially among our young people who were just finishing the literacy campaign, reflected a struggle of the indigenous communities as a whole. Imagine interrupting brigadistas to put them in jail along with their leaders, when they are at the peak of the most important experience of their lives, of their history.3

1. Hazel Lau in Envío (Sept/Oct 1988) The Atlantic Coast — Two Leaders’ Paths Rejoin, p. 23.2. Hazel Lau in Envío (Sept/Oct 1988) The Atlantic Coast — Two Leaders’ Paths Rejoin, p. 24.3. Hazel Lau in Envío (Sept/Oct 1988) The Atlantic Coast — Two Leaders’ Paths Rejoin, p. 24.

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Indian cultural revivalism had been encouraged by the Sandinista policy of Indigenismo. Such a policy was assisted by the Literacy Project, which, unsur-prisingly, became saturated with key elements of Miskitu Indian identity, which held far more cogency for the Miskitu themselves than the contents of the liter-acy primers. This identity was bound up with memories of the Kingdom of Mos-quitia, a form of autonomy that the Sandinistas interpreted as separatism, and the economic good times during the Anglo-American presence on the Coast. A further element of this identity was the historic resentment towards the Span-iard Nicaraguan state whose actions terminated this era, replacing it with a coercive and corrupt system characterized by high taxes, land expropriations and loss of economic and political status. The increasing presence of the Nicara-guan state and the anti-imperialist nationalism, which now formed its guiding ideology, tended to be antithetical to many of the elements which made up Mis-kitu’s indigenous identity. Specifically, whilst Somoza was seen as the “last marine,” the Sandinistas were unmistakably Spaniards and, by that token, the his-toric oppressors of the Miskitu. Consequently, the Miskitu began to invoke their indigenous identity as an act of resistance and opposition. The Sandinistas had, according to Hale (1994), “simultaneously fostered Miskitu ethnic militancy and eliminated the constraining effects of Anglo affinity.”1 These memories and affin-ities had been long-standing elements in Miskitu consciousness, and both had usually been asserted whenever the presence of the mestizo-dominated national state was perceived to have become overbearing. They were neither products of opportunistic leaders nor CIA propaganda. Nevertheless, the Sandinistas objected strongly to any affinities with the revolution’s main international enemy, associating all talk of autonomy under the British and North Americans to counter-revolutionary efforts to encourage separatism. These objections were based on deep-seated premises amongst Sandinistas in particular, and mestizos in general, concerning the capacity of Indians to act as self-conscious political subjects. From the poetic works of Ernesto Cardenal to post-1979 statements by senior military officials, Sandinista discourses on Atlantic Coast Indians com-monly depicted them as both backwards and politically inert. The Miskitu had never been capable of organizing themselves, even their much-cherished King-dom had been an invention of British imperialism. Given these assumptions, talk of autonomy and land rights was seen as a product of manipulation by the CIA and its agent, Steadman Fagoth.2 At this stage, the Sandinistas could not distin-

1. Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction p. 162.2. There is little doubt that Fagoth had indirect contacts with the CIA by this time. Funds

from the US embassy paid for MISURASATA’s offices in Managua and Fagoth main-tained contacts with opposition leader Alfonso Robelo, who was linked with the CIA via the US embassy. For details see Vilas, C. (1989) State, Class & Ethnicity, pp. 124, 128-9.

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guish between deep and abiding elements within Miskitu collective historical memories and counter-revolutionary attempts to undermine the revolution. After unwittingly reviving memories of Miskitu autonomy from the Nicaraguan national state, they then repressed them. All previous military attempts to regain their position of autonomy had foundered owing to the lack of support from the Miskitu’s Anglo-American allies, a refusal based largely on the same racist and ethnocentric ideas held by mestizo Nicaraguans of all political colors. However, this was not the case on this occasion. With the Reagan administration offering the Miskitu military and financial assistance, thousands of Miskitu crossed the Honduran border to join counter-revolutionary forces or Contras.1

7. CONCLUSION

In the struggle against Somocismo, the Sandinistas had constructed a com-pelling counter-history through the popular nationalist figure and cultural archetype of Sandino precisely because it contained attributes with which Nica-ragua’s mestizo population recognizably shared so many affinities. Although the class content of Sandinismo’s nation-building project very soon became the ter-rain upon which the national bourgeoisie would contest the revolution, the sig-nifier around which that project revolved remained salient enough for a critical mass of mestizo Nicaraguans to sustain that project over a ten-year period. The Sandinistas had rapidly engaged in a number of strategies which attempted to routinize the class and anti-imperialist content of Sandinismo into the everyday lives of Nicaraguans. Books, histories, plaques, stamps, banknotes and street names were repeatedly utilized in this, each contributing to the creation of polit-ical subjectivities which could underpin the larger structural dimensions of the Sandinista project. The fact that the revolution did last ten years, however con-tested it may have become, suggests at least a degree of success in these efforts.

