9. Conclusion: exceptionalism and Nicaragua’s many revolutions

Justin Wolfe

As historians, we do well to remember that what’s new is invariably old. Nicaraguan exceptionalism – particularly framed around the Sandinista Revolution and its aftermath – is one in a long history of such claims. At the very least, we ought to begin with Nicaragua’s early 19th-century declaration of its ‘geographic destiny’ – defined by the potential for an interoceanic canal across its territory – to become the world’s ‘New Constantinople’.¹ By the latter half of the 19th century, as Nicaraguan elites surveyed the landscape of instability and authoritarianism that had come to define Central America, they boasted of Nicaragua, with its regular elections and single-term presidencies, being the ‘Switzerland of Central America’.² As the 20th century dawned, Nicaraguan exceptionalism shifted from something material or institutional to a quality inherent in Nicaraguans, a widespread belief in what Hilary Francis refers to as Nicaragua’s ‘revolutionary heritage’. The earliest version of this framed the actions of Augusto Sandino’s unrelenting struggle against US military occupation. Even if the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour Policy combined to diminish the US appetite for such endeavours, Nicaraguans looked to Sandino’s rebellion as the essential element in US withdrawal in 1933.³ Indeed, that exceptionalism formed the foundation for the FSLN’s origin story and trajectory. For, despite the diffusion of guerrilla movements throughout Latin America after Cuba’s success in 1959, only the FSLN succeeded in taking power to establish a revolutionary regime.⁴

How, when and to what extent this sense of a distinct heritage radiated across Nicaragua is at the heart of the chapters that make up this book. These are not easy questions to answer, and the works in this collection remind us that the history of the Sandinista Revolution is a moving target. It is the revolutionary struggle from the founding of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN); it is the revolution in triumph from 1979 to 1990; it is the Revolution in defeat. It is even, perhaps, the FSLN in resurgent power since 2007. It is also and always, all of these ‘revolutions’ in memory. Moreover, despite its relatively small size, Nicaragua’s geographic and social diversity suggests even more that we are walking within a garden of forking paths.

1 F. Kinloch Tijerino, Nicaragua, identidad y cultura política (1821–1858).

2 A.J. Cruz, Jr., Nicaragua’s Conservative Republic, 1858–93; C. Cruz, Political Culture and Institutional Development in Costa Rica and Nicaragua: World-Making in the Tropics.

3 E. Camacho Navarro, Los usos de Sandino. Jaime Wheelock Román, one of the FSLN’s leading intellectuals, worked to position Sandino within a longer history of Nicaraguan exceptionalism in Raíces indígenas de la lucha anticolonialista en Nicaragua, de Gil González a Joaquín Zavala, 1523 a 1881.

4 T.P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America.

Much of the richest work published in the aftermath of the Sandinista defeat in 1990 wrestled with the Sandinista loss by delving deeper into the history of Nicaragua’s social and cultural complexity, too often ignored or minimised in the class-reductive analysis of Sandinista leadership. Whether it was peasants, indigenous communities or women, scholars revealed people whose lives and politics intersected with the revolution in ways that often seemed complementary, but which ended up in conflict as these communities’ agency butted heads with the FSLN’s vanguardist approach.⁵ The chapters by Florence Babb and José Luis Rocha are particularly apt examples, albeit for different reasons. As Babb shows, the FSLN had trouble placing LGBT identities and rights within its ideological framework. With land reform, by contrast, the FSLN claimed to know better than peasants their needs and desires. What these chapters also reveal, and what is displayed in even fuller flower in the chapters by Fernanda Soto, David Cooper, Francis and Johannes Wilm, is how the Sandinistas provided both an ideological framework and the tools for organising newly imagined selves.

