Goliath’s global David

Nicaragua wrong-footed the empire by attracting international support. Review: The Sandinista Revolution, Mateo Jarquín, by Gavin O'Toole

The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History, Mateo Jarquín, 2024, University of North Carolina Press

It is relatively easy to discern the hazy movements of US imperialism in Central America, where the hegemon can be considered less a blurred finger stirring the jungle mist and more a tense thumb pressing on an insect.

The reasons for this are self-evident: the sub-region comprises tiny countries with a combined population of just 52 million people and a GDP eclipsed 70 times by the behemoth in the north. Central American states are very small, very weak, and very divided.

It is therefore also easy to assume that whenever one of these countries has been convulsed by a radical insurgency or revolution, the outcome has been determined in Washington.

Radical ambitions hang in the balance, redistribution awaits an audit. The question quickly becomes the degree to which Caesar approves—or, more likely, disapproves—of efforts in the unruly provinces to pursue meaningful change.

This perspective is a reflex on the left and an assumption made so often by historians of the Cold War, yet Nicaragua has consistently demonstrated its limitations—even if the Sandinista Revolution became an obsession in Washington, which pulled out all the stops to sabotage it.

One reason for acknowledging that Nicaragua’s role in this drama was more that of a rising star than merely a bit part in a tale of two superpowers, argues Mateo Jarquín, is that its miniature experiment in democracy and redistribution was played out on a global stage. Despite the best efforts of Washington to hog the limelight, the Sandinista Revolution attracted a large and receptive international audience.

From an historical point of view, the reflex to consider Nicaragua’s revolution solely through the ripples it created in the north distorts its terms of reference and does a disservice to the brave men and women who tried to change their country for the better.

As Jarquín writes: “The conventional view of the Cold War as a conflict between great powers sometimes leads to an under-appreciation of small states’ own interests, autonomy, and capacity to influence events. This is especially true in the Americas. In a historical context of overwhelming US dominance, Latin American countries are sometimes perceived as passively reacting to the policies and whims of the regional hegemon.”

Critically, Jarquín situates Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) rule between 1979 and the 1990s in a global context, rather than the limited sphere of US bilateral relations.

His work forms part of a reassessment of this period—led by Latin Americanists—that is informing “new Cold War histories” which conceive of a global ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism involving Asian, African, and Middle Eastern leaders as much as those in Europe and North America.

He writes: “Nicaragua, like all other countries in the Western Hemisphere, does not exist in a vacuum with the United States. Beyond key socialist partners like the Soviet Union and Cuba, state and non-state actors from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East saw something relevant at play in Central America’s Cold War conflicts and involved themselves in ways that shaped the Nicaraguan revolutionary process.”

That said, there is little doubt the US did it worst to keep Nicaragua under its thumb.

Victory by the FSLN against the vile Somoza dynasty in 1979 greatly alarmed ascendant neoconservatives, with Ronald Reagan eventually warning apocalyptically that Marxist-Leninist “malignancy in Managua” brought the Soviet threat to America’s “doorstep”.

He began to fund, arm and train the Contra counter-revolutionary insurgents, engulfing Nicaragua in civil war—or a proxy invasion, if you prefer—as the CIA engaged in sabotage. The US compounded its aggression with economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation.

At one level, then, a focus on imperialism is justified, especially in the context of events now unfolding elsewhere: Nicaragua can broaden our understanding of US hegemonic meddling from Latin America to Iraq and Afghanistan, while enlightening American citizens about the staggering acts of hypocrisy undertaken by their governments. The Nicaraguan counter-revolution, for example, also sowed the seeds of the Iran-Contra scandal, by which arms were sold to Iran to fund the Contras off the books.

It is without doubt that US policies had a decisive impact on the revolution, blunting policymaking and greatly weakening Nicaragua. And when all’s said and done, and despite having been a key figure in the 1979 anti-Somoza alliance and a member of the revolutionary government’s first junta, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who defeated her former Sandinista allies in 1990, did so with the backing of Washington.

