Introduction: exceptionalism and agency in Nicaragua’s revolutionary heritage

Hilary Francis

On 10 January 2017, ten days before Donald Trump took his oath of office, Daniel Ortega was sworn in as President of Nicaragua for the fourth time. These two very different presidents both gave inauguration speeches suffused with nationalism, but only one of them claimed that his country was exceptional. In his remarks to scattered crowds on Pennsylvania Avenue, Donald Trump promised to make America great again (again), but in spite of his inflated jingoistic rhetoric, Trump is not, in fact, an American exceptionalist. He does not believe that his country is innately different, nor that accidents of geography or history have conspired to set the United States apart as a nation with a particular role in the world. It was Ortega, not Trump, who used his inauguration speech to emphasise, once more, his belief in Nicaragua’s exceptionalism, calling this small Central American country of six million people a ‘blessed’ nation.¹

The contrast between the two indicates something fundamental about the nature of exceptionalism: it relies on a sense of a particular moral purpose. Trump rejects the concept because he rejects morality. For him, international politics is a zero sum game in pursuit of material resources. Therefore, the United States cannot be exceptional as long as other countries ‘are eating our lunch’.² This logic leads him to conclude that the Iraq War was a bad idea because Americans did not ‘take the oil’ before getting out.³ Daniel Ortega, in contrast, asserts that Nicaragua is exceptional precisely because, in spite of an acute lack of material resources, the particular moral character of Nicaraguans allows them to overcome great odds. Claiming that Nicaragua has ‘the lowest crime rate in Latin America and one of the lowest on the planet’, Ortega argues that ‘These goals have been reached with limited material resources, because we have infinite moral resources, that is our strength.’⁴ Rosario Murillo, who is both vice-president and first lady, claims that Nicaragua is a peaceful country in the midst of a ‘world full of conflict’ because ‘Nicaraguans have accumulated within themselves a heritage of respect, moral strength, and admiration which is unbreakable, unyielding, hard-working and heroic, qualities which are recognised around the world.’⁵

1 ‘Toma de posesion e investidura de Daniel Ortega en 2017’, YouTube video, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAKUaAWvX9k (accessed 15 Apr. 2019); S. Wertheim, ‘Trump and American Exceptionalism’ (2017).

2 Wertheim, ‘Trump and American exceptionalism’.

3 Ibid.

This collection is, in part, a reaction to this government rhetoric. Its chapters began life as a set of papers presented at a conference at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London in March 2015. At that time, several of us were thinking independently about the idea of Nicaraguan exceptionalism. The FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) government’s claims were always clearly overblown, but they belied a range of phenomena which suggested that Nicaragua really was different. Nicaragua was not wracked with violence in the same way as her Central American neighbours: homicide rates and levels of emigration to the United States were both substantially lower. Furthermore, beyond the rhetoric, it was clear that many Nicaraguans outside of the party of government – and vehemently opposed to it – also considered Nicaragua’s heritage to be unique. They believed that their country’s history bestowed on Nicaragua’s citizens a particular set of strengths and traits, even as it imposed a particular – sometimes unbearable – burden upon them.

Nicaraguan exceptionalism is unique among exceptionalisms for the emphasis it places on the moral duty of the individual. Many cultures of exceptionalism rely upon a belief in the particular moral virtues of a nation’s citizens, but most combine this with a conviction that certain material factors have contributed to this cultural exceptionalism. The United States, it is argued, is exceptional because of the vast resources that were mobilised by westward expansion. Venezuela is exceptional because of its oil reserves. Cuba is exceptional because its strategic importance meant that independence came late and, once the revolution had triumphed, the island’s topography ensured ease of control.⁶ In the Nicaraguan case a similar retreat to the concrete is impossible. Before the revolution in 1979 nobody had suggested that Nicaragua was exceptional nor that the nation possessed any intrinsic assets that made the revolution more likely. Nicaraguan exceptionalism is seen as the result of human endeavour, achieved by sheer force of will.

The lens of exceptionalism gives us a new way to consider an old question, much discussed in scholarship on Nicaragua: what remains of the revolution?⁷ Were the sacrifices that brought the Sandinistas to power in 1979 entirely in vain? What tangible (and not so tangible) changes survived the upheaval of the revolutionary decade? It was clear to us that any credible answer to this question required scholarship that was fully grounded in both the past and the present, and which gave a detailed account of the connections between the two. As a group of historians, sociologists and anthropologists, that task forced all of us out of our immediate comfort zones. It demanded that the social scientists think in more detail about the historical antecedents for the phenomena they described, and it required the historians to write all the way up to the present. At the time of writing, the historians especially have reason to curse the hubris that pushed us into this endeavour. The present is always a moving target, but in 2018 Nicaragua experienced the most intense period of political upheaval since the revolution of 1979. The verdict of the Envío editorial team in the month after the violence began cannot be disputed: ‘There is a clear dividing line between the Nicaragua that existed before these unexpected days of rebellion and the Nicaragua of today. We still don’t know how this new country, born of this outburst of unrest, will take shape. But we know that nothing will be in the same place as it was before.’⁸

4 La Voz del Sandinismo, ‘Daniel: Policía Nacional tiene resultados excepcionales’, 9 Dec. 2014.

5 Y. Prado Reyes, ‘Compañera Rosario’, 12 Dec. 2016.

6 I. Tyrrell, ‘American exceptionalism in an age of international history’, 96 (4) (1991); S. Ellner and M. Tinker Salas, ‘The Venezuelan exceptionalism thesis: separating myth from reality’ (2007); L. Whitehead, ‘On Cuban political exceptionalism’, (2007).