In some ways, it has been taken for granted that in creating new, revolutionary subjectivities, Nicaragua’s pre-revolutionary selves were more straightforward, if not static. In 1985, relying on the dossiers of participants in the fighting to oust Somoza, Argentine sociologist Carlos Vilas tried to define the ‘social subject’ of the Sandinista Revolution.⁶ An astute observer of contemporary Nicaraguan society, Vilas recognised and engaged with the country’s regional variation – for example, that students accounted for 29 per cent of the participants from Matagalpa, but only 16 per cent in Masaya. That said, his analysis of occupational categories like gentes de oficio and jornaleros suggested a fixity not matched by historical experience.⁷ The departments of Chinandega and Carazo, for example, registered the highest degree of rural proletarianisation in the 1970s and consequently, Vilas noted, emerged as ‘the departments where the political work of the FSLN began earlier with agricultural workers’.⁸ The histories of their proletarianisation and what these meant for their political subjectivity, however, led these departments to have distinct experiences of the revolution in power and in post-1990 politics.⁹

5 See, e.g., J. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979; C.R. Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987; J. Charlip, Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880–1930; J.L. Gould, To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indians and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880–1965; E. Dore, Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua; J. Wolfe, The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Nicaragua.

6 C.M. Vilas, ‘El sujeto social de la insurrección popular: La Revolución Sandinista’, 20 (1) (Jan. 1985): 119–47.

7 Gentes de oficio is a category which includes skilled, self-employed workers in a range of occupations, such as craftsmen, plumbers, mechanics, carpenters, tailors and barbers. Jornaleros means day-labourers.

Even in areas that seemed more homogenous, like the ‘agricultural frontier’ of Nueva Segovia, a teasing out of historical details further reveals the complex dynamics of the revolution. Lynn Horton’s extraordinary study of the revolution and counter-revolution in the Segovian region of Quilalí explores the diverse entanglements within the Segovias. Quilalí had a diverse, yet highly unequal, distribution of land, a reality exacerbated in the 1970s by ongoing eastward migration into a zone with little resemblance to the undeveloped frontier of the 1950s. The FSLN’s failure to understand these existing divisions, and the dreams of autonomy that drove frontier migration, made it nearly impossible for them to perceive what attracted some peasants to the revolution, and what enraged those who joined the Contras.¹⁰ As Francis, Soto and Cooper show, the intersection between agency and institutionalisation remained crucial not just in the aftermath of the FSLN’s electoral loss in 1990, but even with the FSLN’s return to power in 2007.

For many of the authors in this collection, new forms of political organisation and participation constitute another key legacy of the revolution. The 20th century saw a number of major developments of this kind in Nicaragua, the first under the dynastic rule of the Somoza family, the second under the FSLN – often with striking parallels. Under US occupation, the Nicaraguan military was replaced with Guardia Nacional, which not only concentrated power in the hands of the Somozas, but created a truly viable national armed force in Nicaragua for the first time, one that both forged the culture of its members and established a new regime of policing (albeit, as Robert Sierakowski notes, highly corrupt and ineffective) across the territory.¹¹ Sierakowski argues that an equally dramatic shift in the culture of policing attended the revolution’s creation of the Sandinista Police, one that initially persisted with its transformation into the post-1990 Nicaraguan National Police.¹² Following his return to power in 2007, however, Daniel Ortega initiated a campaign of political favouritism that undermined the police’s institutional independence and converted it into a partisan tool of coercion.

8 Vilas, ‘El sujeto de la insurrección popular’, 135.

9 See, e.g., Gould, To Lead as Equals, 292–6; Charlip, Cultivating Coffee, 220–8; Wolfe, The Everyday Nation-State, 205–6. See, too, Karen Kampwirth’s critique of the fixity of these categories in Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba,138–45.

10 L. Horton, Peasants in Arms: War and Peace in the Mountains of Nicaragua, 1979–1994.

11 R. Millett, Guardians of the Dynasty; K. Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936–1956; R. Grossman, ‘“The Blood of the People”: The Guardia Nacional’s Fifty-Year War against the People of Nicaragua, 1927–1979’, 59–84.

12 A useful comparison ought to be made with the Sandinista Popular Army and its transition into the Nicaraguan Armed Forces.

