Augusto César Sandino

Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino (May 18, 1895 – February 21, 1934) was a Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of a rebellion against the U.S. military presence in Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. He was labeled as a bandit by the U.S. government, and his exploits made him a hero throughout much of Latin America, where he became a symbol of resistance to U.S. domination. Drawing the United States Marines into an undeclared guerrilla war, his guerrilla organization suffered many defeats, but he successfully evaded capture. US troops withdrew from the country after overseeing the inauguration of President Juan Bautista Sacasa. Sandino was assassinated by General Anastasio Somoza García, who went on to seize power in a coup d'état two years later, establishing a family dynasty that would rule Nicaragua for over forty years. Sandino's legacy was claimed by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which overthrew the Somoza government in 1979.

Contents

Early life

He was born out of wedlock, the son of wealthy landowner Gregorio Sandino and Margarita Calderòn, a servant with the Sandino family. He lived with his mother until the age of nine, when he moved into the home of his father.[1]

In 1921, after attempting to murder the son of a prominent conservative townsman, he fled to Honduras, Guatemala, and eventually Mexico, where he found employment at a Standard Oil refinery near the port of Tampico. There, he became involved with various fringe groups, such as the Seventh-day Adventists, spiritist gurus and anti-imperialist, anarchist, and communist revolutionaries. In particular, he was influenced by the ideology of mestizaje that had emerged in the Mexican Revolution, which glorified the Indian heritage of Latin America. Sandino returned to Nicaragua in 1926 after the statute of limitations on his charges expired, finding work as a clerk at the San Albino gold mine, located in the Segovias mountains, in the remote northeastern part of the country.

Emergence as guerrilla leader

Sandino (centre) en route to Mexico.

Shortly after his return, the Constitutionalist War began when Liberal soldiers in the Caribbean port of Puerto Cabezas revolted against Conservative President Adolfo Díaz, who had recently been installed under U.S. pressure following a coup. The leader of this revolt, General José María Moncada, declared that he supported the claim of exiled Liberal vice-president Juan Bautista Sacasa, who returned to the country in December and declared himself president of a 'constitutional' government, which was recognized by Mexico. Assembling a makeshift army composed largely of gold miners, Sandino led a failed attack on the Conservative garrison nearest to the San Albino mine. Afterwards, he travelled to Puerto Cabezas to meet with Moncada. The unknown Sandino's request for weapons and a military commission were denied by Moncada; however, after capturing some rifles from fleeing Conservative soldiers, the other Liberal commanders agreed to grant him a commission.

By 1927, he was back in the Segovias, inciting many of the local peasants to join his army and staging increasingly successful attacks on government troops. In April, Sandino's forces played a vital role in assisting the principle Liberal Army column, which was advancing on Managua. Having received arms and funding from Mexico, the Liberal army of General Moncada seemed on the verge of seizing the capital. However, the United States, under the threat of military intervention, forced the Liberal generals to agree to a cease-fire. On May 20, representatives from the two warring parties signed the Espino Negro accord, which was negotiated by Henry Stimson, who was appointed by U.S. President Calvin Coolidge as a special envoy to Nicaragua. Under the terms of the accord, both sides agreed to disarm, Díaz would be allowed to finish his term, and a new national army would be established, the Guardia Nacional (National Guard), with U.S. soldiers remaining in the country to supervise the upcoming Presidential election. Afterwards, a battalion of U.S. Marines under the command of General Logan Feland arrived to enforce the agreement.

After the signing of the Espino Negro accord, which he was excluded from participating in, Sandino refused to order his followers to surrender their weapons and returned to the Segovias, marrying a telegraphist's daughter in the village of San Rafael del Norte. At the beginning of July, he issued a manifesto in which he condemned the betrayal of the Liberal revolution and declared war on the United States, whom he described as the 'Colossus of the North' and 'the enemy of our race.'[2] Later that month, about 800 of Sandino's followers attacked a patrol of Marines and Nicaraguan National Guardsmen that was sent to apprehend him in the village of Ocotal. Armed primarily with machetes and 19th-century rifles, they attempted to besiege the Marines. However, they were repulsed with the help of one of the first dive bombing attacks in history, conducted by five Marine de Havilland biplanes. Estimates for the number of Sandino's men who were killed in the attack were 56, while the Marines suffered only one dead and five wounded and the National Guard 3 dead and 5 wounded. After these heavy losses, Sandino learned from his mistake and concentrated on ambushes and sudden raids rather than open attacks.