With regard to the Atlantic Coast and Costeños, this process was so highly contested by the majority of the inhabitants of that region that Sandinismo never successfully conquered a position of hegemonic leadership. In line with recent work, this chapter has focused on the legacy of Anglo-American imperialism as an explanatory factor in making sense of the impact of Nicaraguan nationalist

1. Despite Sandinista suspicions and the rhetoric of separatism on the part of Fagoth, Miskitu fighters soon found that Contra leaders, who were predominantly Mestizos, were even more hostile to separatist aspirations. This hostility helps explain why the Miskitu failed to unite under Fagoth, who had the closest links with the CIA and Contra leadership. Some decided to follow Brooklyn Rivera, who joined Edén Pastora’s Contra forces based in Costa Rica. Others decided to follow Hazel Lau and remained in Nicaragua to form part of the constitutional opposition.

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discourses on the Atlantic Coast. The association of Anglo-American imperial-ism with Costeño autonomy from the national Nicaraguan state contrasted sharply with the extermination of Indians and the colonization of their lands so characteristic of Iberian imperialism in the Pacific. This experience, and the memories of them which were kept alive at the community-level, explains why Costeños adopted Anglo-American culture and institutions as their own. Not only had Anglo-American imperialism brought Costeños real economic benefits but, by embracing its cultural forms, Costeño identity came to be associated with a high-status European culture, which was seen to have been both distinct and more civilized than the oppressive Iberian culture of Spaniard Nicaraguans. The portrayal of the Reincorporación (1894) as the Overthrow of Costeño insti-tutions and the imposition of mestizo Nicaraguan rule reinforced the negative association of mestizos as oppressors. Given the status of mestizo culture, insti-tutions, and history within Costeño memories, it is not surprising that Nicara-guan nationalism in general has had little resonance amongst Costeños.

Whilst Anglo-American affinities granted Costeños a sense of empower-ment, they simultaneously acted to de-radicalize forms of political activism, as Anglo-American institutions, and especially the Moravian Church, refused to acknowledge Costeños’ ability to rule themselves. During the Somocista period, acquiescence was reinforced by the dictatorship’s status as friend and ally of the US. The radically different nature of Sandinista nationalism undercut many of the factors that had thus far constrained Costeños ethnic/indigenous militancy. By encouraging the “flourishing of this region’s local cultural values, which flow from the original aspects of its historic tradition,” the Sandinistas unwittingly re-valued historical memories that were decidedly antipathetic to Nicaraguan nationalism. The fact that the revolutionary regime repeated the mistakes of pre-vious national governments by placing Pacific mestizos in key positions on the Atlantic Coast, at times replacing incumbent Costeños, particularly aggrieved Creole professionals. However, it was the revolution’s overtly anti-imperialist and anti-US stance which represented something particularly novel within Nic-araguan nationalist discourses, and which proved to be a decisive factor in alien-ating Costeños from the revolution. Early Costeño sympathies towards the revolution began to shift owing to the contradictions between the Sandinistas’ anti-imperialist nationalism and Costeños’ historical memories.

The indifference and alienation which these factors gave rise to was to turn into open hostility and, ultimately, armed conflict. Sandinista ethnocentrism prevented Costeño claims for autonomy and respect for their distinct institu-tions from being taken seriously. The nature of these demands appeared to engender the re-establishment of institutions from the colonial period, contra-dicting Sandinista perceptions of what constituted “original aspects” of the region’s historic traditions. Autonomy from Nicaragua had been an invention of the British, designed to divide the territorial integrity of the nation so as to facil-

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itate the imperialist exploitation of the region. Having no basis in original ethnic or indigenous cultures, Costeño demands were seen as being only skin-deep, the result of ideological confusion due to CIA propaganda, an openly anti-Sandinista Moravian Church and a lack of political agency on the part of Costeños them-selves. For the Sandinistas, the nature of Costeño claims only served to confirm them as backward and as subjects of imperialism.