7 D. Rodgers, ‘Searching for the time of beautiful madness (2009); F. Babb, After revolution (2001); R. Montoya, Gendered Scenarios of Revolution (2012). The idea of Nicaraguan exceptionalism is addressed explicitly in S. Martí i Puig and D. Close, ‘La excepción Nicaragüense?’ (2009); and J.M. Cruz, ‘Democratization under assault: criminal violence in post-transition Central America’, PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2010.

The violence of 2018 ripped Nicaraguan society open in ways that may never be repaired. But it also exposed continuities that were a surprise to many. In 2007, when Daniel Ortega first returned to power, former vice-president and leading dissident Sergio Ramírez spoke of a Nicaragua that was divided into three: the deluded who chose to believe Ortega’s promises about a second stage of the revolution; the betrayed, who felt that their revolutionary-era sacrifices had come to nothing; and the young, who viewed ‘what has come down to them from history as a cacophony so confused as to induce only oblivion’.⁹ In fact, events of recent months have shown that young Nicaraguans are not the apathetic, self-involved consumerist types that their elders had hitherto perceived them to be.¹⁰ Young Nicaraguans have led the current protest movement – and they have done so by drawing widely and creatively on Nicaragua’s revolutionary traditions. In their actions and analysis they have made it clear that they are keenly aware of their country’s recent past. They have shown that they are heirs to a particular sense of agency and duty, a particular moral imperative, which we call Nicaraguan exceptionalism. This introduction has three sections. The first discusses the evolution of exceptionalist ideas from 1979 until 2017. The second looks at the ways in which these same ideas have played out during the protest movement and government crackdown of 2018. The last explores in more detail each chapter’s particular contribution to this volume.

8 Envío, ‘Abril 2018: La insurrección de la conciencia’, no. 434, May 2018, http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/5479 (accessed 15 Apr. 2019).

9 S. Ramírez, ‘Nicaragua: through the abyss’, 3 Sept. 2007.

10 M. Córdoba, ‘La apática generación post-revolución sale a las calles y hace tambalear al gobierno de Daniel Ortega’, Infobae, 22 Apr. 2018. There is substantial survey data and other research which suggest that most young people are not interested in politics. See, e.g., F. Maradiaga, ‘Youth analysis for strategic planning’, 28 Nov. 2017.

Exceptionalism in the ‘first’ and ‘second’ stages of the revolution: 1979–2017

In 1979 the FSLN led a broad-based popular movement which overthrew the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty. The Somozas had ruled Nicaragua for 43 years, relying on US support and increasingly brutal repression to remain in power. When Ronald Reagan’s administration began an undeclared war on Nicaragua, the country’s plight became an international cause célèbre. International supporters of the Sandinistas were drawn by the conflict’s stark injustice – with the might of the United States ranged against a tiny, impoverished Central American nation – but they were also attracted by the Sandinistas’ policies. A mixed economy, the county’s first free elections in 1984, and a commitment to grassroots democracy, via a series of mass organisations, all suggested that Nicaragua might be the first example of viable, democratic socialism, succeeding where so many others failed before. At the time, academics frequently referred to the Nicaraguan experience as a ‘unique experiment’.¹¹

In 1990, with the economy in crisis and the country struggling with the impact of a decade of war, Nicaraguans voted the Sandinistas out of office, opting instead for a coalition of mainly right-wing parties backed by the United States. Sixteen years of right-wing neoliberal government ensued, until Daniel Ortega was elected to the presidency in November 2006, and then won further elections in 2011 and 2016. He has held office continuously for more than a decade, overturning Nicaragua’s constitutional prohibition on re-election in order to do so. Ortega’s new period in office has been characterised by an acute intolerance for any threat to his hold on power, however slight. In 1990, Ortega had agreed to bring elections forward as part of the Central American peace process, because he and the FSLN assumed that they would win comfortably. The shock of that defeat, and the fact that it took the FSLN 16 years to return to office, created the conditions for the paranoia and increasing authoritarianism that have characterised the FSLN’s attitude to power since 2007.¹²

From the beginning, there were clear irregularities in the way that elections were run. In the 2008 municipal elections – the first held with the FSLN as national incumbent – the number of votes cast exceeded the number of voters on the electoral roll in multiple districts in 40 different municipalities.¹³ In 2011, there were widespread irregularities in the electoral process, even though opinion poll data suggest that the government could have won comfortably without fraud: the FSLN’s goal was not just to win, but to win an absolute majority in the National Assembly. IPADE, a respected Nicaraguan NGO with a long history of election monitoring, was denied accreditation. International observers from the European Union and the Organisation of American States (OAS) were accredited in 2011, but their work was significantly undermined: 20 per cent of the OAS observers were prevented from observing election-day preparations at the polling stations to which they had been assigned, which meant that they could not verify that the ballot boxes were empty when they were sealed.¹⁴ No independent election observers, national or international, were accredited for the 2016 presidential elections. In any event, the contest was a foregone conclusion because Eduardo Montealegre, leader of the main opposition party, was removed from office by Nicaragua’s Supreme Court less than five months before the vote.¹⁵

11 The phrase ‘unique experiment’ is used, to give just a few examples, in R.S. Garfield and G. Williams, Health and Revolution: The Nicaraguan Experience (1989), 197; C. Robinson, Nicaragua: Against All Odds (1989), 12; D. Faber, Environment under Fire: Imperialism and the Ecological Crisis in Central America (1993), 189; T. Walker, Nicaragua: The Land of Sandino (1986), 120; H.E. Vanden and G. Prevost, Democracy and Socialism in Sandinista Nicaragua (1996), 75.

12 For a visceral account of the Sandinista experience of the 1990 electoral defeat, see S. Ramírez, Confesión de amor (1991).

