Nicaraguan Revolution - Formation of The FSLN

Formation of The FSLN

In 1958, Roman Raudales, a comrade of Augusto César Sandino's, launched a guerrilla movement in Northern Nicaragua. The small band led by Raudales, who was by then past sixty, lived in the mountains and exhorted the people to take up arms against the Somoza dictatorship. Although a National Guard punitive squad wiped out this tiny guerrilla force with its "whitebearded patriarch," the very appearance of a group pitting itself against the dictatorship inspired others to begin similar activities. These included students as well as a youthful group within the Nicaraguan Socialist Party who began to decry what they saw as the timidity and un-militancy of that organisation. (The Nicaraguan Socialist Party was Nicaragua's Communist party, a COMINTERN member. Banned in Nicaragua in 1945, it operated underground.) The young anti-Somoza activists soon had organised several guerrilla groups that operated in the areas of Nueva Segovia and Rio Jorgo near the border with Honduras, and also in the Matagalpa and Jinotega highlands. One of these activists was Carlos Foonseca Amador, a young communist party member who had studied law at the University of Léon, been repeatedly thrown in jail for his political activities, and finally deported to Guatemala in 1959. While there, he and a few score other Nicaraguans formed a guerrilla group that named itself the Rigoberto Lopez column, after the patriot who had assassinated Somoza Garcia in 1956. They reinfiltrated Nicaragua but their first engagement was disastrous: nine of them were killed and Fonseca badly wounded. Upon his recovery, Fonseca linked up with Thomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga to publish a newspaper, Juventud Revolucionaria. A guerrilla group formed around these three, called Juventud Patriotica. It later changed its name to Frente de Liberación nacional; in 1961 it had seven members. Finally, in 1962, it took on the name which was to prove permanent, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.

The group began to combine armed action in the highlands with urban and village operations, mostly bank raids, and started to carry on political education among the population. Upon entering one or another inhabited locality, the Sandinistas would call a meeting of the local peasants to describe their aims and purposes, and exhort them to actively participate in the struggle to overthrow the dictatorship. According to one of its leaders, Plutarco Hernandez, in some places as many as 300 peasants would turn out to hear them speak. However, many of the small Sandinista group were imprisoned or killed by the National Guard in the years 1962 - 1964.

Many of the early Sandinistas were students from the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua -- UNAN) in Managua

The FSLN had about twenty members in the early 1960s.

In 1972 an event occurred which Somoza was able to use to considerably enrich himself; however, in doing so he incurred the animosity of the Nicaraguan public and the international community, and also many Nicaraguan business people, to an extent that seriously damaged his position. The event was the Managua earthquake of December 23. It killed 5,000 to 10,000 people, left 50,000 without homes, and destroyed eighty percent of Managua's commercial buildings. A major relief effort was undertaken by international donors. Somoza was able to turn the disaster to his profit by putting himself in charge of the local organisation responsible for distributing the aid and appropriating a large amount of it for himself. The job of rebuilding was given predominantly to Somoza family and friends, which increased his monopolisation of the commercial life of the country. Somoza's control and accumulation of ownership was already a source of friction between him and other Nicaraguan capitalists because it was shutting them out of investment opportunities. The quake grab exacerbated that problem. Another phenomenon was that thousands of young middle-class people had their prospects in life seriously diminished by the earthquake through impoverishment up to and including homelessness; for many, the relative desirability of radical change had been increased, and Sandinista support grew accordingly.

Anastasio Somoza Debayle's intentions to run for another presidential term in 1974 were resisted even within his own Partido Liberal Nacionalista (PLN – National Liberal Party). The political opposition, led by La Prensa editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal and former minister of education Ramiro Sacasa, established the Unión Democrática de Liberacion (UDEL – Democratic Liberation Union), a broad coalition of anti-Somoza elements, including members from both the traditional elite and labour unions. The party promoted a dialogue with the government to foster political pluralism. The president responded with increasing political repression and further censorship of the news media. Somoza was reelected president in 1974.

On 27 December 1974, a group of FSLN guerrillas seized the home of a former government official and took as hostages a handful of leading Nicaraguan officials, many of whom were Somoza relatives. The agreement reached between them and the government on 30 December with the mediation of Archbishop Obando y Bravo damaged the prestige of the already unpopular government. The guerrillas received US$1 million ransom, had an FSLN declaration read over the radio and printed in La Prensa, and succeeded in getting fourteen Sandinista prisoners released from jail and flown to Cuba along with the kidnappers. The guerrilla movement's prestige soared because of this successful operation. The act also established the FSLN strategy of revolution as an effective alternative to Udel's policy of promoting change peacefully. The government responded to the incident with further censorship, intimidation, torture, and murder.

In 1975, Somoza and the National Guard launched another campaign against the FSLN. The government imposed a state of siege, censoring the press, and threatening all opponents with detention and torture.

In late 1975, because of the repressive campaign of the National Guard and because of its own increase in size, the FSLN split into three factions.

• The Proletaries, or Proletarian faction, headed by Jamie Wheelock Román, followed traditional Marxist thought and sought to organise factory workers and people in poor neighbourhoods.
• The Guerra Popular Prolongada (GPP – Prolonged Popular War) faction, headed by Tomás Borge and Henry Ruiz, was influenced by the philosophy of Mao Zedong and believed that revolution would require a long insurrection that included peasants as well as labour movements.
• The Terceristas, also known as the Third Roaders, Third Way, or Insurrectional faction was pragmatic and called for ideological pluralism. Its leaders included Plutarco Hernandez, and the Ortega Saavedra brothers, Daniel José and Humberto. It argued that social conditions in Nicaragua were ripe for an immediate insurrection. The Third Way faction supported joint action with non-Marxist groups against Somoza.