2. Some History¶
Core Argument¶
After independence from the Mexican Empire, the United Provinces of Central America attempted to establish a Federal Republic under Francisco Morazán in 1824, but this project was obstructed by church privileges and conservative caudillos. Nicaraguan oligarchs subsequently launched a civil war that balkanised the region into unviable mini-states. The United States exploited this division to control inter-oceanic trade routes, orchestrating Panama’s independence in 1903 to secure perpetual sovereignty over the Canal Zone. Nicaragua was considered strategically essential for an alternative canal route; US marines invaded four times between 1896 and 1912, remaining for over two decades to ensure stability in return for not competing with Panama.
The introduction of coffee created a new bourgeoisie that appropriated Church, communal and public land. In 1909, the landed oligarchy, in a feudal-imperialist alliance, backed a US overthrow of the government, after which American banks gained financial control. Augusto Cesar Sandino began a nationalist guerrilla struggle in 1927, arguing that only workers and peasants could carry through national liberation. The US created and trained the National Guard, which used terror tactics. Sandino was executed in 1934, paving the way for the Somoza dictatorship. The cotton boom after 1949 accelerated mechanisation and dispossessed campesinos, who were forced into seasonal wage labour or migration. By the late 1970s, two-thirds of rural families could not meet minimum nutritional requirements, and Nicaragua had the lowest life expectancy in Central America.
Capitalist expansion concentrated vast wealth in few hands, deepened dependence on the US market, tightened imperialist political and economic control, and increased cultural subjugation to Coca-Cola and Hollywood. The Somoza state preferentially assisted its capitalist farmer supporters with subsidies and infrastructure, but development was uneven. Capitalism was most advanced in the Pacific coastal region, centred on export activities; less advanced in the central interior, where small food producers and subsistence farmers predominated; and minimal on the Atlantic Coast, limited to subsistence farming, mining (largely Somoza-owned with US investment), and timber. By 1978, despite Catholic patriarchal propaganda, one-third of all Nicaraguan families were headed by women, and two-thirds in Managua, due to fathers and husbands abandoning families. Eighty per cent of single mothers were wage earners. The extreme oppression and lack of prospects under capitalism thrust women in colonial and semi-colonial countries into the vanguard of social struggle. Rural workers, poor and middle peasants, and the urban poor all experienced hunger, impoverishment, degradation, and the brutality of the National Guard, arbitrary arrest, and torture. Subject to a system of police spies and provocateurs, they would be the force that smashed the Somoza state.