This need for absolute control is also clear in the Ortega administration’s attitude to peaceful protest. Orteguista officials clearly subscribe to the notion that ‘whoever has the streets has the power’ and in the years since 2007 they have acted accordingly.¹⁶ In 2013 a group of elderly protestors and their student supporters staged a sit-in demonstration at the Institute of Social Security (INSS) to demand pension reform. They were beaten, threatened and robbed by an organised group of assailants who had been transported to the scene in vehicles belonging to the Managua mayor’s office. The attacks took place in full view of the Nicaraguan police, who did not intervene as the violence unfolded.¹⁷ Since 2013 anti-canal protestors have fiercely resisted the government’s transoceanic canal project. Their protests have repeatedly been thwarted by Nicaraguan police and groups of pro-government supporters: in 2014 a demonstrator lost an eye after police shot him with a rubber bullet, and in 2016 a bridge was destroyed to prevent peasant protesters taking part in a march.¹⁸

13 Such discrepancies were not apparent in subsequent elections because the government stopped releasing district-by-district statistics. Consorcio Panorama Electoral, ‘Informe preliminar elecciones 2016’, 4.

14 Envío, ‘Elecciones 2011: Perdió Nicaragua’, no. 356, Nov. 2011; The Carter Center, ‘The 2011 Elections in Nicaragua’, Study Mission Report, 7.

15 N. Lakhani, ‘Nicaragua suppresses opposition to ensure one-party election, critics say’, Guardian, 26 June 2016.

16 G. Rothschuh, ‘Observatorio de los medios’, Confidencial, 17 Apr. 2018.

17 Envío, ‘The challenge of the others’, no. 384, July 2013; Centro Nicaraguense de Derechos Humanos (CENIDH), ‘Violaciones de derechos humanos en el contexto de la protesta de los adultos mayores por su derecho a una pensión reducida de vejez’, 27 June 2013; C. Salinas, ‘El gobierno de Ortega reprime la protesta de los “viejitos” en Nicaragua’, El País, 23 June 2013.

18 CENIDH, Derechos humanos en Nicaragua: Informe 2013 (2014), 39; CENIDH, Derenchos humanos en Nicaragua: Informe 2015 (2016), 42–4; M. Aguilera, ‘Destrozan puente para impidir marcha campesina’, Hoy, 30 Nov. 2016; V. Vásquez, ‘Perdió un ojo en marcha anticanal, pero continúa en la protesta’, Confidencial, 18 June 2017.

A pattern of state violence has also been reported in the north of Nicaragua, where former Contra combatants have rearmed in opposition to the FSLN government. Press and human rights reports indicate that between 2011 and 2017 the Nicaraguan army killed at least 31 people in at least 14 attacks on suspected Contra groups, suggesting a widespread practice of extrajudicial execution of armed opponents of the government.¹⁹

Nonetheless, in the 11 years before April 2018 the Ortega government was able to broadcast its version of Nicaraguan exceptionalism with some success, partly because of economic progress. In 2015 IMF executive director Otaviano Canuto described Nicaragua as ‘a success story in the making’ and by 2017 the country had the third highest growth rate in Latin America. The ‘buoyant’ economic growth was partly the result of aid from Venezuela, but it was also built upon the firm pact established between Ortega’s government and the Nicaraguan private sector.²⁰ This economic growth was closely linked to the central thread in the government’s claims to exceptionalism: the idea that Nicaragua was the safest country in Central America. And while some have questioned the claim, the statistics certainly supported it: in 2017 murders in Nicaragua totalled 431, or 7 per 100,000 people, a fraction of the 60 per 100,000 reported in nearby El Salvador. Huge numbers of migrant children have arrived in the United States from Central America in recent years, but hardly any come from Nicaragua, even though it is the poorest country in the region.²¹ The crudest explanations for this difference suggest that Nicaraguans have no need to flee violence and high crime rates because ‘Nicaragua has good cops’, an approach that has aged extremely poorly since April 2018.²² Nonetheless, even if we discount the Nicaraguan government’s boasts of the country’s ‘infinite moral resources’, it is clear that Nicaragua’s recent history follows a distinctive path that requires further explanation.

19 L.E. Martínez M., ‘Ejército enfrentó a un solo hombre en Ayapal’, La Prensa, 9 Mar. 2017; A. Cerda, ‘Ejército letal contra “armados”’, Confidencial, 7 Feb. 2017; CENIDH, ‘Informe del CENIDH sobre violaciones de derechos humanos en Las Magdalenas, Ciudad Antigua, Nueva Segovia’, 17 Nov. 2016; E. Romero, ‘Muere el armado Enrique Aguinaga en enfrentamiento con Ejército de Nicaragua’, La Prensa, 30 Apr. 2016; E. Chamorro Mendieta, ‘Cerrato fue torturado con saña antes de su asesinato’, La Prensa, 24 Apr. 2016; E. Romero, ‘Seis muertos en combate entre Ejército y armados en Ayapal’, La Prensa, 30 Mar. 2016; ‘Dos muertos tras enfrentamiento con la Policía en Jinotega’, La Prensa, 21 Aug. 2015; CENIDH, ‘Informe del CENIDH concluye: “Fue una acción militar”’, 9 Feb. 2015; W. Aragón, ‘Sepultan a ex Contra “Triple H”’, La Prensa, 15 Sept. 2014; ‘Nicaragua: La Contra conmemora desmovilizacion mientras siguen asesinando a sus dirigentes’, Nicaragua Hoy, 27 June 2014; E. Romero, ‘Ejército confirma muerte de “Cascabel”’, La Prensa, 16 Apr. 2014; A. Lorío, ‘Asesinan al “flaco Midence”’, La Prensa, 22 Dec. 2013; E. Romero, ‘Repudio en pantasma por muertes’, La Prensa, 12 Oct. 2013.

20 O. Canuto, ‘Nicaragua: a success story in the making’, Huffington Post, 11 Sept. 2015; Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Preliminary Overview of the Economies of Latin America and the Caribbean 2018: Briefing Paper; IMF, ‘IMF concludes staff visit to Nicaragua’, 5 Dec. 2016.

