6. How FSLN Gained and Retained Leadership of the Revolution¶
Core Argument¶
In the aftermath of the 1979 insurrection, the FSLN moved swiftly to consolidate its political and military monopoly, systematically subordinating the popular organs that had fuelled the revolution to a rigid, top-down state apparatus. With a guerrilla command structure preserved intact and a membership of only around 500, the leadership was forced to rely on middle-class professionals to administer the state, while simultaneously bureaucratising mass organisations. Civil Defence Committees were transformed into Sandinista Defence Committees (CDSs) under strict FSLN discipline; by mid-1985, these were in crisis due to a lack of internal democracy and heavy-handed orders from above. Urban militias were quickly disarmed and integrated into the conventional EPS army under Humberto Ortega, securing the FSLN’s military monopoly. Mass organisations such as AMNLAE, the ATC, and the CST were created or co-opted to implement decisions from above, not to debate policy. The CST’s role was explicitly to increase production and suppress strikes, while the ATC contained peasant land demands within a mixed economy framework, protecting an alliance with agrarian capitalists.
The FSLN’s intolerance of independent working-class organisation was starkly demonstrated in its suppression of the FO (Workers’ Front). When the FO led strikes for higher wages, including at the San Antonio Sugar Mills, the EPS occupied its offices, arrested its editor and leading members, and handed its printing works to the literacy crusade. Workers struck again demanding the FO’s release. Daniel Ortega, Jaime Wheelock, and Tomás Borge condemned the workers; Borge threatened to send in troops. The real targets were rising factory militancy for higher pay and workers’ control. The measures consolidated the CST’s dominant position, integrating unions into the state apparatus, though the CST itself led strikes and occupations against owners decapitalising enterprises, demanding nationalisation.
The FSLN launched UNAG in 1981 alongside the First Agrarian Reform Law, intended for co-operative farms and small/medium peasant holdings. It pressed for land for landless peasants, credit for small and middle farmers, and militias against the Contras. Larger landowners accused the FSLN of dividing producers. However, the FSLN’s strategy aimed for a mixed economy with an alliance with major agrarian capitalists. Nationalising Somoza’s holdings gave control of only twenty per cent of agricultural production, not the expected sixty per cent. The FSLN soon backed landlords over tenants, indicating the revolution would not follow Cuba’s example. Capitalists refused to resume production and held back investment. La Prensa campaigned for the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’, and bourgeois parties launched in September 1979 called for the revolution to be limited to bourgeois democracy. The Junta’s economic appointees from the private sector renegotiated foreign debt and channelled aid through the FIR, further entrenching capitalist relations within the revolutionary state.