As his successes grew, he transformed his own name to Augusto César Sandino and renamed his band of followers "The Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua". Efforts by the Marines to kill or capture Sandino over the summer proved to be a failure, due to the Sandinistas' superior knowledge of the local terrain and skill at camouflaging their movements. In November 1927, U.S. aircraft succeeded in locating El Chipote, Sandino's remote mountain headquarters near the Honduran border. However, by the time the Marines succeeded in reaching it, they found it abandoned and guarded by straw-dummies, Sandino and his followers having long since escaped.[3]

Evading detection, Sandino surprised the Marines by moving southward, conducted raids into the coffee-growing department of Matagalpa and Jinotega. In February 1928, Carlton Beals interviewed Sandino in the town of San Rafael del Norte. The interview, which was published in The Nation, was the only one Sandino ever gave to a North American journalist. Afterwards, Sandino and his forces moved eastward towards the Mosquito Coast. In April, the Sandinistas destroyed the equipment of the Bonanza and La Luz gold mines, the two largest mines in the country, both of which were owned by U.S. investors. With aerial support, the Marines attempted to advance several riverine patrols from the east coast of Nicaragua up the Río Coco river during the height of the rainy season, frequently having to rely on native dugout canoes. While these patrols succeeded in limiting the movement of Sandino's forces and securing tenuous control over the principal river in northern Nicaragua, they failed to locate Sandino or lead to a decisive victory.

Sandino's emblem showed a U.S. Marine about to be beheaded. Despite great effort, the U.S. military never was able to catch or kill him, although he felt it necessary at one point to stage a fake funeral for himself, as an American plane observed from above.

Efforts at winning recognition

A flag captured by US Marines from Sandino's forces

The Struggle

Having addressed his declaration of war against the United States to the whole of the 'Indo-Hispanic race', Sandino saw his struggle in racial terms, as the defense not only of Nicaragua but of the whole of Latin America. At the beginning of his rebellion, Sandino appointed a Honduran poet, journalist and diplomat named Froylan Turcios as his official foreign representative. Residing in Tegucigalpa, Turcios was the recipient and disseminator of Sandino's communiques, manifestos and reports, as well as his connection to sympathizers who provided him with arms and volunteers. Working with a number of prominent Nicaraguan exiles, Turcios sought to build support for his struggle in the other Central American nations and Mexico, which had supported the Liberals during the Constitutionalist War. In the latter country, his principle representative was a Nicaraguan exile named Pedro Zepeda, who had previously served as the liaison between Sacasa and the Mexican government.

Sandino's principal demands were the resignation of President Díaz, withdrawal of U.S. troops, new elections supervised by Latin American countries and the abrogation of the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty, which gave the U.S. exclusive rights to build a canal across Nicaragua. The elections which were held under the supervision of the U.S. military in October 1928, which lead to the election of José María Moncada, proved a major setback for Sandino's claim to be acting in defense of the Liberal revolution. Prior to the election, he attempted to organize a junta with three other marginal factions, which would be headed by Zepeda. In the pact establishing the Junta, Sandino had himself declared Generalissimo and uncontested military authority of the republic. Following the election, Sandino ruled out negotiations with his former rival, Sandino declared the elections unconstitutional. In an attempt to outmaneuver Moncada, he expanded his demands to include the restoration of the United Provinces of Central America, which would remain a central component of his political program. In a letter he wrote to Argentine President Hipólito Irigoyen in March 1929 entitled 'Plan for Realizing Bolívar's Dream,' Sandino outlined an even more ambitious political project. He proposed a conference in Buenos Aires of all the Latin American nations to work towards their political unification into an entity he called the 'Indo-Latin American Continental and Antillean Federation,' in order to resist further U.S. domination and guarantee that the future Nicaraguan Canal would remain under Latin American control.

