How the FSLN overthrew forty years of US-backed dictatorship, launched a literacy crusade, and defended the revolution against CIA-funded terrorism
For over four decades — from 1936 to 1979 — the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua as a personal fiefdom, backed at every stage by the United States. Anastasio Somoza García seized power in 1936 with the direct assistance of the US Marine Corps, which had occupied Nicaragua almost continuously since 1912. The Marines had created and trained the Nicaraguan National Guard specifically to serve as the enforcement arm of US interests, and Somoza was installed as its commander.
The Somoza dynasty — father and two sons ruling in succession — accumulated vast personal wealth while the Nicaraguan people suffered extreme poverty. By the late 1970s, the Somoza family owned an estimated 25% of all arable land in the country, controlled the national airline, the shipping line, major banks, construction companies, and media outlets. The country had an infant mortality rate of 120 per 1,000 live births. Half the population was illiterate. Half the children under five were malnourished. There was one doctor for every 2,000 people — and most doctors were concentrated in Managua.
Franklin D. Roosevelt reportedly said of the elder Somoza: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” This captures the essence of US imperialism in Latin America: the systematic support of brutal dictatorships that guarantee the extraction of surplus value by American capital.
Comprador bourgeoisie: The Somoza dynasty was the classic example of a comprador class — a domestic elite whose wealth and power depend entirely on serving the interests of foreign capital. They do not represent national development but act as agents of imperialist extraction. See Neo-Colonialism.
The Sandinista movement took its name from Augusto César Sandino, the guerrilla leader who waged a six-year war (1927–1933) against the US Marine occupation of Nicaragua. Sandino — a worker who had laboured in the mines and plantations of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — was the only Nicaraguan general who refused to sign the US-brokered peace accord that ended the Liberal-Conservative civil war. He declared: “I will not sell out, I will not surrender. I want a free homeland or death.”
Sandino’s Army in Defence of National Sovereignty was primarily composed of peasants and workers from the mountainous north. They fought the most powerful military on Earth to a standstill using guerrilla tactics, earning the admiration of anti-imperialist movements across Latin America. The Marines were finally withdrawn in 1933 under the pressure of Sandino’s resistance and the Great Depression.
In February 1934, after signing a peace agreement, Sandino was assassinated on the orders of Anastasio Somoza García, the head of the National Guard. Somoza then seized the presidency in 1936 and began the dynasty. Sandino’s murder became a founding act of the revolutionary consciousness that would eventually produce the FSLN.
“Only the workers and peasants will go all the way. Only their organised force will achieve victory.”
— Augusto César SandinoThe Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) was founded on 23 July 1961 by Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomás Borge Martínez, and Silvio Mayorga. Fonseca — the principal ideological leader — was a Marxist-Leninist who synthesised Sandino’s anti-imperialist nationalism with Marxist class analysis and the lessons of the Cuban Revolution.
The FSLN spent nearly two decades building the organisational infrastructure necessary for revolution. In the early years, the front operated as a small guerrilla force in the mountains, suffering severe defeats at Pancasán (1967) and other engagements. These setbacks forced a strategic rethinking. By the 1970s, the FSLN had developed three tendencies: the Prolonged People’s War (GPP) faction favouring rural guerrilla warfare, the Proletarian Tendency favouring urban working-class organising, and the Tercerista (Insurrectionist) tendency favouring a broad anti-Somoza alliance.
In 1978, following the assassination of opposition newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro by Somoza’s agents, the three tendencies reunified. The National Directorate of nine comandantes was established, combining the strengths of each strategic approach: guerrilla capacity, working-class base, and broad popular alliance.
The FSLN’s eighteen years of preparation before the insurrection confirms Lenin’s teaching that revolution requires patient organisational work. “Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn Russia!” The vanguard must be built long before the revolutionary situation matures. See The Vanguard Party.
The final offensive began in June 1979. The Somoza regime had already lost all legitimacy. The 1972 Managua earthquake — which killed 10,000 people — had exposed the regime’s corruption when Somoza personally pocketed international relief funds. The National Guard’s indiscriminate bombing of cities during the September 1978 uprising had turned even the bourgeois opposition against the dictatorship.