The Literacy Project brought the contradictions based around mestizo eth-nocentrism and Costeños’ Anglo-American affinities to the forefront of Sandini-sta-Costeño relations. The Atlantic Coast and its ethnic/indigenous peoples had no place within the Sandinistas’ historical narrative of Nicaragua, around which the original material of the Literacy Project was based. Neither support litera-ture nor the literacy primers comprehended the time or the place which made up Costeño reality. Instead of leading to the greater integration of Costeños into the nation, this project gave the Miskitu in particular a more cogent sense of their own distinct shared history, which increasingly galvanized an exclusively Mis-kitu national consciousness. The fact that their Kingdom had been so dependent on the English, the fact that it had undergone a process of Creolization from the 1830s, the fact that the US had ultimately sanctioned its demise in 1894, and the fact that most Miskitu communities of the day consented to this, seem to have been filtered out of the imagining process which characterized the Literacy Project. When MISURASATA leaders were arrested at the end of the Literacy Project, not only did this appear to confirm CIA propaganda about the revolu-tion’s communist nature, it also made it clear that the Sandinistas, as with all mestizo national governments before them, would not permit Costeños to recover their autonomy from the national state, an element of Miskitu collective memory recently revitalized through the mobilization consequent on the Liter-acy Project.

Infrequent attempts had been made to recapture this autonomy by force, such as the events which followed the Reincorporación/Overthrow of 1894, and the exploits of General George in 1925, all of which foundered when their Anglo-American allies refused to respond to appeals for military and political support. This was not the case in 1980-81. By 1980, the CIA had already identified the Mis-kitu as a “source of resistance to the Sandinistas.”1 On this occasion, the US actively recruited, armed, trained, and organized Costeños to engage in a mili-tary effort aimed at overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. Given the sup-pression of the Costeños’ utopian vision of regaining their autonomy, the US-backed Contras symbolized assistance from a traditional ally in a struggle against an historical enemy.

1. CIA report dated December 1980 quoted in Hale, C. (1994) Resistance and Contradiction, p. 264, footnote 48.

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Any assessment of the revolution’s relations with Costeños encounters the inescapable historical legacy that the modern nations of the Americas have borne an essentially European culture and world view since their creation. Once the Spanish Empire had relinquished its claims to its former American colonies, the new mestizo élite found itself in a tiny minority in comparison to the Indian population. Whilst attempts were made soon after independence to engage in a process of civilizing the Indian, they were soon abandoned. The Indian was a fig-ure beyond civilization, unable to grasp European concepts such as progress and a capitalist economy.1 With progressive miscegenation, a growing mestizo pop-ulation became the adopted subjects upon which Latin American’s nation-build-ing projects rested. Whatever the differences in their more inclusive, egalitarian class politics, the Sandinistas became the bearers of this original mestizo project in the latter part of the twentieth century and their experience with the Miskitu in many ways reflects those of the early mestizo liberal nationalists of the conti-nent. It is this factor which led Anderson to describe the Sandinistas as the “unwitting heirs” of those early nationalists, seeing the Miskitus’ continuing Indian identity only in terms of an obstacle to their project.2 As Indians, they would remain what they had always been: marginal subjects with few rights and no perceptible political identity.3

1. Francis Kinlock, “Civilización y barbarie: mitos y símbolos en la formación de la idea nacional” in Kinlock, F. (ed.) (1995) Nicaragua en Busca de su Identidad (Managua: Insti-tuto de Historia de Nicaragua — Universidad Centroamerica), pp. 257-258.