Solidarity with Foreign Nations

As Sandino's success grew, he began to receive symbolic gestures of support from the Soviet Union and the Comintern. The Pan-American Anti-Imperialist League, which was supervised by the South American Bureau of the Comintern, issued a number of statements applauding support of Sandino. The U.S. branch of the Anti-Imperialist League played a central role in opposing the war in the United States itself. Sandino's half-brother Socratés, who lived in New York, was featured as a speaker at a number of rallies against U.S. involvement in Nicaragua organized by the League and the U.S. Communist Party. The Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, meeting in Moscow in the summer of 1928, issued a statement 'expressing solidarity with the workers and peasants of Nicaragua and the heroic army of national emancipation of General Sandino.' In China, a division of the Kuomingtang army that seized Beijing in 1928 was named the Sandino brigade. The following June, Sandino appointed a representative to the Second Congress of the World Anti-Imperialist League in Frankfurt, which was attended by Jawaharlal Nehru and Madame Sun Yat-sen.

Time in Mexico

Sandino's relations with Turcios soured as a result of the latters opposition to Sandino's Junta proposal and his siding with Honduras in a border dispute with Guatemala, which Sandino saw as a distraction from the goal of Central American unification. Conflict between the two men led Turcios to resign in January 1929, largely cutting off the flow of arms to Sandino's forces and leaving Sandino increasingly isolated from potential supporters outside Nicaragua. In an effort to secure military and financial support, he wrote a number of letters appealing to various Latin American leaders. After receiving an offer of asylum from Mexican President Emilio Portes Gil, Sandino left Nicaragua in June 1929. After arriving in Mexico, he was confined by the Mexican government to the city of Mérida in order to appease the United States. He remained in Mérida for over a year and although he managed to travel to Mexico City and meet with Portes Gil, his request for support was quickly rebuffed. The Mexican Communist Party offered to pay for Sandino to travel to Europe, but the offer was withdrawn after he refused to issue a statement condemning the Mexican government. In April 1930, as Sandino's relations with the Communists grew increasingly hostile, they leaked information suggesting that Sandino was critical of Portes Gil's government, causing him to flee the country and return to Nicaragua.

EMECU

During his period in Mexico, he had become a member of an organization the Magnetic-Spiritualist School of the Universal Commune (EMECU). Founded in Buenos Aires in 1911 by a Basque electrician named Joaquín Trincado, the EMECU blended the political ideals of anarchism with a cosmology which was an idiosyncratic synthesis of Zoroastrianism, Kabbalah and Spiritism. Rejecting not only capitalism but also Bolshevik Communism, Trincado his own brand of communism centered a 'spiritism of Light and Truth' that would supersede all existing religions in the final stage of human history. This stage, which would arise from the political conflicts of the twentieth century, would witness the establishment of the 'universal commune', in which private property and the state would be abolished, the hatred caused by false religions would disappear and all of humanity would be part of one race (Hispanic) and one language (Spanish). Sandino's only communication with Trincado was through a series of letters. However, after his return, his manifestos and his personal affiliations were increasingly shaped by his attempt to apply the ideals of the EMECU. He named Tricado one of his official representatives and replaced the old seal of a campesino beheading a U.S. Marine with the symbol of EMECU. His distrust of his former Communist associates led him to break off relations with one of his most trusted lieutenants, a Salvadoran named Farabundo Martí, accusing Martí of spying on him for the Communists. In February 1931, Sandino issued his 'Manifesto of Light and Truth,' which reflected a new millenarian tone in his beliefs. The manifesto proclaimed the coming of the Last Judgement, which will witness "the destruction of injustice on the earth and the reign of the Spirit of Light and Truth, that is, Love." Nicaragua has been chosen to play a central role in this struggle, and his army was an instrument of divine justice. "The honor has fallen to us, brothers, that in Nicaragua we have been chosen by Divine Justice to begin the prosecution of injustice on earth."[4]

