declining terms of trade (commodity export
prices rising more slowly or falling, as against
rising costs of manufactured imports and, in the
1970s, the rising cost of oil). On such a social and
economic basis, democracy could not be built up;
on the contrary, deprivation and extremes of
wealth and poverty provided the soil for revolt
and savage repression.
Nicaragua has traditionally been an area of US
concern. When disorder and foreign financial
claims threatened it in 1912, US marines moved
in and did not finally leave until January 1933. By
then they had had to cope with a nationalist back-
lash. Augusto César Sandino led a guerrilla cam-
paign against them and against the Nicaraguan
government they were supporting. He was tricked
into taking part in negotiations by the Nicaraguan
leaders whom the marines had left behind in
power, and in 1934 he was murdered by the
Nicaraguan National Guard. Sandino was a liberal
reformist and patriot, and now he became a
martyr, a powerful symbol whose name and
mantle the Marxist Sandinistas appropriated in
their struggles during the 1970s against the rule
of the Somoza family.
The Somozas had established a dynasty in
Nicaragua. In the 1930s power in the country was
wielded by the National Guard, which had been
organised by the US to maintain internal security.
At its head was General Anastaslo Somoza Garcia.
The constitutional institutions were a façade
behind which the National Guard operated. In
1937 Somoza made himself president and ruled
the country for the next nineteen years, until he
was assassinated in 1956. His authoritarian rule
became notorious for corruption, nepotism and
repression. This was not a turn of events
Washington had anticipated when creating the
supposedly non-political National Guard, but
defence of constitutional proprieties was not high
on Washington’s list of priorities, as long as US
interests were safeguarded. Somoza’s National
Guard was preferable to having to send in US
marines. Somoza took care not to offend US
interests and aligned Nicaragua as a dependent
and reliable US ally. He was also adept at manip-
ulating the political and landed interests at home.
In the division of spoils, the National Guard were
pampered, and plantation owners and merchants
were allowed to reap unhindered the profits of
their enterprises. This left the vast majority of the
population in wretched poverty, illiterate and
with no hope for the future. On Somoza’s assas-
sination his eldest son Luis took over the presi-
dency and the younger son, Anastasio Jr, assumed
command of the National Guard. The 1950s and
1960s were relatively peaceful in Nicaragua, a
period of diversification into cotton and other
crops; a small but growing middle class began to
emerge with the help of Alliance dollars, and
some economic progress was achieved. But for
the peasants the expansion of cotton-growing
meant displacement from the land.
Luis was the ‘weakest’ of the Somozas, and
in 1967 Anastasio assumed the presidency.
Nicaragua’s most bloody and repressive decade
now began. Anastasio made no pretence of ruling
as a politician. He used the naked power of the
National Guard, employing murder and torture
to crush the growing opposition. When a devas-
tating earthquake in 1972 all but destroyed
Managua, Nixon sent large-scale aid. It did not
reach the victims; only half of it could be
accounted for by the Nicaraguan treasury.
Corruption was rife, and for a time the National
Guard could keep order only with US help.
Reconstruction after the earthquake benefited
mainly Somoza’s supporters, not the poor. The
guerrilla war flared up and National Guard atroc-
ities perpetrated in repressing the guerrillas out-
raged the Church. Human-rights abuses were
now affecting American support. There was
growing opposition in the US to providing
dollars in support of ruthless dictators, yet even
under President Carter military aid continued to
be granted to Somoza, since the alternative of a
Marxist-led Nicaragua was regarded as totally
unacceptable. But the abuses of Somoza and his
National Guard, worldwide condemnation and
the evident crumbling of Somoza’s power left the
Carter administration little alternative but to
abandon all support for the regime by the spring
of 1979. A few weeks later, in July, Somoza was
overthrown by the broad opposition coalition of
guerrillas, the Sandinista National Liberation
Front (FSLN).
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