CHAPTER 8 NATIVE MESOAMERICANS IN THE MODERN ERA 313Nicaraguan National Guard was a 7,000-strong army and police force directly
under Somoza’s control (his sons usually held its highest command posts).
The National Guard used terror and extortion to keep the Nicaraguan people
in line, and as a result the guardsmen were greatly resented. Besides the National
Guard, other precipitating factors leading to the revolutionary explosion against the
Somoza regime were the devastating earthquake in 1972 (Somoza was accused of
personally profiting from the incoming foreign assistance); Somoza’s fraudulent re-
election in 1974, and the assassination in 1978 of his leading political opponent,
newspaper editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro (it was widely believed that Somoza was
responsible for Chamorro’s death).
Revolutionary opposition to the Somoza regime started as early as 1961, with
the founding of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) by a group of
middle-class radicals from the Matagalpa Highlands. Following the Cuban model,
the small band of revolutionaries engaged in guerrilla-like attacks against the Na-
tional Guard and gradually won to their side large numbers of Nicaragua’s rural
workers and peasants. By the 1970s the FSLN was able to recruit several thousand
middle-class youth and urban workers to its cause, and it began to launch bold mil-
itary offensives against the regime. For example, in 1978 the rebels seized the National
Palace and forced Somoza to accede to several exorbitant demands. Finally, the FSLN
forces initiated attacks on all the major cities of Nicaragua, preceded in almost every
case by local insurrections (Figure 8.7).
The FSLN revolutionary army launched a final offensive from Costa Rica in 1978,
and in July 1979 Somoza fled to Miami as the Sandinistas occupied the capital of
Managua. The victorious Sandinistas then attempted to establish a socialist state in
which both private enterprise and civil liberties would be respected. They were op-
posed at every step by the United States, which cut off all aid and organized a coun-
terrevolutionary group of dissident National Guardsmen and Nicaraguan peasants
known as the Contras.
Figure 8.7 Masks worn by Sandinistas during the 1978 insurrection at Monimbó, Masaya,
Nicaragua. Photograph by the authors.