The Editor Is Willing to Buy the Manuscript

Timo Schaefer reviews Mateo Jarquín’s “The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History.”

By Timo SchaeferAugust 16, 2024

• History

• Cultural Studies

IN 1979, MOST Latin American countries were ruled by right-wing military dictatorships. The Cuban Revolution was 20 years old, and copycat guerrilla groups had been comprehensively defeated across the region thanks in part to heavy United States counterinsurgency efforts. The flame of revolution appeared to be spent. It was in this unpropitious regional context, in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua, that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberal Front, FSLN), the guerrilla group known colloquially as the Sandinistas, overthrew the brutal, United States–backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. It would turn out to be the last of Latin America’s Cold War revolutions. But for a moment, the Sandinistas’ feat returned hope to a battered socialist Left in the region.

How were the Sandinistas able to achieve victory when so many other guerrilla groups had failed? According to Mateo Jarquín’s intriguing The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (2024), a big part of the answer has to do with how the Sandinistas leveraged international diplomacy.

It is perhaps not an intuitive argument. What makes a revolution successful, you may think, is its ability to mobilize the oppressed and build up alternative power structures. But Jarquín points out that confronting an old regime requires weapons and resources—and where will those come from if not outside supporters? Revolutionaries also need international allies to find refuge when things at home get too hot. Finally, if revolutionaries are successful—if, that is, they succeed in making a revolution—they rely on international recognition to secure aid and to bolster their domestic credibility. A revolution without diplomacy, in short, is a nonstarter.

Jarquín’s history of Sandinista diplomacy takes in not only the fight against Somoza but also the FSLN’s years in power and shocking electoral defeat in 1990 by a conservative candidate, Violeta Chamorro (incidentally the author’s grandmother). It is an ambitious endeavor, for while historians of Latin America have in recent years paid significant attention to inter-American diplomacy, those historians have generally written for specialist audiences. Jarquín, however, wants to do more than add another entry to a lively field of scholarly investigation. Armed with his research in diplomatic sources, as well as interviews with key Sandinista government figures, he promises the reader a panoramic vista of the Sandinista Revolution’s entire history. His book thus puts the clout of diplomatic history to the test. Does the study of diplomacy yield knowledge that is significant enough to the story it seeks to illumine to power a history of the depth and breadth that Jarquín attempts?

Jarquín makes the case for diplomatic history brilliantly in the book’s early chapters. It is here that he explores the Sandinistas’ foreign relations when they were a divided guerrilla group taking on a colossus. Providing diplomatic support to the scrappy idealists, and supplying them with the necessary weapons, was an unlikely “fellowship” of Latin American heads of state, united by their hatred of Somoza. The fellowship included Cuba’s Fidel Castro, of course, but also Panama’s Omar Torrijos, Mexico’s José López Portillo, Costa Rica’s Rodrigo Carazo—a Christian Democrat heading a center-right coalition—and, perhaps most surprising of all, Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez, a staunch and outspoken anticommunist.

These heads of states were far from natural allies. Establishing contact among them and converting their sympathy with the Sandinistas into effective support, all while provoking minimal public attention, produced mini-plots worthy of a spy novel. For example, a Sandinista faction first established contact with the Venezuelan president through the intercession of Colombian novelist—and notable left-wing sympathizer—Gabriel García Márquez. As Jarquín recounts, the literary giant used coded language to deliver Pérez’s response to the Sandinistas: “‘The editor,’ he said, referring to the Venezuelan leader, ‘is willing to buy the manuscript. And he’s also willing to pay some handsome royalties.’”

Not least of the international allies’ achievements was to convince a reluctant United States, led in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter, to support a transition of power in its traditional client state. By this time, the revolutionaries controlled much of the country but had not yet taken Managua, Nicaragua’s capital. Nor had they comprehensively defeated Somoza’s fearsome National Guard. Their diplomatic allies now pushed for an arrangement that would be acceptable not only to the Carter administration but also to Sandinista collaborators in the Nicaraguan business sector, who had done their part to bring the dictatorship to the brink of defeat by withdrawing support from Somoza and participating in various strikes. The arrangement stipulated that Somoza would leave the country, handing power to a coalition government of Sandinistas and conservative (but anti-Somocista) politicians. Moderate elements of the National Guard would be incorporated into Nicaragua’s post-dictatorship army, thus depriving the Sandinistas of sole control of the armed forces.