2. Anderson, B. “Afterword” in Guidier, R. (1988) Ethnicities and Nations (Austin, University of Texas Press), p. 406.


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CHAPTER 7. CONCLUSION

This work has sought to identify the origins of the Sandinista revolution in terms of the failure of nineteenth century liberal regimes to complete the task of constructing Nicaragua as a culturally and historically distinct, sovereign, national entity. The nationalist administration of José Santos Zelaya (1892-1909) represented the most dynamic and thoroughgoing of such regimes. Through the expulsion of the British from the Atlantic Coast and the military defeat of the regime’s regional enemies, Zelaya was to consolidate Nicaragua’s territorial integrity like never before. His policies to modernize the state, underpinned by growing revenues from coffee exports, increased the capacity of the state to dis-seminate the idea of Nicaragua as a national entity with a liberal, capitalist, mes-tizo identity. The nationalist politics of the Zelaya administration were to galvanize the nation-building efforts initiated during the Thirty Years period, achieving a number of key objectives. The increasingly effective war-making capacity of the state appears to be one such objective pursued with some suc-cess. The expansion of export agriculture, which was facilitated by state-spon-sored infrastructural projects, was another. The most ambitious of all such objectives remained the initiation of a new inter-oceanic canal project. The image of Nicaragua woven around the canal project depicted the nation as one whose geography would grant it a unique position in the world trading system, guaranteeing it wealth and prestige, and allowing it to occupy a distinct position vis-à-vis the rest of Central America.

Such visions of the nation were, however, to come into direct conflict with those of the self-declared Manifest Destiny of the United States. Zelaya’s court-ing of German and Japanese capital to finance the construction of the canal incited the US to invoke the Monroe Doctrine (1823). The US would not tolerate

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a competitor to the Panamanian canal over which it exercised control. Reaction to Zelaya’s canal project took the form of a Conservative-led rebellion, which received direct US military support. What followed was a period akin to the Age of Anarchy, as Nicaragua’s divided oligarchy embarked on a series of internecine civil wars. It was a period that marked a watershed in Nicaraguan history, for it is at this moment when the US begins to affirm its hegemony over Nicaragua’s political and economic affairs, and a pattern of dependence is established that would last until the overthrow of the Somocista dictatorship in 1979. Nothing illustrates this more than the signing of the Dawson Pacts (1910) and the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty (1914), both of which gave the US State Department a deter-mining role over Nicaragua’s economic and political affairs. Those political actors who occupied the office of the presidency did so at the behest of the US, whose endorsement was more important than that of the Nicaraguan nation in determining their political fortunes.

An attempt to break this pattern was represented by the Sandino rebellion. Sandino’s military defense of the nation’s sovereignty was accompanied by a political project designed to grant the particular image which he held of the nation an everyday presence in the lives of the Segovian peasantry. This political project became more apparent during the brief period of the Segovian co-opera-tive that Sandino established after the signing of peace accords with President Sacasa in 1933. Taken together, these activities provide compelling evidence that Sandino, like Zelaya, understood the important role played by the state in the building of the nation. However, Sandino also recognized the critical factor of national sovereignty over the state if it were to perform this function. In pursu-ing the objective of national sovereignty, Sandino had to draw on new subjects and on new political ideologies.

The failure of Sandino’s anti-imperialist nationalist project had far-reaching and long-term consequences. After Sandino’s death in 1934, the only political forces of any substance left in the country were those who had collaborated with the US Marines. This context provided the US with a unique opportunity to consolidate its control over Nicaragua through political measures, rather than military intervention. The new Roosevelt administration adopted an alternative strategy that would successfully secure all major US objectives in Nicaragua for the next forty-two years. This took the form of the building of a client state, whose administrative capacity and monopoly over the means of violence were such that it could guarantee political stability, the ending of internecine civil war, and prevent the emergence of nationalist, and by that token anti-US, move-ments. In so doing, however, the Somocista government systematically aban-doned the politics of nationalism that had been the hallmark of the Zelayaadministration and of most Nicaraguan governments since the National War

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

(1855-56). Under the Somozas, Nicaragua’s interests became inextricably bound to, indistinguishable from and determined by the regional interests of the US. Imagining the nation as a culturally and historically distinct limited community, and one which was sovereign, was never an objective of the Somocista state. Indeed, quite the reverse.

The first steps in the re-birth of the kind of nationalist politics practiced by Zelaya and Sandino came with the formation of the Sandinista National Libera-tion Front in 1961. It is not so much that this opposition group distinguished itself from all others by engaging in military actions against the regime. It is the legitimation of the Sandinista’s political agenda through an exclusive reference to Nicaragua’s history and political culture of struggle against imperialism that represented an important advance on the Conservative-led opposition. The writ-ings of Carlos Fonseca Amador were to construct an image of the nation that would locate the Sandinista’s anti-imperialism and socialism as being an inher-ent, enduring and distinctive characteristic of that nation. Not only did Fon-seca’s historical portrayal of the propensity for Nicaraguans to engage in anti-imperialist struggle distinguish them from other Central American nations; in so doing he simultaneously depicted the US as the nation’s absolute Other. For the Sandinistas, the idea of the nation occupied a position of ultimate legitimacy in a way that it did not for the other opposition groups ranged against the Somocista state. It was for this reason that the elaboration of a distinctive image of the nation became such a major undertaking for the Sandinistas.