21 T. Clavel, ‘2017 homicide rates in Latin America and the Caribbean’, Insight Crime, 19 Jan. 2018; D. Rodgers, ‘Living in the shadow of death: gangs, violence and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002’ (May 2006), 267–92.

22 J. Replogle, ‘Why Nicaraguan kids aren’t fleeing to U.S.’, KPB2, 29 Jul. 2014; National Public Radio, ‘Why Nicaragua’s not in the conversation about Central American migrants’, 1 Aug, 2014; I. Castro, ‘Migration outlier: how Nicaragua escaped neighbors’ deadly spiral’, Reuters, 28 Aug. 2014; R. Lovato, ‘What explains Nicaragua’s surprisingly low murder rate?’, Boston Globe, 12 Jan. 2018.

Before April 2018 talk of Nicaraguan exceptionalism was not confined to Ortega and his allies; nevertheless, other versions of the discourse carried nothing of the confidence and triumphalism expressed by the government. Rather, Sandinistas from all walks of life felt a pervading sense of guilt and betrayal. The belief that Nicaragua was – and should be – unique led them to feel that they had failed, because so many of the dreams of the revolution had come to nothing. José Luis Rocha, who discusses agrarian reform in this volume, has written elsewhere about his experience as a brigadista in the 1980 literacy crusade, giving a lucid account of this pernicious sense of guilt and anger over a dream betrayed:

This same sense of guilt is shared by some of the poorest Nicaraguans, those without access to the ‘Miami way of life’. In her 20-year study of the Sandinista community of Tule, Rosario Montoya argues that the expectations created by revolutionary discourse left the citizens of Tule with a crippling sense of guilt for having ‘failed’ to fulfil an impossible dream of the utopian ‘new man’ and ‘new woman’ of the revolution.²⁴

The burden of this strain of exceptionalism led many dissident Sandinistas to blame themselves for Ortega’s increasing authoritarianism. In an article written in 2016, Henry Ruiz, a member of the Sandinistas’ governing junta in the 1980s, asked, ‘How did we get here?’ He found his answer in searing self-criticism. ‘We are the people most responsible for the fact that Daniel Ortega is where he is, all of us who fought against the Somoza dictatorship, all of us of the generation that fought against the dictatorship and then little by little allowed this man to ensconce himself in power ... Yes, we are guilty, some more than others.’²⁵

In the months since April 2018 that sense of guilt has turned to anger and defiance. The impact of the violence itself is shocking enough, but the events of 2018 also forced many Nicaraguans to relive the buried traumas of the past. The period of silent resentment is over, and this new outpouring of grief and anger has made the discourses of exceptionalism more obvious and more explicit: fervent patriotism and ideas about duty to country form the backbone of the current opposition movement.

23 J.L. Rocha, ‘A passionate memory in times of disillusion’, Envío, no. 230, Sept. 2000.

24 Montoya, Gendered Scenarios of Revolution.

25 H. Ruiz, ‘Daniel Ortega es un tránsfuga político y la tarea hoy es evitar que consolide su dictadura familiar’, Envío, no. 414, Sept. 2016.

Exceptionalism and the martyrs of April: April–December 2018

The violence began on 18 April 2018. Two days earlier, the government had finalised reforms to the Nicaraguan Institute of Social Security (INSS). The INSS had been struggling for some time and Nicaraguan journalists have discovered a range of issues relating to mismanagement and financial impropriety.²⁶ The government’s implementation of the INSS reforms was a response to pressure from the IMF, but it was poorly timed. In the weeks before, hundreds of students had protested against the government’s mismanagement of a forest fire in the Indio Maíz reserve in the south of the country. These protests were the most significant student mobilisation since the INSS protests of 2013. It is difficult to understand, therefore, why the government chose to press ahead with the INSS reforms – a known flashpoint – when the momentum of student protests had already begun to build.

On 18 April government supporters used familiar tactics, roughing up demonstrators and journalists in Managua and León. Photographs of bloodied protesters, including pensioners, led to larger demonstrations the next day. At this point, for reasons which are still unclear, the state responded with unprecedented, lethal force. According to Ligia Gómez, a former Sandinista official at Nicaragua’s Central Bank, a meeting of party officials was convened at midday on 19 April. ‘Vamos con todo’, they were told. ‘We’re going to give it everything we’ve got. We’re not going to let them steal the revolution from us.’²⁷ Later that day, two protestors and a policeman were killed, but the escalation only served to increase dissent. Demonstrations took place across the country on the following day, and agents of the state across the country responded with lethal force. On 20 April eight people were killed in Managua, two in Ciudad Sandino, one in Tipitapa, two in Estelí, three in León, four in Masaya and one in Sébaco.²⁸

In the next few months more than 325 Nicaraguans were killed, most at the hands of agents of the state.²⁹ Hundreds of thousands of people, particularly the young, participated in marches, roadblocks and university occupations. The assumption that had prevailed for so long – that most young people had little interest in politics – was proved wrong. In many cases, the most intense resistance came from traditionally Sandinista working-class neighbourhoods: Monimbó in Masaya, the eastern barrios of Managua, Barrio Sandino in Jinotega.³⁰ Foreign journalists came to Nicaragua in a trickle rather than the flood seen in the 1980s. But they did come. And they saw a rebellion that looked like the mirror image of the Sandinistas’ struggle to overthrow Somoza. Multiple articles asked how Ortega had become a copy of the dictator he had helped to overthrow, and many noted the obvious echoes of the past: the use of adoquines (hexagonal paving stones) to make barricades; the ubiquity of the rallying cry ‘que se rinda tu madre’ (‘Tell your mother to surrender’, the last words of Sandinista poet and revolutionary Leonel Rugama).³¹ In the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson traced the historical roots still further, linking Masaya’s trenchant resistance to a century of rebellion stretching back to the war of 1912.³²

26 ‘El mal manejo de los fondos del INSS’, La Prensa, 3 Jul. 2017; J.A. Silva et al., ‘Se siembra alarma entre pensionados’, El Nuevo Diario, 3 June 2008.

