When he went to the presidential palace of La Loma in Managua on the night of February 21, 1934 for a dinner, Augusto C. Sandino did not imagine that it would be the last of his life.
This Wednesday 90 years have passed since his death in a treacherous ambush, an event that contributed to expanding the myth of the Nicaraguan guerrilla leader and marked a turning point in the history of the Central American country.
The figure of Sandino continues to generate debate among Nicaraguans: for some he is a symbol of resistance and national sovereignty; For others, a ruthless fighter with more thirst for power than ideas.
The truth is His fight marked a turning point in the history of Nicaragua, the repercussions of which are still felt today.
the murder
On February 21, 1934, Sandino attended a dinner at the Presidential Palace of La Loma, invited by President Juan Bautista Sacasa.
Sacasa had come to power the previous year, in which US troops withdrew from Nicaragua and what seemed to be a stage of reconciliation between the country’s diverse and antagonistic political forces began.
One of them was the guerrilla commanded by Sandino, which had been key in the fight against US intervention. until the final withdrawal of his marines.
Sandino’s side, which had strong support among the peasant communities, had signed peace with the Sacasa government and had consolidated itself as a kind of autonomous power with political and military influence in the country.
Upon leaving the dinner, Sandino and his four companions were detained by members of the National Guard, led at that time by Anastasio Somoza García – who three years later took power and began a regime of more than four decades controlled by his family-.
Sandino did not expect it: “I think he was guilty of a certain naivetybecause they made him believe that the route of negotiation was a possibility after the departure of the North American Navy from Nicaragua,” explains historian Óscar René Vargas, author of the biographical book about the guerrilla “Sandino: Floreció al filo” to BBC Mundo. of the Sword.”
Two of his companions (his father and the writer Sofonías Salvatierra, Minister of Agriculture of Sacasa) were imprisoned and Sandino was taken along with his two lieutenants to an open field on the outskirts of Managua, where they were shot.
Sandino’s fight
To understand what happened that night we have to go back to the mid-20s of the last century, when two irreconcilable enemies were fighting for power: the conservatives and the liberals, to which Sandino belonged for a time.
The United States, which had economic interests in the country, continually interfered in Nicaraguan politics – generally in favor of the conservatives – and deployed marines there.
To end a war between conservatives and liberals, in 1927 the the Blackthorn Pactwhich implied the permanence of the conservative government until elections mediated and supervised by the US were held.
Sandino refused to sign it and began recruiting more peasants for his guerrilla: the Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua (EDSN), which fought against the marines and the Nicaraguan National Guard.
The guerrilla grew rapidly and at the beginning of the following decade they chained important victories against the US forces, which At the end of 1932 they left Nicaraguacoinciding with the election of the liberal Sacasa as president.
Sandino and Sacasa reached a peace agreement, while The National Guard led by Somoza was in charge of security of the country, although the Sandinista guerrilla continued partially armed and active.
It was then that it was decided to kill Sandino. But who was it and why?
Who and why killed him?
The official version is that Anastasio Somoza planned the murder along with 14 members of the National Guard – a rival of the Sandinista guerrilla – behind President Sacasa’s back.
Somoza himself declared two years later that he had killed Sandino. by order of the then American ambassadorArthur Bliss Lane.
“Somoza was in cahoots with the American embassy, that is already known, it is historically proven,” says historian Oscar René Vargas.
Humberto Belli, however, doubts this.
“Somoza wanted to wash his face a little and later blamed the American ambassador, but The United States had no major interest in Sandino’s death because he had already left the country. By then Sandino was a local problem,” he argues.
And why was he murdered?
“For the National Guard it became almost a political imperative to put an end to Sandino,” says Humberto Belli.
The writer attributes the murder to the fact that the guerrilla leader “had a stronger military force than was believed”
“The General Staff of the National Guard came to the conclusion that it could not have an armed feudal state within its own national territory and that the only solution was to kill Sandino.”