It was not until 1979, however, with the overthrow of the Somocista dicta-torship, that the Sandinistas achieved the critical goal in establishing national sovereignty over the state. Achieving this goal allowed the Sandinistas’ vision of the nation to be elaborated and disseminated through a number of state-spon-sored projects, the most significant of which identified in this book being the National Literacy Crusade. The Crusade can be taken to represent the kind of imagining process spoken of by Anderson in his discussion of the idea of nation-ness. Indeed, the analysis presented in this book has illustrated how Anderson’s ideas on imagining the nation can be applied through a different range of devices from those that he himself discusses in his own work. Through the staging of the Crusade, the Sandinistas were to embark on a nation-building project the like of which had never been experienced in Nicaragua. The self-conscious, simulta-neous progression of a mass of anonymous people through this campaign pro-duced a sense of community whose limits were defined exclusively in national terms. This process was further consolidated by the political characterization of the nation, associating it with an enduring struggle against imperialism that characterized Nicaragua as historically and culturally unique. Drawing on Fon-seca’s historical narrative, the Crusade not only created a sense of community

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which comprehended its limits in national terms, it also created a political will that was associated with that national community sui generis. The Crusade had its own place in this ongoing historical narrative, forming part of the nation’s struggle against imperialism by eradicating one of its consequences, that of mass illiteracy. In doing so, the nation had begun to express its true political identity once again. The Nicaraguan nation had regained something so long denied it by the Somocista dictatorship, something identified by Anderson to have been essential to any nation, its sovereignty. The Crusade became the pre-eminent device through which Nicaragua was to be conceived of as a “deep, horizontal comradeship,” one which was “inherently limited and sovereign,” exhibiting per-haps for the first time all those characteristics which Anderson attributed as essential to modern nations.

Contrary to many commentaries on the Sandinista revolution that continue to characterize it in terms of an attempted transition to socialism, the present work provides an alternative view that identifies its provenance in the over-throw of the Zelaya government in 1909. The Somocista dictatorship repre-sented the most enduring manifestation of an ongoing process of dependence that had its origins in this event. It was the unfinished task embarked upon by Zelaya to build an independent sovereign nation that was to constitute the over-riding task of the Sandinista revolution, marking a return of the kind of state-sponsored nationalist politics since the time of Zelaya. In illustrating this point, the state can be seen as playing a critical role. Given Nicaragua’s provenance, having no experience of nationhood prior to the collapse of the United Provinces of Central America and sharing much in common in terms of history and lan-guage with its Central American neighbors, the state became the main vehicle through which to construct a new national entity. Through the sponsoring of maps, festivals, histories, flags and censuses, the state began to build the nation as both a culturally distinct and sovereign entity. However, building the nation cannot be reduced to building a state as suggested by Giddens. As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, the nation was as much a cultural entity as a politi-cal one. It was not patriotic loyalty towards state institutions that mobilized so many Nicaraguans to the cause of the revolution but the image of the nation that found its way into the daily lives of most Nicaraguans through a multitude of signifying devices. Although most of these devices were sponsored by the state and, in most cases, became vehicles for the transmission of the anti-imperialist ideology that informed the politics of the state, it is important to see them as operating with a degree of autonomy from the state. As Anderson pointed out, the ability to imagine communion on a national, rather than familial, religious or tribal basis, is a cultural artifact of modernity. It depends on modern forms of lit-

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Chapter 7. Conclusion

erary and visual communication techniques that permitted a new apprehension of time and space through which the imagining of nation-ness became possible.