27 W. Miranda Aburto, ‘“Vamos con todo”: filtración desvela que Rosario Murillo ordenó aplastar las protestas en Nicaragua’, Univisión, 21 Nov. 2018; C.F. Chamorro, ‘Habla exsecretaria política FSLN en el Banco Central’, Confidencial, 18 Nov. 2018.

28 Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos Independientes (GIEI) Nicaragua, ‘Informe sobre los hechos de violencia occurridos entre el 18 de abril y el 30 de mayo 2018’.

29 OAS, IACHR, ‘IACHR warns of new wave of repression in Nicaragua’, 18 Oct. 2018; Amnesty International, ‘Shoot to kill’, 18 Oct., 2018, 5.

Nicaraguans themselves were clear that this tradition of rebellion made them unique. When Evo Morales tweeted in defence of Ortega, suggesting that, just as in Venezuela, the Nicaraguan government was the victim of a US-backed coup, Nicaraguan journalist Tifani Roberts derided the possibility of any comparison with Venezuela. ‘No one can tame Nicaraguans,’ she said, ‘They don’t bow their heads, they won’t allow it, they’re brave, they defend themselves, they do not surrender.’³³ Here, we suggest that Nicaraguan ideas of exceptionalism stem from the experience of the revolutionary decade, but Nicaraguans themselves offered a range of theories in their responses to Roberts’ comment. For some, Nicaraguans’ defiance came from Sandino; for others, it was the legacy of rebellious, indigenous blood. Exceptionalism was no longer confined to those who still called themselves Sandinistas.

In the months after the violence began, the discursive tradition of exceptionalism meant that many Nicaraguans did not just hope that they might overthrow a dictatorship once again – they knew that they must, and would. The sense of a duty and moral imperative imposed by the sacrifices of those who came before them was palpable and inescapable. In the week after the violence began, Nicaraguan poet and revolutionary Gioconda Belli wrote of a ‘judgement day’ for Nicaragua’s rulers, and a struggle suffused with the presence the country’s heroes and martyrs:

30 La Prensa, ‘Barrio Sandino, el pequeño Monimbó de Jinotega’, 18 June 2018; E. Reyes, ‘Sitios que fueron resistencia del sandinismo y hoy se levantaron en contra’, Maje, 13 June 2018.

31 C. Lane, ‘Ortega is becoming the sort of autocrat he once despised’, Washington Post, 16 July 2018; J. Webber, ‘A rebel no more, Ortega comes to resemble the dictator he replaced’, Irish Times, 22 Aug. 2018; J. Bauluz, ‘Viewpoint: Ortega’s Nicaragua crisis evokes memories of past’, BBC, 1 Sept. 2018.

32 J.L. Anderson, ‘“Fake news” and unrest in Nicaragua’, New Yorker, 27 Aug. 2018.

33 T. Roberts, Tweet, https://twitter.com/TifaniRoberts/status/994793874873901057?s=19 (accessed 16 Apr. 2019).

The principle that sacrifice denotes political authority has also been passed on to this new generation of protestors. In May, 20-year-old student Lesther Alemán challenged Ortega on the first day of the national dialogue, which was broadcast live. Alemán asserted his right, as a representative of the students, to demand Ortega’s departure, because ‘ nosotros hemos puesto los muertos’ (‘We have provided the dead’).³⁴ His phrasing echoed a dark joke in the 1980s about the power of Conservative elites from the city of Granada which suggested that ‘León provided the dead, Granada provided the ministers’.³⁵

Leonel Delgado has expressed concern about this ‘sacrificial narrative’, and many within the protest movement are aware of the dangers of such an approach.³⁶ For this reason, one of the most popular slogans of the movement has been ‘Free fatherland and life!’, a reformulation, favoured by Sandinista poet Ernesto Cardenal in the early 1980s, of the standard revolutionary slogan ‘Free fatherland or death!’³⁷ But despite this obvious self-awareness, there is still a real danger that the exceptionalism which drives the movement will also be its downfall. Exceptionalism lends itself to Manichean versions of history, it pits pantheons of heroes against pantheons of villains. The current movement has claimed for its own the revolutionary heroes who died before 1979 and consigned to the scrapheap anyone who has collaborated with Ortega in recent years.³⁸ But in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, this new generation will need a much deeper understanding of the exact nature of those mistakes. Many of the most reflective, critical voices in Nicaraguan civil society are fully aware that the only way forward is to seek a much deeper engagement with more nuanced accounts of the past. This book hopes to contribute to that search.

34 El Nuevo Diario, ‘Primer día del diálogo nacional en Nicaragua’.

35 C.M. Vilas, ‘Family affairs: class, lineage and politics in contemporary Nicaragua’ (1992): 309–41, 324.

36 L. Delgado, ‘Fin de Época’, Situación de Nicaragua, 22 Apr. 2018.

37 El País, ‘Ernesto Cardenal inaugurará en Madrid una exposición de arte’, 4 Dec. 1981.

38 See, e.g., the photo of a mural in Rivas, taken by Tom Phillips, in which the faces of Tomás Borge and Daniel Ortega have been defaced, but that of Carlos Fonseca has been left untouched. ‘Ghost resorts: Nicaragua crisis ravages nascent tourism industry’, Guardian, 6 Aug. 2018.