Óscar René Vargas, for his part, alleges that “the Sandinista movement controlled about 6 departments, so established an alternative power in Nicaragua that could not be accepted by either the United States or the country’s economic class.”
Sandino, the historian points out, “advocated an agrarian reform that endangered the accumulation model based on large extensions of land. It was a problem for the ruling class and that is why they decided to kill him,” he explains.
Sandino’s ideas
Augusto César Sandino did not leave a written legacy, except for letters with which he communicated with the authorities of the time, and he did not subscribe to a specific ideology or formulate a new one.
For Óscar René Vargas, Sandino’s ideology is a mixture of “anti-imperialism, nationalism and an agrarian vision” not necessarily leftist, although he collaborated with leftist leaders such as the Salvadoran communist Agustín Farabundo Martí, who was his secretary and later colonel.
He points out that, although Sandino advocated social reforms, his movement was based on the principles of sovereignty and self-determination.
He was significantly influenced by the Mexican Revolution, which led him to propose “Nicaragua’s agrarian reformwhich was a revolutionary proposal within the canons that existed at the time,” according to Vargas.
For his part, the writer Humberto Belli offers a critical perspective that contrasts with the more traditional and heroic visions of Sandino.
“He never stopped thinking about coming to power, he wanted to be president and there are plenty of quotes and historical evidence that prove it. If you have achieved it, he would have been a bloodthirsty and totalitarian leader or a dictator,” he says.
Belli describes Sandino’s ideological orientation as “a very strange mixture,” influenced by his time in Mexico and his affiliation with the spiritual magnetic school of the Universal Commune, a current that mixes theosophy, spiritualism and beliefs in energy and reincarnation.
Regarding his agrarian vision, Belli acknowledges that Sandino talked about distributing land and forming peasant cooperatives, but argues that his proposals were limited.
“He was a fairly illiterate man. He knew how to read and write, but he didn’t go beyond that., and I didn’t have a very coherent idea of what I was going to do for Nicaragua. Yes, he talked about distributing land, but that’s all there was to it,” she says.
The legacy
Regarding Sandino’s legacy, Óscar René Vargas highlights that he marked a turning point by being “the first time in history that a peasant guerrilla managed to defeat the US intervention”.
The second historical lesson, he continues, “is that Sandinismo marked an era in Latin America, where for the first time a solidarity movement developed” that crystallized, for example, in the social revolt in El Salvador of 1932.
The third is that “it has been a watershed in the political history of Nicaragua” since “the nationalist anti-imperialist effect is an element that endures”, he assures, despite the fact that “unfortunately it has been used by the Ortega-Murillo regime.”
Under the banner of Sandinism, Daniel Ortega and his wife and vice president Rosario Murillo today govern Nicaragua, where there are no free elections and hundreds of political dissidents – including historical Sandinistas and Óscar René Vargas himself – have been imprisoned and later banished.
Vargas accuses Ortega and Murillo of having tarnished the figure of Sandino: “Before the dictatorship Sandino had a national consensus, but now a sector of Nicaraguan society considers that Sandinismo is bad, as if Ortega-Murillo were an extension of Sandino”.
“I compare the Sandino movement with those of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa in Mexico, who were slandered by the Mexican elite and years later considered national heroes. I think the same thing is going to happen with Sandino,” he says.
Humberto Belli, however, has a very different opinion about what Sandino contributed to Nicaragua and Latin America.
Belli questions the heroic narrative built around the Nicaraguan guerrilla, whom he considers a myth made after the fact by the Sandinista movement that fought against the dictatorship of the Somoza family until finally conquering power in 1979.
“Seen from the outside it seems that he was a heroic guerrilla who fought against the North American intervention, but people do not understand the nuances.”
The writer defines Sandino as a “quite violent man” whose struggle was marked by cruelty, with war tactics such as the “vest cut” with which his combatants cut off the heads and arms of their enemies.
And he believes that the decision not to sign the Espino Pact and take up arms, which began his guerrilla fight and the myth around his figure, only served to cause an unnecessary war.
“Sandino’s legacy was a legacy of useless blood,” he says.
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