Building the nation became an urgent task for the Sandinistas, since the concept became the critical foundation on which Sandinista nationalism would gain its mobilizing power. In line with Nairn’s thesis, popular mobilization was essential for the achievement of the Sandinistas’ developmental objectives pre-cisely because existing conditions of underdevelopment meant that there was no other vehicle through which these objectives could be achieved. Just as nine-teenth-century Liberals had used a number of interpolative devices to portray the nation as being liberal in order to legitimate their specific class project, so the Sandinistas were to undertake a similar task. Legitimizing their political project necessitated nationalizing it. Consequently, the Sandinistas portrayed their brand of socialism as a reflection of the nation’s will. Through such a portrayal, Sandinismo attempted to become the sole legitimate political expression of the nation, embodying the quintessential characteristics of what it was to be Nicara-guan. The characterization of the nation as inherently anti-imperialist was essential in the underpinning of the revolutionary project, for it created a com-munity in whose interests Sandinismo was seen to serve, engendering a loyalty to that project and the state that embodied and disseminated it. Although this process was not unproblematic, as illustrated by the Contra War and the general antipathy shown by Costeños towards the revolution, it did nevertheless find enough currency to sustain the Sandinista revolutionary regime for ten years. Without such a compelling image of the nation fostered by Sandinista national-ism, it is doubtful that the kind of mass mobilizations so characteristic of the regime would have been possible at all. This became particularly important in the military sphere, since, despite the massive support that the Contras received from the Reagan and Bush administrations, tens of thousands of Nicaraguans were prepared to defend the revolution and the image of the nation that it embodied. This is the power of the modern concept of the nation. It is this con-cept that all genuine developmental political agents have appealed to since the first fragile imaginings of Nicaragua as a national entity, from nineteenth-cen-tury Liberals to twentieth-century Sandinistas.

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Schroeder, M. (1993) “‘To Defend Our Nation’s Honor’: Towards a Social and Cultural History of the Sandino Rebellion in Nicaragua, 1927-1934” (University of Michigan).

Teplitz, B. (1974) “Political Foundations of Modernization in Nicaragua: The Administration of José Santos Zelaya, 1893-1909” (Howard University).

Zimmermann, M. (1998) “In the Footsteps of Ché and Sandino: The Life of Carlos FonsecaAmador of Nicaragua” (University of Pittsburgh).

174

INDEX

AAfrica, 3, 119, 124African descent (African-ness), 113, 116, 119–121Alliance for Progress, 55, 118Alliance for the Progress of the Miskitu and

Sumu (ALPROMISU), 126–127, 135, 138, 142, 152

American Revolutionary Popular Alliance (APRA), 73

Anderson, Benedict, 5–7, 21, 28Autonomist Party, 49

BBakunin, Mikhail, 42Bentham, Jeremy, 34, 174Black Sandinistas, 126, 130–131Bluefields, 37, 40, 109–110, 112–115, 126, 128, 130,

139–140, 146, 149Borge, Tomás, 61, 63, 82, 172Brautigam Beer, Donovan, 129–130Bryan-Chamorro Treaty (1914), 39–40, 162

CCardenal, Ernesto, 122–123, 155, 169Carrión, Luis, 139Castro, Fidel, 36, 62, 66Central America, 1, 5–6, 31–35, 43, 57, 79, 82, 87,

102, 109, 114, 119, 131, 161, 163–164, 171, 174Central American University (UCA), 82Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 141, 150–

152, 155, 158Chamorro, Emiliano, 32, 37–38, 40–41, 46, 54–

55, 57, 68, 71–72, 96, 119–120Conservative Party, 38–39Constitutionalist War (1926-27), 43, 57–58,

100, 115Contras, 156, 158, 165Creoles, 7, 107, 109–110, 112–121, 124, 126, 128–

130, 138–141, 147, 149–150

Cuba, 7, 62–63, 68–70, 72, 75, 81, 100, 141

DDawson Pacts, 38, 40, 162Defending Army of Nicaraguas National Sov-

ereignty (EDSNN), 44, 46, 48–49, 51, 59, 63, 71

Díaz, Adolfo, 38, 41, 46, 96

EEl Chipote, 97–98

FFagoth, Steadman, 135, 142, 145, 148, 150–152,

154–155Fonseca, Carlos, 7, 61–77, 82, 95, 102, 147, 163,

167–168, 170–174Freire, Paulo, 81–82, 84, 87, 153, 168

GGellner, Ernest, 6, 9–12, 15–16, 20, 168Giddens, Anthony, 6, 16–20, 22, 164, 168Gordon, Edmundo, 112, 115–116, 118–120, 122,

126, 128–130, 132, 140, 150, 168, 171Great Awakening of 1881, 113Guevara, Ernesto Ché, 6, 62–67, 70–71, 73–75,

77, 168, 174

HHale, Charles, 109Hodgson, George Montgomery, 115Hooker, Dexter (Commander Able), 139