Debating Nicaraguan exceptionalism

Aside from Robert Sierakowski’s contribution, these chapters were finalised just before the violence of 2018 began. They take varying approaches to the subject: some are concerned with the question of whether the concrete gains of the revolution really were exceptional, others explore Nicaraguans’ own exceptionalist beliefs. Throughout, there is a clear connecting thread: a sense of agency. Our findings echo the work of Rosario Montoya in the village of Tule, where local citizens displayed ‘a commitment to active participation in their own lives’ as well as a ‘belief in their capacity to affect the forces that shape their lives and society’ which, she suggests, may be the most durable legacy of the Sandinista Revolution.³⁹

If asked in March 2018, I would not have said that our approach to this legacy was romanticised. Most of the scholars involved in this volume were born around the time of the revolution. We began our professional lives long after the electoral defeat of 1990, and the scholarship in which we immersed ourselves was preoccupied with the failure of the Sandinista project and the reasons for that failure.⁴⁰ Much of what follows conveys the bleak sense of disappointment that has characterised many people’s relationship with the Sandinista Revolution for many years.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that rereading this work in the light of recent events brings different things to the fore. In his account of the Nicaraguan police, Robert Sierakowski draws on Seymour Martin Lipset’s concept of exceptionalism as a double-edged sword. In Sierakowski’s version, exceptionalist beliefs in Nicaragua inculcated the unswerving loyalty and dedication that produced the successes of the National Police in the 1980s and ’90s, but also prepared the ground for the violence of 2018. Similarly, Johannes Wilm writes of the confidence and self-belief that led the FSLN to act as if it were a much larger power on the international stage. A year ago, this posturing was an interesting anomaly that sometimes yielded results. Now, it helps to explain a far more maladjusted and damaging set of behaviours. In December 2018, for example, it looked as though the OAS would invoke its democratic charter against Nicaragua. The FSLN government had precipitated this by closing NGOs and arresting journalists, seemingly oblivious to the inevitable international reaction. Former ambassador José Luis Velásquez noted that the regime ‘was unable to recognise’ the climate of international opinion and the predictable consequences of their actions.⁴¹

39 Montoya, Gendered Scenarios of Revolution, 202.

40 This literature includes, but is not limited to: A. Bendaña, Una tragedia campesina: testimonios de la resistencia (1991); Rodgers, ‘Searching for the time of beautiful madness’; Babb, After Revolution; J.L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912–1979 (1990); O. Núñez Soto and G. Cardenal, La Guerra en Nicaragua (1991); F. Soto Joya, Ventanas en la memoria: recuerdos de la revolución en la frontera agrícola (2011).

It would be a serious mistake, however, to read what follows as nothing more than a cautionary tale about the dangers of fanaticism. My own chapter compares decision-making in two rural communities, one fiercely Sandinista and the other a former bastion of support for the Contras. Both communities exercise considerable agency in different ways, but the Sandinista community, here called El Junco, has developed a profound tradition of community participation and consultation which is clearly rooted in the community’s experience of the revolutionary decade. Here as well, the double-edged sword of exceptionalism is clearly in play. In 2015, one interviewee in El Junco told me that his parents would ‘never ever’ change their support for Ortega, ‘ pase lo que pase’ (‘Whatever happens’). He was not wrong. Some in the village, at great personal risk, have spoken out forcefully against the abuses that began in April 2018. But the majority of Junco residents still support Ortega. The supporters include some close friends who will not talk to me now. This is an experience shared by many Nicaraguans and others with close ties to the country. In a piece in Confidencial, Guadalupe Wallace Salinas describes the anguish caused by conflicts with friends and family members who are still complicit with or supportive of the FSLN regime. ‘Along with the tears,’ she writes, ‘a part of me has gone.’⁴²

It is not straightforward, therefore, to argue that we should listen to these voices. But it is crucial. In their May editorial, the Envío team declared, with not-at-all-concealed exasperation, that surely now the majority of Sandinistas would turn away from Daniel Ortega.⁴³ In fact, many have not, and the reasons for this require our close attention – now more than ever. This book shows clearly that the revolution failed because it could not deal with diversity. Whether it was confronted with young gay and lesbian revolutionaries or poor peasants who wanted their own land, the first FSLN government repeatedly imposed its own ideas of what was required, rather than engaging with the cacophony of voices, histories and ideas that it inherited in 1979.

There is a danger that this same pattern will repeat itself if Daniel Ortega ever steps down. Leading intellectuals and opposition figures in Nicaragua have been quick to condemn continuing support for the FSLN as the product of ignorance and lack of education. The similarity with pronouncements from the FSLN in the early 1980s is uncanny. When Félix Maradiaga suggests that the small percentage of the population which still supports Ortega needs to be ‘rescued from the deceits to which poverty and oppression have condemned them’ he sounds a lot like Tomás Borge in 1980, arguing that ‘it was understandable’ that peasants supported the Contras, because ‘400 years of exploitation and misery which we inherited from Somocismo could not be wiped out in one year of revolution’.⁴⁴ In 2018 Sergio Ramírez went further. The basic problem, he suggested, was that Nicaragua continues to be a ‘rural society’ where a lack of progress and modernity allows dictatorships to flourish.⁴⁵

41 J.I. Espinoza, ‘¿Cuáles son las consecuencias que sufriría Nicaragua con la Carta Democrática de la OEA?’, El Nuevo Diario, 29 Dec. 2018.

42 G. Wallace Salinas, ‘Nicaragua 2018: annus horribilis y annus mirabilis’, Confidencial, 29 Dec. 2018.

43 Envío, ‘Abril 2018: La insurrección de la conciencia’, no. 434, May 2018.

The narrative of exceptionalism divides the world into enlightened fulfillers of moral destiny and ignorant types who hold up the march of progress. That approach obscures the infinite variety of ways in which Nicaraguans experience the present moment and the recent past. It complements and compounds an older set of discourses in which Nicaraguan intellectuals construct ‘good peasants’, who embody the change they want to see in the world, and ‘bad peasants’, who are the scapegoat for the failure to achieve that utopia.⁴⁶ It is these discourses, rather than rurality itself, which have no place in the 21st century.