But this arrangement fell through. The man designated by Somoza as interim president went rogue. Instead of handing over power to the Sandinista-led coalition, as had been agreed, he vowed to serve out Somoza’s presidential term—and, improbably, called on the Sandinistas to lay down their arms to avoid further bloodshed. In response, the outraged Sandinistas marched on the capital, whose National Guard defenders—as shocked by this development as anyone else—were unprepared for a fight and melted away. The Sandinistas were thus able to establish themselves in power as the result of a final military push, rather than the negotiated transfer of power that their international allies had worked so hard for. They still agreed to share the government with their collaborators in the business class, but they were in complete control of the army and hence could call all the shots. Jarquín’s narrative of these chaotic events closes out the book’s first part, to which it provides a fittingly dramatic finale, showing diplomacy’s power in shaping history not only when it succeeds but also when it unravels.

The book’s middle part tells the story of the FSLN in power. In these chapters, Jarquín guides the reader through a number of historical milestones: the Sandinistas asserted dominance in the post-Somoza governing coalition, causing a break with their erstwhile partners from Nicaragua’s business sector; they attempted to build a revolutionary state that would be socially radical while respecting private property and civil liberties; and war began between the FSLN-led Nicaraguan state and the Contras, the United States–financed counterrevolutionary forces. That war would quickly come to dominate life in revolutionary Nicaragua, leaving tens of thousands of victims, devastating the economy, and irremediably derailing the Sandinistas’ government program.

However, Jarquín’s research into the Sandinista government’s foreign relations has little to add to this story. If the book’s beginning shows the promise and power of a diplomatic history of revolution, the middle chapters thus show the limitations of such an approach. Recognizing this, Jarquín often relies in these chapters on other researchers’ scholarship, which he complements with the perspectives of leading Sandinista policymakers, as articulated in their memoirs and in interviews with the author. The result is a narrative that has much to say about the Sandinistas’ intentions but gives only a general idea of how those intentions actually reached Nicaragua’s population.

On the pivotal question of the rise of the counterrevolutionary Contras, Jarquín charts a middle course between the explanations advanced by sympathizers of the competing forces. Yes, the Contras were at first organized by remnants of Somoza’s defeated National Guard (though they would later include some important Sandinista defectors). They were financed by the United States, and without that sponsorship, it is doubtful that they would have succeeded in raising a credible army. But the Contras were also drawing on a real groundswell of support in parts of the Nicaraguan countryside, occasioned by the often clumsy and occasionally authoritarian way in which the Sandinistas attempted to carry out their agrarian reform. To argue over whether the Contras’ attack on Sandinista-ruled Nicaragua constituted an imperialist intervention or a genuine civil war is therefore to fall into a false opposition. The Contra War was both of those things at once.

While Jarquín is a clear-eyed guide to scholarly controversy, his attempt to be fair to both sides is at times confusing. He insists on the relative modesty of the Sandinistas’ land reform program, which primarily expropriated land belonging to members of the Somoza family and their “known associates.” The program was in fact so modest that five years after the revolution, the state-owned agricultural sector still accounted for less than 20 percent of total Nicaraguan landownership. But Jarquín equally insists on the fear of expropriation that gripped even small and middling farmers. It was this fear, he writes, that drove thousands of peasants into the arms of the Contras. It is not easy to reconcile those perspectives or to understand, absent any attention to peasant voices, how the revolution played out among the rural sector of the population.

Jarquín’s interest in diplomatic history holds him in better stead in the book’s final section, which discusses the efforts, led by Costa Rican president Óscar Arias, to end Nicaragua’s civil war. Accords signed in Esquipulas, Guatemala, formed the basis first for a ceasefire and then for full democratic elections in Nicaragua. Arias’s peace initiative alarmed President Ronald Reagan, who believed that no peace was possible unless Sandinista president Daniel Ortega agreed to step down. Only the pressure of combined Central American support for the deal persuaded Reagan to cede ground and allow the peace process to continue, culminating in the 1990 elections that—against all predictions—the opposition won.

Jarquín’s discussion of the Sandinistas’ election loss is brief and anticlimactic. Jarquín does not attempt to address the extent to which their loss represented disenchantment with the Sandinista governing project versus a capitulation to military blackmail, as people feared a reignition of Contra attacks should the Sandinistas come out on top. Perhaps that is inevitable. Election outcomes, after all, reflect popular moods that cannot be gleaned from diplomatic records or the statements of political leaders. Here and elsewhere, then, Jarquín’s research falls short of delivering on the promise of comprehensiveness contained in his book’s title. Jarquín’s contribution to the broader project of understanding Latin America’s last great revolution is nevertheless impressive. No group of people, you may think, are less likely to contribute to the course of a revolution than drab diplomats. Jarquín shows, however, that without diplomats, the Sandinista Revolution would have looked very different—and may not have happened at all.