The FSLN coordinated a national insurrection combining guerrilla columns advancing from the north, south, and east with mass popular uprisings in every major city. Workers, students, women, peasants, and even sections of the progressive bourgeoisie participated. The barricade committees — Comités de Defensa Sandinista — organised neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
On 17 July 1979, Somoza fled to Miami with what remained of the national treasury. Two days later, on 19 July, the FSLN marched into Managua to the jubilation of hundreds of thousands. The National Guard — without its master — collapsed entirely. The revolution had triumphed.
An estimated 50,000 Nicaraguans — approximately 2% of the population — had been killed in the insurrection and the preceding years of repression. The country lay in ruins: $480 million in capital had been looted by the Somozas, and the departing National Guard had deliberately destroyed infrastructure.
“This revolution was not stolen by a minority. It was won by the overwhelming majority of Nicaraguans. It was an insurrection of the entire people.”
— Daniel Ortega, 1979Within months of taking power, the Sandinista government launched a programme of social transformation that remains one of the most impressive in Latin American history.
In March 1980, the government launched the National Literacy Crusade — modelled on Cuba’s successful 1961 campaign. Over 100,000 volunteer teachers, most of them secondary school students, were sent into the countryside. In five months, the national illiteracy rate was reduced from 50% to 13%. The campaign won UNESCO’s Nadezhda Krupskaya Prize in 1980. It was followed by a permanent adult education programme that continued to reduce illiteracy throughout the 1980s.
The Somoza family’s vast landholdings were immediately confiscated. The Agrarian Reform Law of 1981 redistributed over 2 million acres of land to peasant cooperatives and individual smallholders. By 1984, more than half of all agricultural land had been redistributed. State farms were established on the largest expropriated properties, while cooperatives received preferential credit and technical assistance.
The revolutionary government expanded healthcare dramatically. New clinics and hospitals were built throughout the country, particularly in rural areas that had never had medical facilities. Polio was eradicated. Malaria cases were reduced by 50%. Infant mortality fell from 120 to 40 per 1,000 live births within a decade. Cuba provided hundreds of doctors and medical personnel in a demonstration of proletarian internationalism.
The Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (AMNLAE) — named after the first woman killed in the revolution — organised women as a political force. The revolution introduced equal pay legislation, maternity leave, programmes against domestic violence, and massively expanded women’s access to education and employment. Women had constituted 30% of FSLN combatants during the insurrection.
The banking system was nationalised. Foreign trade was brought under state control. The mining sector, previously dominated by American and Canadian companies, was nationalised. However, the Sandinista government maintained a mixed economy — approximately 60% of GDP remained in private hands. This reflected both the broad class alliance that had made the revolution and the practical constraints of building socialism in a small, devastated country under imperialist siege.
The Reagan administration viewed the Sandinista revolution as an existential threat to US hegemony in Central America. From 1981, the CIA organised, trained, funded, and directed the Contras — a counter-revolutionary force composed primarily of former National Guard members, disaffected peasants, and mercenaries. Operating from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, the Contras waged a campaign of deliberate terror against the civilian population.
The Contras’ strategy — designed by the CIA — specifically targeted the revolution’s social achievements. They murdered literacy campaign teachers, burned rural health clinics, assassinated cooperative leaders, mined harbours, and destroyed bridges and power stations. A CIA manual distributed to the Contras explicitly instructed them in assassination, sabotage, and psychological warfare against civilians.
The war killed over 30,000 Nicaraguans. Material damage exceeded $17 billion — more than the country’s entire GDP. The US also imposed a comprehensive economic embargo, cutting Nicaragua off from its largest trading partner.
In 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contras and mining Nicaraguan harbours. The US simply ignored the ruling — a definitive demonstration that international law means nothing when it contradicts the interests of the imperialist hegemon.
The Contra war is a textbook example of imperialist aggression against national liberation. When a people dares to overthrow a client regime, imperialism responds with economic strangulation and proxy warfare. The same pattern was applied to Cuba, Chile, Grenada, Libya, Syria, and Venezuela. See Imperialism and Sanctions & Imperialism.