Five of the eight chapters in this volume relate to the rural experience during and after the revolution. Alongside Rocha and Berth’s chapters on food policy and agrarian reform come three chapters (from Soto, Cooper and myself ) which draw on extensive fieldwork to give an account of the impact of changing relationships with the FSLN at the community level. There is no unity in our findings. Rather, the key contribution of this work is that it demonstrates the profound local and regional differences in the way that the revolution was experienced. A truly rich literature on experience of the revolution in the countryside, if we ever get one, might look something like the historiography of Shining Path and its antecedents in Peru: a complex mosaic of local and national power struggles which puts rural people’s subjective experience of change at the centre of the story.⁴⁷

This book is not only about the rural experience, although we cannot claim to provide a similarly comprehensive treatment of other aspects of the legacy of the revolution. Such an effort would require consideration of the experience of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast, of the history of the army, and of the development of labour politics and trade unions, to name just a few of the most notable omissions. But the book’s rural core is complemented by three chapters which set the book within a wider context: Sierakowski’s work on the police, Wilm’s research with Sandinista activists in León and Babb’s account of the LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer Questioning) movement in Nicaragua since 1979. This combination helps us to think beyond an overly schematic separation of rural and urban experience. We show clearly that no homogenous rural world exists in Nicaragua: there is considerable variety between the rural case studies explored here. At the same time, crossovers and connections can be perceived between particular rural case studies and particular urban ones: we can see similarities between the single-minded devotion of Sierakowski’s urban police recruits and the attitude of community activists noted by Wilm and myself in León and El Junco respectively. Babb’s LGBTQ revolutionaries experience a tension between personal awakening and emotional investment in the revolution, tempered by a revolutionary state that coopts, manipulates and denies their true identity. There is much in that account which resonates with Soto’s haunting, bleak rendition of the experience of Sandinista-supporting peasants on the agricultural frontier.

44 F. Maradiaga, Tweet, 30 July 2018, https://twitter.com/maradiaga/status/1023713856676290560 (accessed 16 Apr. 2019); ‘Twenty-five peasants detained in Quilalí [sic] cleared’, Radio Sandino, 4 Aug. 1980, Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

45 F.J. Larios, ‘Sergio Ramírez: “Quiero transformar las cifras en rostros”’, El Nuevo Herald, 28 Sept. 2018.

46 L. Delgado Aburto, ‘Desplazamientos discursivos de la representación campesina en la Nicaragua pre y post-sandinista’, Latinoamérica: Revistas de estudios latinomericanos, no. 58; L. Serra, ‘El movimiento social nicaragüense por la defensa de la tierra, el agua y la soberanía’ (2016), is a good example of the kind of homogenising, ahistorical approach which is common: a single rebellious peasant consciousness is attributed to an inheritance passed down from ancestors who fought the Spanish conquistadores and participated in Sandino’s war against the US occupation in the 1920s and 1930s, among others.

47 See, e.g., S.J. Stern (ed.), Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru 1980–1995 (1998); K. Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (2012); J. Puente, ‘La “massacre” de Ondores: reforma, comunidad y violencia en la Sierra Central (1969–1979)’ (2016).

Robert Sierakowski’s account of the Sandinista National Police, which opens the book, provides its starkest analysis of the dangers of exceptionalism. As elsewhere, there is an emphasis on the perception of power that the revolution brought, the changes wrought by a generation of young police cadets who saw themselves as ‘the vanguard of the emerging socialist society ... [with] a transcendent mission that emphasised sacrifice, solidarity, humanism and human rights’. The case of the police service stands out, however: Sierakowski shows that this voluntaristic faith was translated into a tangible structural change in terms of a commitment to community policing and a strong institutional culture which scorned self-interest. This laid the foundations for a system of policing which successfully eradicated the endemic violence of the Somoza years. Ultimately, however, the success and sacrifice of the 1980s and ’90s only serve to demonstrate the immensity of the police force’s subsequent fall from grace. Sierakowski argues that the exceptionalist tradition made it easier for Ortega to use the police as a tool of state repression.

Fernanda Soto’s account of Sandinista peasants in Mulukukú is equally preoccupied with the question of what has been lost, but she also turns her attention to what might still remain. Soto begins with the story of a recent murder, the alleged killing of a prominent landowner by a mozo, or labourer. Could it be, she asks, that it was because of the revolution that ‘ mozos are not like they were before’ – less deferential, less willing to suffer provocation in silence? Her answer to that question sets the tone for much of what follows: many of the achievements of the revolution proved to be ephemeral, partly because of the incalculable impact of the Contra War, but also because present and past interactions with the FSLN have reaped a harvest of inequality and corruption. However, she notes that, despite their wartime experiences, most of her informants continue to support the revolution, which ‘opened a space for Nicaraguans to imagine themselves and their society in new ways’.

The sense that personal empowerment is the revolution’s chief legacy is reinforced by Christiane Berth’s chapter on the Sandinista food policy. Berth rejects the standard view, which attributes Nicaragua’s nutritional crisis to the cuts of the neoliberal era after 1990. In fact, she argues, calorie intakes had already plummeted to the levels of the 1950s in the last years of the revolutionary decade. In the honeymoon years immediately after the revolution, the Sandinistas had sought to achieve self-sufficiency in basic foods, and the Nicaraguan programme was promoted by NGOs and international organisations as a model for food policy in the Global South. Ultimately though, this effort was unsuccessful, and Nicaragua’s record regarding food policy cannot be regarded as exceptional. A number of factors, including the pressure of the Contra War and the economic blockade, as well as policy errors and increasing tensions between the Sandinista government and the peasantry, led to an increasingly severe subsistence crisis in the years after 1985. Berth argues that the present FSLN government’s policies are a pale imitation of the programmes of the revolutionary era, because they do not include any attempt to make profound changes in economic structures or land distribution. Nonetheless, she suggests that civil society activism in Nicaragua, particularly the campaign for a food sovereignty law in the early 2000s, is evidence of the continuing existence of a vibrant network of peasant organisations, a direct legacy of the revolution itself.