IInter-Oceanic Canal, 34

175


JJunta Government for National Reconstruc-

tion (JGRN), 80, 85, 88, 134–135, 144, 171

KKropotkin, Peter, 42

LLa cruzada en marcha, 91, 93–95, 147, 153, 172–

173La Información, 129La Prensa, 61, 120–121, 129Lau, Hazel, 142, 154Literacy Project in Languages (Literacy

Project), 8, 133, 137, 145–151, 153–155, 158Los Doce, 82

MMagnetico-Spiritual School of the Universal

Commune (MSUC), 42, 47, 71Managua, 39, 41, 51, 53, 91–92, 109, 136, 139, 141,

167–174Mariátegui, José Carlos, 65Martí, Farabundo, 63, 71, 73Martínez, Tomás, 33, 35Mena, Luis, 38Mestizo, 118, 121, 134, 174Mexico, 41–43, 45, 47, 58, 71–74, 89, 100Miskitu Indians, 107–108, 122–123, 168–173Miskitu Reserve, 109Modernization, 4–7, 11, 14–16, 26, 28, 38, 55, 57,

83–84, 103, 118, 127, 131, 169, 174Moncada, José María, 40–41, 43, 48, 54, 56, 71,

96–97, 99, 101Mosquito Coast, 112, 125

NNairn, Tom, 6, 12–16, 20, 165, 169National Autonomous University of Nicara-

gua (UNAN), 61, 63, 65, 82National Guard, 44, 46, 48, 50–52, 54, 57, 66,

74, 100, 103, 118, 122, 128, 139, 149National Literacy Crusade (Crusade), 1, 7, 29,

79–88, 90–95, 103–106, 133, 145–147, 150, 163, 168–169

National War (1854-57), 33, 35–36, 40, 162Nationalism, 1, 9, 11–12, 14, 20–21, 26, 44, 133,

167–170, 174New Man, 75, 77, 82–83, 95Nicaraguan Institute for the Atlantic Coast

(INNICA), 134, 136, 140, 144–145Nicaraguan Socialist Party (PSN), 61–64, 66–

67, 69

OOrtega, Daniel, 154Ortega, Humberto, 70, 122, 124

PPancasán (1967), 66–67Peoples Literacy Army (EPA), 87Pérez, Rigoberto López, 62, 69Progressive CosteÒo Organization (OPRO-

CO), 126, 128–129, 131, 138, 150Puerto Cabezas (Bilwí), 41, 43, 110, 142, 146,

154

RRamírez, Sergio, 7, 80, 82, 86, 90Ramírez, William, 136, 140Reincorporación/Overthrow (1894), 110–111,

114–117, 151, 157–158Rivera, Brooklyn, 142

SSacasa, Juan B., 40–41, 46, 48, 50–52, 58, 71–72,

115, 162San Juan del Norte (Greytown), 68, 110Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN),

5–6, 32, 45–46, 61, 63–70, 75, 77–79, 82–83, 86–87, 91–92, 95, 121–122, 131, 133–137, 139, 142, 147–148, 163, 168–169, 171

Sandino, Augusto C., 6, 28, 32, 40–52, 56, 58–59, 61–65, 67–75, 77–78, 82, 87, 90, 92, 95–96, 98–103, 111, 115, 117–118, 120, 122–123, 136, 147, 149, 156, 162–163, 167–170, 172–174

Segovias, 43, 61, 97Somocismo, 7, 32, 52, 54–57, 59–60, 62, 64, 67–

68, 74, 77, 83, 87, 90, 105, 118, 120, 134, 138, 142, 147, 152, 156

Somoza García, Anastasio, 27, 51–57, 61, 68–69, 71, 74, 83, 96–97, 99, 118–119, 126–128, 132, 134, 137, 140, 145, 154–155, 168–171

Southern Indigenous Creole Community (SICC), 126, 130, 138, 150

TTünnermann, Carlos, 82–84, 173Treaty of Tipitapa (1927), 41, 43, 71, 73, 101Treaty of Versailles (1783), 109, 112Trincado, Joaquín, 42, 48

UUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 80, 82, 168, 170, 172–174

176

Index

WWalker, William, 33, 68, 96Walter, Knute, 54Wheelock, Jaime, 40, 83, 122, 124–126, 138, 169,

173–174

ZZambos, 125Zelaya, José Santos, 6, 27–28, 36–39, 56, 59, 68,

79, 96, 110–111, 114–115, 117, 134, 161–164, 173–174

Zeledón, Benjamín, 39, 46, 68–69, 71–72, 78

177

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