The leadership of Anastasio Somoza García brought other substantial changes to Nicaraguan society, notably consolidating politics within a populist framework that built upon the anti-caudillo campaign of the US occupation and bureaucratising the state under his leadership.¹³ Together, these transformed Nicaraguan political culture, especially in coffee and cotton zones as well as in urban centres throughout the country. Recent scholarship has contended it was these that held the Somocista state together, and more so than the Guardia’s repression. As Jeffrey Gould argues in his ground-breaking study of campesinos (farmers) in Chinandega, ‘Workers and peasants largely accepted the Somozas’ variant of populism and its corresponding rules of the game, but, at the same time, they shaped and transformed Somocista populism.’¹⁴ Victoria González-Rivera’s research on women’s politics within the Somocista state reveals similar shifts in political culture.¹⁵ Indeed, growing resistance to the dictatorship was frequently framed in terms of its opposition, not in the revolutionary language of the FSLN but rather in their own experience of Somocista development. The difficult road for land reform, detailed by Rocha, and in food policy, analysed by Christiane Berth, reveal the Sandinista’s blind spot to the depths of Somocista political culture. That said, as Rocha’s work indicates – and so, too, that of Babb, Cooper, Francis, and even Soto – the revolution provided new institutional tools and practices that have lasted long beyond the FSLN’s defeat in 1990.

In his oft-cited work on the post-Second World War defeat of fascism and the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980s, Francis Fukuyama argued for the emergent hegemony of neoliberal republicanism.¹⁶ Fukuyama’s thesis on ‘the end of history’ recognised a profound shift in the global balance of power. In this shift, the United States consolidated political and economic predominance through its assumption of the role as the ‘last superpower’ together with the intensified position of economic organisations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization in which the US held a nearly unchecked leadership role. The world has proved itself to be more complex than Fukuyama imagined. His focus on a totalising ‘common ideological heritage of mankind’ led him to dismiss whatever kinds of ‘strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso’, for their failure to be of world-historical importance or influence.¹⁷ Since the late 1990s, it has become clear that Nicaragua (and Latin America more generally) adjusted to these dramatic changes in quite diverse ways, producing an array of left- and right-wing governments, each often responding to questions of environment, race and ethnicity, and global capitalism in ways hardly imaginable in the 1970s.

13 Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza; M. Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Caudillo can be translated as ‘strongman’.

14 J.L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979, 293.

15 V. González-Rivera, Before the Revolution: Women’s Rights and Right-Wing Politics in Nicaragua, 1821–1979.

16 F. Fukuyama, ‘The end of history?’, The National Interest, 3–18.

17 Ibid., 9.

Still, Nicaragua has continued to participate as a subordinate in the global capitalist system. Its economy has grown in recent years – with higher and more consistent rates of growth than most of Latin America since 2009 – but, it is still focused on roles long familiar to the Global South: agro exports, maquiladoras¹⁸ and tourism. After returning to power, the FSLN began to develop a series of social programmes framed in revolutionary rhetoric, but which are, as Francis and Berth show, more attuned to neoliberal expectations and ties of political clientelism, and far from universal. That said, rates of extreme poverty have declined considerably over the last decade, fuelled especially by increases in income among the poorest in the country, growth in the agricultural sector, robust commodity prices and foreign aid from Venezuela. Long-term instability in prices, environmental concerns and the crisis in Venezuela, however, raise serious questions about the Sandinistas’ ability to sustain these economic advances. What is more, despite its ballyhoo-ed social programmes, social investments remain too low to effect meaningful redistributions of wealth or opportunity.¹⁹

Most of the authors in this collection argue that an exceptional sense of self-empowerment and grassroots organisational capacity represent the key legacies of the Sandinista Revolution. Since 2007, these have played out against the backdrop of growing FSLN popularity and its consolidation of power. Still, there is a fragility to the constellation of forces that have made this possible. The Sandinistas have raised expectations while also limiting dissent. How will Nicaraguans respond if meaningful social transformations fail to materialise? Will the revolution’s legacy lead to greater inclusion? Or, perhaps, serve as the springboard for change when the economy inevitably stumbles.

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