In his chapter on Sandinista relations with the Eastern Bloc, Johannes Wilm seeks to define and explain the ways in which agency is understood within Sandinismo. Drawing on interviews with Sandinista activists in León and elsewhere, Wilm deploys the Nicaraguan term ‘protagonismo’ to describe this set of ideas. He makes a direct link between Sandinista activists’ protagonismo and their faith in Nicaraguan exceptionalism, and shows how activists’ belief in Nicaraguans’ superior political consciousness and organisational skills lead them to perceive their country as one that can act as the equal of any major power. In the eyes of these activists, Nicaragua is exceptional compared to the other countries of Central America, countries which are still bound to the United States by the chains of economic dependency. Wilm is careful to note that he is concerned with perceptions of exceptionalism, rather than the question of whether these beliefs reflect reality. Nonetheless, he suggests that the Sandinistas’ enduring confidence on the world stage has had a tangible effect on the country’s foreign relations: in recent years, just by insisting on its right to a strong alliance with Russia, Nicaragua has obtained something that seemed impossible.

In his account of Nicaragua’s agrarian reform, José Luis Rocha suggests that the events of the revolutionary decade have left rural Nicaraguans with a particular sense of agency and capacity for organisation. But he takes pains to point out that this legacy is not the result of a deliberate plan executed by the FSLN government in the 1980s, but rather the product of a number of shifts in policy forced by opposition to the government in the countryside and the circumstances of the Contra War. The initially slow pace of agrarian reform, and a tendency to privilege large state farms over small-scale peasant production, created tensions between the government and landless peasants, which helped to accelerate support for the counter-revolution in rural Nicaragua. In later years, the distribution of small plots to peasant producers was emphasised, which helped to reduce rural support for the Contras. The piecemeal and contradictory nature of the reforms, combined with the pressures of war, meant that changes to land tenure were only partial. In many instances these were easily reversed after the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat in 1990. Despite this, Rocha argues that agrarian reform did have lasting, tangible legacies which continue to make Nicaragua exceptional. A culture of cooperativism and the strength of peasant organisation have created particularly fruitful conditions for the development of fair-trade schemes in recent years. An existing knowledge of, and predisposition towards, ‘democratic’ cultivation has made Nicaragua a world leader in the fair-trade coffee market.

Rocha’s overview of the revolution’s legacy in the countryside is followed by two case studies which explore the impact of the revolution at the community level. My own chapter considers structures of decision-making in two rural communities: one is predominantly Sandinista and the other had strong ties to the Contras in the 1980s and has historically always voted for parties of the right. It suggests that the revolution allowed rural Sandinistas to develop a strong culture of local organisation and decision-making, a culture that persists to this day. However, it also points to the divisive effect of this legacy: communities that supported the Contras developed very different structures for decision-making, and these different legacies, in addition to the experience of the war itself, continue to set communities apart.

In his ethnography of the Segovian village of Gualiqueme, David Cooper argues that community members’ sense of the legacy of the revolution is predicated upon a particular set of beliefs about what constitutes social change and how it is achieved. For Cooper, community residents are not primarily concerned with the wider social hierarchies that preoccupy NGOs and activists who work with the community. Rather, they think in terms of inclusion and exclusion, and hope to strengthen Gualiqueme’s links with redistributive networks in the wider world. Seen in this light, Cooper suggests, the villagers’ continuing support for Daniel Ortega’s social programmes, and their continuing faith in the positive legacy of the revolution, make perfect sense. Villagers prize their ongoing relationship with Ortega and the FSLN because of the party’s ability to bind the community more tightly with wider flows of material wealth.

In the book’s final chapter, Florence Babb explores the revolution’s equivocal record in relation to the LGBTQ movement. She argues that by the early 1990s Nicaragua was ‘a regional leader in LGBTQ activism and cultural development’, but she also notes the considerable difficulties that LGBTQ people continue to face in Nicaraguan society today. Babb suggests that this ambiguous outcome is rooted in the two faces of Nicaraguan exceptionalism. The revolution brought new encounters and freedoms that provided many with opportunities for self-discovery. The experience of organising in the revolution also allowed activists to develop ‘the strategic tools necessary to develop a way of struggling for sexual rights’. At the same time, the heteronormative ethos of the revolution, and the emphasis on state-based development, placed restrictions on autonomous initiatives for change, restrictions which are also apparent in the actions of the current FSLN administration.

In his prescient conclusion to this volume, written before the outbreak of violence in 2018, Justin Wolfe notes the fragility of the apparent consensus forged by the FSLN. He wonders whether the legacies of the revolution will provide the necessary springboard for change when the status quo inevitably crumbles. At the time of writing, Nicaraguans are bitterly divided on that question. For every young protestor who claims the ideals and tactics of the revolution as their own, there is another Nicaraguan who regards the violence of 2018 as yet another reason to obliterate all traces of the Sandinista past once and for all. Future debates about the legacy of the revolution will be belligerent and near-impossible to resolve, but they are nonetheless preferable to the silence about the traumas of the 1970s and 80s that has prevailed for the last thirty years. Any new consensus will require a nuanced and unflinching attempt to reckon with Nicaragua’s recent history. We hope that this book will contribute in some small way to that essential task.

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