But at another level, as Jarquín observes from the reflections of Robert Kagan—a State Department staffer during the Reagan years—the controversy “was not about Nicaragua at all. It was a battle to define America at home and abroad”.

One reason for that was timing: the Sandinistas achieved global significance and symbolic influence because of the singular role they played at a key moment in the Cold War.

Jarquín writes: “It was the last gasp of armed revolution—a historical climax, as FSLN leader Sergio Ramírez noted in his memoir, for an entire generation who admired Lumumba and Guevara, read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, celebrated decolonisation in Asia and Africa, protested in 1968, and believed in socialism as holding the key to modernity and development.”

The Sandinistas’ urge to combine Marxism with liberal democratic traits fed the appetite for a “third way” in Cold War politics, especially in Europe, ignited the imagination of a generation of younger radicals, and turned Nicaragua into an essential destination on the itinerary for virtue-signalling progressive tourists.

Nicaragua’s diplomats pursued parallel policies of non-alignment while edging closer to Cuba and the Warsaw Pact, as forces in the middle such as western European democracies worked to prevent the revolution inflaming superpower tensions.

Western Europe was ripe for a narrative that challenged US swagger, believing that Reagan’s swashbuckling conceit recklessly destabilised world affairs and would simply push Nicaragua into the arms of the socialist camp.

Elsewhere, the diverse and eclectic Sandinista leadership had much in common with contemporaries who had led decolonising revolutions in Asia and Africa—they were nationalists who sought modernity and national liberation in a quagmire of underdevelopment and imperialism.

The revolution’s symbolism was especially pronounced in Latin America, where many on the left saw it as payback for the stolen hopes a few short years earlier of Allende’s Chile, by then in the grip of a malignant military dictatorship. The Sandinistas set a hemispheric agenda and influenced debates on sovereignty and democracy at a time when Latin American countries had grown impatient with brutal, US-backed military rule.

The implications were profound in Central America, a sub-region convulsed by insurgent and counterinsurgent violence in the 1970s and 1980s, where a slogan soon echoed through the overcrowded graveyards: “Nicaragua ayer, El Salvador hoy, Guatemala mañana.”

By stepping outside a limited focus on big power politics to look at the global position of the Sandinista Revolution, Jarquín highlights important lessons from this David and Goliath story.

First, he draws attention to the limits of American power. While US policymakers were influential in Nicaragua, the author argues that they never enjoyed the level of control they wanted, and Managua increasingly began to recognise the local roots of the Contra as opposed to its US levers.

Second, while Nicaragua was at constant risk from the US, the struggle between socialism and capitalism offered a broad coalition of support—from the Soviet bloc and national liberation movements in Asia and Africa to social democrats in Europe.

Third, Latin American governments themselves responded to the threat to their shared interests posed by US meddling in Central America with a rare exercise in regional autonomy that would have important consequences—the Contadora process.

This multilateral peace framework premised on traditional shared values of non-intervention and respect for national sovereignty failed to end violence in the sub-region, but isolated the policy of the main protagonist, Washington, in the international arena. In so doing, it partially legitimised Managua’s leftwing government, while damaging Reagan’s toxic narrative—a key diplomatic objective of the Sandinistas.

Finally, the Nicaraguan experience was evidence that for Latin America’s revolutionary tradition to have any continuity in the post–Cold War world, it would have to opt for democracy: all leftwing movements that have come to power since have done so.

If Jarquín is not fulsome in his praise of the Sandinista Revolution’s ultimately “ambiguous” legacies, especially in terms of poverty—and is scathing of the growing similarities between Somoza and the dynastic dictatorship created by Daniel Ortega—he is clear that this momentous event may offer us a vantage today for understanding the end of the “post-Cold War era” as the commitment to democracy of former transitions decays.

He writes that “it is worth noting that the post–Cold War period has started to look as conducive to authoritarianism as what came before. Across both periods, progress on the generation and more equal distribution of wealth has been achingly slow. Nicaragua, specifically, remains one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.”