Nicaragua's twentieth century was defined in large part by foreign intervention, family dictatorship, and revolutionary resistance. The thread connecting these forces runs through a single name, that of Augusto César Sandino, born in 1895, a nationalist guerrilla leader who spent the late 1920s and early 1930s fighting a sustained armed resistance against the United States military occupation of his country. When American troops finally withdrew from Nicaragua, leaving behind a US-trained military force called the National Guard under the command of Anastasio Somoza García, Sandino believed the struggle was over. He was wrong. On 21 February 1934, Somoza ordered the National Guard to assassinate Sandino. The murder was the opening act of a US-backed dynastic dictatorship that would hold Nicaragua in its grip for more than four decades.
Somoza used the murder of Sandino as a springboard to seize the presidency in 1936. He and his sons, Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, ruled Nicaragua in succession, building a family regime sustained by American support, National Guard repression, and the systematic looting of the national economy. Opposition was suppressed, elections were managed, and the country's wealth was concentrated in the hands of the Somoza family and their allies. By the 1 January 1933 deadline agreed at the end of the second American intervention, no US soldiers remained on Nicaraguan soil, but American influence persisted through the National Guard that the United States had created and equipped.
During the 1960s, leftist ideas spread rapidly through Latin America, driven in part by the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which had demonstrated that a small guerrilla force could defeat a US-backed dictatorship. In Nicaragua, a group of radical young activists and students drew inspiration from these currents and from the legacy of Sandino himself. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, in Spanish the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional or FSLN, was founded in this environment. The suffix "-ista" attached to Sandino's name followed Spanish linguistic convention, marking the members as followers of Sandino and his principles. The FSLN committed itself to armed struggle against the Somoza dynasty, framing its mission as the continuation of the fight Sandino had begun and which his assassination had interrupted.
The organization spent years operating in difficult conditions, suffering setbacks and rebuilding. Through the 1970s, the FSLN grew more effective and more politically sophisticated. The murder of prominent newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro in 1978 triggered a broad popular uprising against the regime. Multiple sectors of Nicaraguan society, from the business community to the Catholic Church to urban workers and peasants, coalesced in opposition to Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The FSLN channeled this energy and coordinated military operations with increasing effectiveness. In July 1979, after a final offensive that swept across the country, the Somoza government collapsed. Anastasio Somoza Debayle fled into exile. The FSLN had overthrown the dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua since before most of its fighters were born.
The new government took the form of a Junta of National Reconstruction, a broad coalition intended to reflect the diverse forces that had toppled Somoza. Centrist members of the junta departed relatively quickly, and by March 1981 the FSLN held exclusive power. The revolutionary government launched ambitious programs in literacy, land reform, and healthcare, achieving genuine improvements in education and public health in the early years of its rule. It also nationalized significant portions of the economy and restructured land ownership. These measures earned the Sandinistas loyalty from substantial sectors of Nicaraguan society, particularly the rural poor.
At the same time, the government faced serious criticism. Human rights organizations documented abuses including mass executions and the oppression of indigenous peoples, particularly the Miskito communities on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. The economy was mismanaged, and inflation accelerated. The United States, under the Reagan administration, was openly hostile to the new government, viewing it through the lens of Cold War competition. A US-backed armed group known as the Contras was organized beginning in 1981 and trained and funded by the Central Intelligence Agency to wage a counterinsurgency war against the Sandinista government. Washington also imposed a comprehensive trade embargo and, in an act of particular aggression, planted underwater mines in Nicaraguan ports. The Contra war lasted until 1989 and caused tremendous destruction throughout the country.
In 1984, the FSLN held national elections that international observers described as free and fair, though the main opposition parties boycotted them. The FSLN won the majority of votes, with parties that opposed the Sandinistas taking approximately a third of the seats in the legislature. After revising the constitution in 1987, the Sandinistas stood for election again in 1990. The vote, conducted under enormous pressure from the ongoing Contra war and US economic strangulation, produced a surprise result: Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of the assassinated editor and the candidate of a broad opposition coalition, defeated the FSLN's Daniel Ortega. The Sandinistas accepted the result and transferred power peacefully, retaining a plurality of seats in the legislature.
The FSLN spent the 1990s and early 2000s as an opposition party before returning to power in 2006, when Ortega won the presidential election. His return marked the beginning of a steady concentration of power. In October 2009, the Supreme Court, on which Sandinista-aligned judges held a majority, struck down constitutional provisions limiting presidential terms, allowing Ortega to run and win again in 2011, 2016, and 2021. International observers broadly condemned these later elections as neither free nor fair. The party became increasingly identified with Ortega personally, and Nicaragua's democratic institutions suffered a systematic erosion. What began as a revolutionary movement named for a martyred nationalist guerrilla had, by the 2020s, transformed into something that bore little resemblance to its founding ideals.