Return to Nicaragua, U.S. withdrawal, Sandino's death

Even though Sandino had been unable to secure any outside aid for his forces, the Great Depression made idealistic military expeditions too costly for the United States. In January 1931, Henry Stimson, who was now Secretary of State, announced that all U.S. soldiers in Nicaragua would be withdrawn following the 1932 election. Responsibility for dealing with Sandino's forces was handed over to the newly-created Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional (National Guard), which would continue to be commanded by U.S. officers. That May, an earthquake destroyed Managua, killing over 2,000 people.[5] Over the summer of 1931, Sandinista bands were active in every department north of Managua, conducting raids into the southern and western parts of the country, the departments of Estelí, León and Chontales. Although they managed to briefly occupy several towns along the nation's principal railroad, linking Managua to the Pacific coastal port of Corinto, Sandino's army did not try to capture any of the nation's urban centers, although sometimes Sandinistas succeed in brief occupations of cities like Chinandega.

In accordance with the Good Neighbor Policy, the last United States Marines left Nicaragua in January 1933, following the inauguration of Juan Bautista Sacasa as the country's president. 130 Marines were killed in their tour of duty to Nicaragua. Sandino met with Sacasa in Managua the following February, during which he pledged his loyalty to the President and agreed to order his forces to surrender their weapons. In exchange, Sacasa granted the soldiers in Sandino's army amnesty and control over a large portion of the department of Jinotega, in which they were allowed to settle with their families and given funds to establish communal farms. During these talks, Sandino also succeeded in convincing Sacasa to allow him to retain a small auxiliary force and settled with his supporters in the country's northern departments. He was ambushed and betrayed by Somoza's order, when he returned from new rounds of the talks with Sacasa, and executed in Managua on 21 February 1934 by the National Guard under the command of Anastasio Somoza García. The following day, soldiers from the National Guard descended on the Sandinista cooperatives and massacred their inhabitants. Two years later, Somoza García forced Sacasa to resign and declared himself President, establishing a dynasty which would dominate Nicaragua for the next four decades. In 1979, his son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was overthrown by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a revolutionary group that took its name from Sandino, which was originally founded in 1961 by Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borge, among others, and later led by Daniel Ortega.

Managua International Airport was named "Augusto C. Sandino International Airport" after him during the 1980s and again renamed this in 2007 by President Daniel Ortega after former president Arnoldo Alemán renamed it Managua International Airport in 2001.

The Nicaraguan portrait artist Róger Pérez de la Rocha has created many portraits of Sandino — whose image was banned by the Somoza dictatorship — and his associates, adding to the country's iconography[6].

Quotes

Come on you pack of drug fiends, come on and murder us on our own land. I am waiting for you on my feet at the head of my patriotic soldiers, and I don't care how many of you there are. You should know that when this happens, the destruction of your mighty power will make the Capitol shake in Washington, and your blood will redden the white dome that crowns the famous White House where you plot your crimes.

(quoted in Zimmermann)

References

  1. ↑ Neill Macaulay, Tha Sandino Affair, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967) p.49.
  2. ↑ latinamericanstudies.org/sandino/sandino7-1-27.htm
  3. ↑ Neil Maculay, Sandino Affair, Pg. 113
  4. ↑ Sandino: Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, 1921-1934, translated by Robert Edgar Conrad, Pg. 105-06
  5. ↑ inter.gob.ni.geofisca/sis/managua72/mallin/great06.htm
  6. ↑ http://archivo.elnuevodiario.com.ni/2000/febrero/19-febrero-2000/cultural/cultural7.html El Nuevo Diario

La soberania de un pueblo no se discute se defiende con el arma en la mano( the sovereign of a country can not be argued about it must be defended with arms on hands)

External links

Persondata
NAME Sandino, August César
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sandino, Augusto Nicolás Calderón
SHORT DESCRIPTION Nicaraguan revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH 18 May 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH 21 February 1934
PLACE OF DEATH