The Sandinista Revolution, Reconsidered

In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, ending a forty-two-year-old family dynasty and marking the first time that socialist revolutionaries seized control of a Latin American country since the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

The Sandinistas remained in power for more than a decade, despite internal divisions and civil war against United States-backed, anti-communist Contra militias thwarting their lofty promises of land reform and income redistribution. Then, in 1990, one of their leaders, presidential incumbent Daniel Ortega, lost an election to the opposition’s Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who died at age 95 earlier this year.

Although this defeat signified the end of Sandinista rule, the Sandinistas themselves survived, albeit in name only. Ortega, abandoning the group’s progressive views in favor of conservative Christian values, re-secured the presidency in 2007. By suppressing dissent and concentrating power within his family—he now rules alongside his co-president wife, Rosario Murillo—his increasingly dictatorial and dynastic regime has brought the story of the Nicaraguan Revolution full circle.

To this day, the FSLN’s rise to power and subsequent clash with the Contras is described as a proxy war: an outlet for the larger battle waged between the US and the Soviet Union. Mateo Jarquín, an assistant professor of history at Chapman University and Chamorro’s grandson, challenges this reading. His 2024 book The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, published by the University of North Carolina Press and available through JSTOR’s Path to Open program, argues interpretation of events in Nicaragua overestimates the significance of US involvement while simultaneously underestimating the agency of the Sandinistas. Chapter six, “The Nicaraguan Question in International Affairs,” is freely available now.

Yes, the Revolution succeeded in part because President Jimmy Carter, a champion of human rights in the wake of the Vietnam War, distanced himself from the Somoza family. And yes, the clash with the Contras erupted in part because Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, wanted to reestablish a toehold in the Americas. Yet, these plot points obscure a larger, more complicated narrative. “A narrow focus on US foreign policy,” warns Jarquín, “cannot tell us why there was a revolution in Nicaragua, what its leaders hoped to accomplish, or how they set about the messy business of remaking a country.”

A closer look at these events doesn’t reinforce so much as break down Cold War dichotomies. While attacked by Washington, the FSLN enjoyed the sympathy and support of many American allies, including Western European democracies sympathetic to their revolutionary commitment to social welfare. Sandinista ideology blended Marxism, liberalism, and nationalism, borrowing ideas from both sides of the Iron Curtain. And its architects saw no contradiction between revolutionary policy and democratic governance. Why, then, did Ortega abandon both?

Tim Brinkhof: Many of your family members have occupied and continue to occupy influential positions in Nicaragua in politics and media. What measures did you take to remain unbiased in researching and writing this book?

Mateo Jarquín: The Sandinista Revolution, and the counterrevolution, was like a vortex that drew in every Nicaraguan family. Even those of us too young to have lived through it were caught in the maelstrom. So, while my situation is unique in many respects, every Nicaraguan scholar approaching this topic has to interrogate their assumptions and positionality.

One shared challenge is the tendency among Nicaraguans to view the Revolution as something that must be either celebrated or condemned, when in fact it’s more useful to approach it as something to be explained and understood. I recently read an essay by Richard Evans, a leading historian of Nazi Germany, in which he wrote that “the historian is not a prosecutor and history is not a court.” My hope was to write something people with vastly different experiences and memories of the Revolution could still engage with, even if they disagree with my framing, methods, or conclusions.

Your scholarship focuses heavily on the actions and beliefs of the Sandinista leadership. Is this focus a consequence of the documents and interview subjects available to you, or is the Revolution best understood by studying its principal revolutionaries?

Both. I was trained in diplomatic history with an emphasis on elite political decision-making and the analysis of government archives, oral histories with leaders, correspondence between officials, records of high-level meetings, and so on. So, when I started this project, those were the kinds of sources I instinctively turned to.

At the same time, I also felt a history of “high politics” in the Nicaraguan Revolution was necessary. Although the conflict unleashed unprecedented levels of popular participation, key decisions were still being made at the top of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The country was at war, and diplomatic factors often shaped domestic outcomes.

Moreover, I think that scholars interested in producing cultural, social, or economic histories of the Sandinista period would benefit from having a clear political framework. A lot of brilliant work on the Revolution was produced in the 1980s and 1990s, but we still lack a unified account that proposes a basic chronology, identifies key actors, and addresses major questions of how power was held and distributed over time. One of the book’s goals was to help create a point of reference that future scholars can build on, challenge, or revise.

You write that “Nicaragua provides one of only two examples of a socialist revolution toppling an American-backed dictatorship in Latin America.” How did the FSLN prevail where other socialist movements did not, especially given that the Sandinista Front was less known than other revolutionary groups prior to its 1979 victory? Was their relative obscurity an advantage?

There’s a rich literature in political science and comparative political sociology that explores this question. Scholars point to many factors, but one key point of consensus is this: the FSLN succeeded in building an ideologically plural, multi-class coalition against the old regime. They didn’t come to power solely on the backs of urban workers or the rural poor. They had support from legal opposition parties, segments of the Catholic Church, and parts of the business class.

They also built alliances with a wide range of international actors, including not only Castro’s Cuba but also the governments of Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, and Costa Rica, as well as non-state actors from across the continent. No other guerrilla organization in the post-Cuban Revolution era leveraged that combination of domestic and international support so effectively.

Their relative obscurity may have also been an advantage. Had they been more visible earlier, they might have developed a more rigid ideological profile, which could have limited their coalition-building capacity. Instead, they appeared malleable—both to Nicaraguans and to outsiders. Everyone saw in the Sandinistas what they wanted to see. The youth of their leadership, and the sense that they had emerged from nowhere, only heightened the feeling of political renewal and rupture with the past.

