The Nicaraguan Revolution (Spanish: Revolución Nicaragüense or Revolución Popular Sandinista, also RPS) encompassed the rising opposition to the Somoza dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, the campaign led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) which led to the violent ousting of that dictatorship in 1979, and the subsequent efforts of the FSLN, which governed from 1979 until 1990, to reform the society and economy of the country along socialist lines. The revolution played a substantial role in foreign policy for Nicaragua, Central America and the Americas. The concurrent Nicaraguan Civil War, waged between the FSLN and the Contras, was one of the proxy wars in the Cold War.
Estimates of death tolls vary, but according to a report from the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the best estimate for the number of deaths is 10,000 during the Sandinista revolution (1978–1979) and 30,000 during the Contra war (1981–1989).
Read more about Nicaraguan Revolution: Origins of The Nicaraguan Revolution, Background: Sandino and Somoza, Formation of The FSLN, Fall of Somoza, First Years, Changes After 1979
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“But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has if he see that it is accidental,—came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him and merely lies there because no revolution or no robber takes it away.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)