After the Sandinistas took power in 1979 as only the second armed leftist movement to do so in Latin America, the small country of Nicaragua became the center of the world. Twenty years after the Cuban Revolution, what would a new socialist revolution in the Americas mean?
Mateo Jarquín’s impressive The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History argues that the revolution “was shaped by how it fit into the global picture.” The book demonstrates how this global picture was key to the Sandinistas’ rise, and in many ways, their endurance. Yet, it also constrained what the revolution could do and ultimately limited the political, social, and economic reforms possible.
The book’s first section shows how Latin American actors “bought stock” in the FSLN’s fight against the U.S.-backed Somoza regime in order to try to shape the Nicaraguan state post-revolution. Jarquín convincingly shows that the Sandinistas succeeded because regional actors wanted them to succeed. Somoza’s instability and the simmering resistance in Nicaragua were a liability to regional leaders who feared war would spread and precipitate another U.S. intervention.
Amidst different ideological orientations and national interests, Panama’s Omar Torrijos, Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez, Costa Rica’s Rodrigo Carazo Odio, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Mexico’s José Lopéz Portillo united to support the Sandinistas with weapons, territory, money, and advice. Twenty years after the Cuban revolution, regional priorities had shifted: nobody wanted “another Cuba,” but for these leaders, it was more important to constrain U.S. power and promote Latin American political visions for the hemisphere, which required bringing Cuba into the “fellowship” of supporters of the Sandinistas. In a twist unexpected by Latin American allies and the Sandinistas alike, the revolutionaries won a total military defeat of the Somoza regime rather than a negotiated political settlement. This outcome afforded the Sandinistas more power in the post-Somoza landscape than their investors had bargained for and threw the shape of the new state into question.
Contrary to their promises of political pluralism, upon taking power, the Sandinistas did not immediately hold elections. Their logic—that armed victory equated to popular sovereignty and that citizens’ participation in mass organizations was a form of “direct democracy”— echoed the Cuban playbook. In terms of a new foreign policy, the Sandinistas pursued non-alignment, closer ties to the socialist camp, and the direct support of the Soviet Union. As the second part of the book details, the Sandinistas relied on foreign diplomacy to gain military support and international legitimacy, both essential to the revolution’s survival—especially as Nicaragua became embroiled in war.
As part of a new generation of historians writing about the war who did not themselves live through it, Jarquín articulates a careful both/and argument: The Contra insurgency was both a form of foreign intervention and a result of the adverse effects of Sandinista policy on landholding peasants in particular.
Shortly after taking power, the Sandinista Army was forced to mobilize to fight the growing number of U.S.-backed, anti-government counterrevolutionaries, or Contras. In the book’s third section, Jarquín looks to balance the domestic and international factors of the Contra War, eventually arguing that it was a “kind of civil war,” organized and financed by the United States but fueled by the local populations’ discontent. As part of a new generation of historians writing about the war who did not themselves live through it, Jarquín articulates a careful both/and argument: The Contra insurgency was both a form of foreign intervention and a result of the adverse effects of Sandinista policy on landholding peasants in particular.
In order to better understand the war and its repercussions, Jarquín looks at regional and global diplomatic responses, which overwhelmingly rejected the Contras. Unwilling to line up behind U.S. fears of a “communist threat” in the hemisphere, countries like Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia led a peacebuilding effort known as Contadora. The group, which excluded the United States, sought to promote a new vision of hemispheric relations in which the United States would not be the sole arbiter of which governments were to be accepted within the inter-American system. But to what extent did this regional challenge to U.S. unilateralism actually help the Sandinistas? While Jarquín argues that regional and global involvement frustrated the Reagan administration’s ability to determine the Sandinistas’ fate, regional diplomatic support and aid also came with pressure to establish representative institutions and to tread carefully with Cuba, the USSR, and the socialist bloc. Demands to hold elections eventually contributed to the Sandinista project’s unraveling. Regional aid, both material and diplomatic, was also never sufficient, which forced the Sandinistas to rely further on help from the USSR and Eastern Bloc, a move that alienated more moderate Latin American allies.
While Jarquín importantly pushes the Contra War and its eventual resolution beyond an exclusive U.S.-Nicaragua dyad, the international dimensions of the counterrevolutionary movement could have been expanded further. How the internationalization of the Nicaraguan revolution reached peasants and popular classes remains largely unaddressed. These threads, while beyond the book’s explicit focus on the Sandinista elite and foreign policy, are essential to understanding how the Nicaraguan revolution fits into the global picture.
The book’s fourth section details how the Sandinistas turned to a diplomatic solution to end the war in the second half of the 1980s as the country’s economy began its downward spiral. Together with four other Central American countries, the Sandinistas signed the Esquipulas Accords in 1987, which required talks with insurgents and a transition to liberal democracy in exchange for non-intervention from Nicaragua’s neighbors. The election of Óscar Arias (1986-1990) in Costa Rica marked the beginning of the end of the country’s tolerance for Contra camps within its territory. Arias also helped convince leaders of Honduras and El Salvador, who had collaborated closely with the United States and the Contras, to reintegrate Nicaragua. While the accords granted legitimacy to the Sandinistas, they also sowed the seeds for their fall from power. In the elections required by the accords, former Sandinista turned opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro was elected, a result respected by the government of Daniel Ortega.
Nicaragua’s tumultuous late 1980s led it to have an important place in the late Cold War. It was also deeply affected by a changing international context: the decline of communism and retreat of the Soviet Union forced the Sandinistas to negotiate and “changed the revolution from without.” I found this section particularly enlightening, as the 1980s generally get lumped into one era. But Jarquín details how different things looked by the second half of the decade—both regionally and globally—and centers Central America as a key location to understand the debates about insurgency, democracy, and the future of the left during the twilight years of the Cold War. The democratic transition came about as an answer to an armed insurgency that could neither win nor be vanquished.
The memories of former Sandinista leaders are now at risk of being forgotten for reasons beyond missing documents. Jarquín’s book includes interviews with former leaders who are now in exile or under arrest by the current regime of Daniel Ortega
The Sandinista Revolution is based on impressive research. As scholars of the revolution know, traditional archives from the revolution do not exist; one must rely on a mosaic of sources. Fortunately for Jarquín, Alejandro Bendaña, the secretary general of the Sandinistas’ Ministry of Foreign Relations, offered him access to his personal archive containing documents from the ministry, which might be the only remaining documents from the Nicaraguan side. Jarquín also conducted scores of oral history interviews with former Sandinista leaders and read closely the memoirs of many former leaders, which collectively add texture and insight to the Sandinista point of view that is lost in the traditional archive.
The memories of former Sandinista leaders are now at risk of being forgotten for reasons beyond missing documents. Jarquín’s book, whose process of research and writing spans the 2018 protests in Nicaragua, includes interviews with former leaders who are now in exile or under arrest by the current regime of Daniel Ortega. Henry ‘Modesto’ Ruiz was put under house arrest in March. Sergio Ramírez, another key interview subject of Jarquín’s, remains in exile in Spain. The Ortega regime stripped him, along with 400 other Nicaraguans, of citizenship in 2023. Jarquín’s work thus helps us understand both the legacies of the Sandinista revolution and how it spawned its own forms of authoritarianism that must today be confronted.
Emily Snyder is the Assistant Director of the CASA-Cuba program in Havana. She was previously the Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge. Her book, Caribbean Internationalisms: Cuba, Nicaragua, and the United States in the Cold War Caribbean, is under contract with University of California Press.