Carlos Fonseca and the Construction of Sandinismo in Nicaragua

Abstract

Ernesto “Che” Guevara hoy, Augusto Cesar Sandino ayer, marcan con heroismo la indispensable rota guerrillera que habra de conducir a los pueblos victimas del imperialismo a la posesión absoluta de sus propios destinos. Carlos Fonseca Sandino, guerrillero proletario Carlos Fonseca's unequivocal bracketing of Augusto Sandino's political project with that of Latin America's premier Marxist revolutionary would have shocked most readers when it was written in 1972. In this and other seminal essays, one of the three founders of Nicaragua's Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) formally integrated Sandino the historical figure into the ideology of their revolutionary struggle. Sandino had fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. forces occupying Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. His assassination in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza's henchmen ushered in a forty-five-year dynastic dictatorship by a succession of Somozas. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, until Fonseca died in combat against the Guardia Nacional in 1976, his writings guided the FSLN's resurrecting and reconstructing of the image of Sandino in order to reshape it into the dominant symbol of a powerful revolutionary ideology.