You note that the Sandinistas—who came to power through revolution—wound up handing power over peacefully in 1990. How do you understand that?

Critics of the Revolution tend to attribute that outcome to chance and circumstance. Defenders tend to see it as a reflection of the Sandinistas’ values and political maturity. In truth, each side underestimates the relevance of the other’s perspective.

My book tries to bridge that gap. It builds on earlier scholarship that explores the tension and interplay between the Sandinistas’ ideological commitments and the constraints of governance; between structural forces and contingent developments. Understanding that balance is key to explaining how such an unexpected political outcome became possible.

While the Sandinistas were a cause célèbre abroad, at home they struggled to realize the social change they had promised. Why do you think that has been the case, and how has the way they are remembered affected contemporary Nicaraguan politics?

US intervention in Central America amplified the Sandinistas’ global profile. Beyond creating an alluring “David vs. Goliath” narrative, it provoked major diplomatic crises in Europe and Latin America and invited more Soviet bloc involvement than might have occurred otherwise.

But there was more to it. The Sandinistas, who promised redistributive reforms within a framework of representative democracy, had a rare ability to appeal across a wide ideological spectrum. Globally, all kinds of left-of-center observers—liberals, socialists, social democrats, Cuban and Soviet-aligned actors—found something in the Nicaraguan experiment that resonated with their own visions.

Critics called it opportunism. I’d argue instead that it reflected a genuine diversity of ideological impulses within the FSLN. The Sandinistas, most of whom were quite young when they came to power, drew from both liberal and Marxist sources. They governed improvisationally, not always knowing exactly who they were or wanted to be. That proved to be both a strength and a weakness.

Many political movements in Latin America revolve around (and are named for) charismatic leaders: Zapatismo, Chavismo, etc. Historians call this caudillismo—a system of rule by a political boss. To what extent did Nicaragua fall prey to it during the Sandinista period?

Sandinista leaders were acutely aware of this dynamic in Nicaraguan political culture. In part to avoid replicating it, they instituted a form of collective leadership during the Revolution, led by the FSLN’s nine-man National Directorate. In that sense, it differed from the Cuban model, where power revolved around Fidel’s cult of personality.

But that approach didn’t entirely overcome the problem. The Revolution still celebrated charismatic leaders from the struggle against Somoza—figures who, not coincidentally, were guerrilla leaders whose authority stemmed from heroism in armed struggle and whose instrument of politics was violence. That military aspect is important to the historical phenomenon of caudillismo.

After the Revolution ended and Nicaragua transitioned to a multi-party democratic system, that culture of personalist leadership persisted. Instead of building strong political parties with coherent platforms, the country ended up with rival caudillos— Sandinista on the left and anti-Sandinista on the right.

When the FSLN returned to power, it further consolidated into a vertically controlled apparatus with little ideological or programmatic coherence. Everything revolves around the image and interests of Daniel Ortega, the secretary general.

You write that “one departure from the Cold War period is the relative disinternationalization of Central American politics. Central American countries today are more deeply integrated in the global economy than ever before. But their politics are less salient on the international scene.” How did we move from the global ramifications of the Sandinista Revolution to this current situation?

The Sandinista Revolution and the revolutionary upheavals of the 1980s more broadly held symbolic global importance because of the Cold War. Once the superpower conflict subsided, it became clear in retrospect that tiny Nicaragua had never posed a serious threat to US national security and that the outcomes of civil wars there or in El Salvador and Guatemala were not relevant to the American economy or way of life.

In other words, contrary to what American diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick once claimed, Central America was never really “the most important area in the world” for the United States, at least not in terms of core national interests. And as the superpowers moved on from Cold War battlefields, the ideological paradigms that had once made Central American revolutions feel globally significant faded with them.

Full-scale armed conflicts in Central America appear now to be a thing of the past. Why?

During the Cold War, if you wanted to overthrow a government, you might count on the backing of a superpower or on transnational revolutionary networks. There were also strong ideological motivations for taking power. That geopolitical context no longer exists.

That said, armed conflict in Central America long predates the Cold War, so this is a relatively modest change in the broader sweep of regional history. And, of course, while large-scale wars are gone, violence in other forms—criminal, state-sponsored, and political—has not disappeared.

You write that nowadays, “Central American governments studiously avoid condemning their neighbors’ human rights abuses. In fact, they appear to learn from and imitate one another.” What have countries such as El Salvador learned from Nicaragua following the Sandinista period?

Central America’s democracies have always been fragile, but none have unraveled as swiftly or completely as Nicaragua’s. A notable aspect of backsliding under Daniel Ortega is that he consolidated a dictatorship without altering the market economy inherited from right-wing predecessors. As such, one lesson other Central American elites have drawn from his regime is that capitalism in the isthmus can thrive without democracy.

They also borrowed a nationalist “us vs. them” narrative that casts students, journalists, intellectuals, human rights defenders, and civil society in general as agents of foreign intervention. In 2018, Ortega broke new ground in Latin American politics by lethally suppressing mostly peaceful protests with police and paramilitary forces. He ultimately got away with it; the international community proved either unwilling or unable to respond meaningfully.

There is widespread concern that Ortega’s rule will usher in a new dynasty in the vein of the Somozas. Do you share that concern?

A few months after the book came out, the FSLN reformed the Nicaraguan Constitution to replace the presidency with a “co-presidency” shared by Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo. So, the idea of a dynastic succession is no longer hypothetical—it’s in progress.

The question now is what happens when Ortega dies. Will the FSLN base, the old guard, the military, and other institutions rally behind Murillo? No one can predict the outcome. So far, though, the succession plan has proceeded without significant internal resistance.

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