When the US Congress passed the Boland Amendment (1982–1984), prohibiting direct US government funding of the Contras, the Reagan administration simply circumvented the law. The resulting Iran-Contra affair revealed that senior officials — including National Security Adviser John Poindexter and Colonel Oliver North — had secretly sold weapons to Iran and funnelled the profits to the Contras.
The scandal exposed the fundamentally lawless character of the imperialist state. The US ruling class was willing to violate its own constitution, sell arms to a country it officially designated a state sponsor of terrorism, and fund death squads — all to destroy a small Central American country’s attempt at self-determination. No senior official served meaningful prison time. North became a conservative media celebrity.
In February 1990, the FSLN lost the presidential election to Violeta Chamorro and the US-funded UNO coalition. The Sandinistas received 41% of the vote; UNO received 55%. The result shocked the FSLN leadership, which had expected victory.
The causes of the electoral defeat are instructive for all revolutionary movements. The Contra war and US embargo had devastated the economy. Hyperinflation reached 33,000% in 1988. The military draft — necessary to fight the Contras — was deeply unpopular. The Nicaraguan people, exhausted by a decade of war and economic collapse, voted not for capitalism but for an end to the destruction that imperialism had inflicted upon them.
The US government spent over $50 million supporting the UNO coalition — an extraordinary sum for a country of 3.5 million people. The message was clear: vote for the opposition and the war and embargo will end; vote Sandinista and the suffering continues. This was not a free election in any meaningful sense — it was a vote conducted under the gun of imperialism.
The 1990 Nicaraguan election demonstrates why bourgeois democracy is a tool of class rule. When imperialism can destroy a country’s economy and fund the opposition, the “free choice” of the electorate is a fiction. The dictatorship of capital operates through the ballot box as effectively as through the barrel of a gun.
The Sandinista revolution confirmed several fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism:
First, that a vanguard organisation is essential. The FSLN’s two decades of preparation, its disciplined cadre structure, and its ability to unify diverse class forces under a single programme were decisive in the insurrection’s success.
Second, that imperialism will never accept the loss of a client state peacefully. The Contra war demonstrates that every revolution must prepare for military defence from the moment of victory. The question is not whether imperialism will attack, but when and how.
Third, that a mixed economy under conditions of imperialist siege is extremely vulnerable. The FSLN’s decision to maintain 60% of the economy in private hands meant that the bourgeoisie retained the economic power to collaborate with imperialism in sabotaging the revolution.
Fourth, that international solidarity — particularly from the socialist camp — is vital. Cuba’s provision of teachers, doctors, and military advisers was crucial. The Soviet Union’s economic and military aid sustained the revolution. The weakening and eventual collapse of the USSR removed Nicaragua’s most important international ally.
Fifth, that revolution is not a single event but a continuous process. The Sandinista experience shows that winning state power is only the beginning. The consolidation of the revolution requires the systematic transformation of the relations of production, the building of popular power, and the defeat of both external aggression and internal counter-revolution.
“They will not be able to block the sun with one finger. The Sandinista Revolution has changed Latin America forever.”
— Carlos Fonseca Amador, founder of the FSLNDespite the 1990 electoral defeat, the FSLN survived as a mass party. The revolution had permanently transformed Nicaraguan society: the land reform could not be fully reversed; the literacy gains endured; a generation had been politically awakened. The Sandinista base remained the largest organised political force in the country.
The neoliberal governments that followed (1990–2006) implemented structural adjustment programmes dictated by the IMF and World Bank, privatising state enterprises, slashing social spending, and deepening inequality. These policies confirmed everything the revolution had warned about: that the return of capitalism means the return of mass poverty.
The FSLN returned to government in 2007 under Daniel Ortega and has governed since. The party’s current trajectory — including alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church — has provoked debate within the international left. A Marxist-Leninist assessment must be concrete: the question is always whether the working class and peasantry are advancing or retreating, whether imperialism is being resisted or accommodated, whether the relations of production are being transformed or preserved.
What remains beyond debate is the heroism of the Nicaraguan people in overthrowing the Somoza dictatorship, the extraordinary social achievements of the revolutionary period, and the criminal character of US imperialism’s war against a small nation that dared to chart its own course.
Every revolution teaches lessons for the next. Study the victories and defeats of the working class to prepare for the struggles ahead.