Nicaragua Archives - Not Even Past

by Virginia Garrard Burnett

These posters were circulated in Nicaragua in 1980 when campaigns to celebrate the end of dictatorship, to increase literacy and to improve public health were central policy concerns.

On July 19, 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN or Sandinistas), a leftist movement that drew its support from a wide sector of Nicaraguan society overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family dynasty had ruled the Central American country with ruthlessness and greed since 1936. The Sandinistas established a revolutionary government that was inspired by Karl Marx and Fidel Castro but was also deeply influenced by Catholic ideas of social justice.

The ascendency of Ronald Reagan to the US presidency in 1981, however, placed the Sandinistas squarely in the crossfire of the new Cold War. Pressure from the United States (especially the US-supported contra war) and Sandinistas’ missteps, along with growing disillusionment of Nicaraguan society, brought about the end of the regime in 1990, when the Sandinistas were voted out of power in a free democratic election.

Although the Sandinistas ultimately proved a disappointment to both the supporters and the opponents of the regime, the early days of their rule were full of optimism and hope for a new Nicaragua, where the full rights of citizenship and access to public goods would be accessible to all.

Two programs in particular, the national literacy campaign (more than half the population was illiterate in 1980) and a national campaign for basic public health (life expectancy of Nicaraguans in the 1970s was only 54 years old) formed the heart of the early Sandinista agenda. The posters here promote these Sandinista social programs, and, generally speaking, the Sandinista cause. They are part of a collection held in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Their strong graphic qualities reflect both the aesthetics of the late 1970s and the Sandinistas’ need to convey political information visually to a largely unlettered citizenry.

THE LITERACY CAMPAIGN

One of the first objectives of the revolution was to introduce basic literacy to Nicaragua’s large illiterate population, in order to both improve people’s lives and to inculcate them with the values of the Sandinista revolution. The National Literacy Crusade, headed by Fernando Cardenal, a Jesuit priest, sent “brigades” of young, urban Nicaraguans to remote parts of the country to teach basic literacy to adults. Many of the early-reader materials utilized explicitly political motifs. Whether or not new readers embraced those ideas, the literacy crusade dramatically improved rates of functional literacy in adults by teaching more than 400,000 Nicaraguans to read and write. The program also introduced the young, urban teachers—brigadistas—to the realities of the poor rural countryside, many for the first time.

Poster showing a young man reading to an older man while a young woman and older woman look on. Poster reads "el deber de un hombre es estar alli, donde es mas util."

The quote printed near the top of this poster, “The duty of a man is be where he is most needed,” comes from the great Cuban nationalist of the late 19^th century, José Martí. In this drawing we can see the young brigadista—clearly identifiable not only by his red Sandinista kerchief and CNA hat, but also by the relative whiteness of his skin—sitting on the ground with a rural campesino (peasant) family and exploring a book that bears the hallmarks of the National Literacy Crusade (or CAN). We see that two of the campesinos are older adults, while a young woman also looks on. The campesinos are surrounded by the tools and implements used by ordinary workers—the man has a hoe and ax, while both women hold manos y matates—corn grinders for making tortillas—all common tools that signify the Sandinsitas’ desire to value to both literacy and labor. In the background are the humble, thatched-roof wattle-and-dab houses common in the Nicaraguan countryside, all in the shadow of a volcano, a geographic feature so characteristic of Nicaragua that it has been used as a signifier for the nation on stamps, coins, the national flag and the Nicaraguan Coat of Arms.

For more on the resources of the Nettie Lee Benson collection, see http://www.lib.utexas.edu/benson/

Further readings on Nicaragua in this period:

Michel Gobat. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Duke, 2005)

John A. Booth, The end and the beginning: the Nicaraguan Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982)

John Donahue, The Nicaraguan revolution in health: from Somoza to the Sandinistas (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1986)

English translations of posters (by order of appearance):

“Childhood is happiness. Happiness is the revolution.” The Luis Alfonso Velazquez Association of Sandinista Children.

“The People and Army United Guarantee Victory. “(FSLN)

“The Motherland…the revolution.” Ministry of Public Education and Propaganda.

“Literacy is liberation. [To be literate] is to follow the road marked out by Carlos Fonseca (a founder of the FSLN who died in 1976) and Sandino. Free Nicaragua!” (National Literacy Crusade)

“The duty of a man is to be here, where he is most needed.” National Literacy Crusade..

“Our Land: Our Revolution.” The Nicaraguan Institute of Agrarian Reform.

by Michelle Reeves

In this new book, covering the entire period of the Cold War in Latin America, Hal Brands restores agency and initiative to Latin American actors, in the process demolishing many of the platitudes that have governed much of the U.S. foreign policy literature. Based on prodigious research in a dizzying array of U.S., Latin American, and even East German archives, Brands’s work advances a trenchant interpretation that cannot be ignored. He argues that the origins of the chaos and instability that ravaged Latin America during the Cold War owed less to U.S. interventionism than to the prevailing confluence of local, regional, and global dynamics.

Though the burgeoning Cold War atmosphere did little to discourage the power grabs of authoritarian leaders, their actions were determined less by U.S. prodding and more by elite backlash against the extension of middle- and working-class power that had occurred earlier in the 1940s. The democratic opening of the World War II period gave way to the consolidation of dictatorship during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The Cuban Revolution dramatically altered the landscape of Latin American politics, and here as well, Brands challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the Cuban-Soviet alliance. Castro’s turn toward the Soviets was driven by ideological and political considerations and occurred well before the disintegration in U.S.-Cuban relations. The real story of the 1960s is not, as most historians would have it, the extent of outside interference in Latin America, but rather the insurmountable difficulties that foreign interventionist powers confronted in attempting to expand their influence throughout the region. Brands locates the source of the intense conflicts of the 1970s in the widening ideological gulf between proponents of National Security Doctrine, who sought to eliminate all shadings of leftism, and advocates of liberation theology, which in its most extreme form embraced Marxism as a tool of social justice. The right-wing extremism of the 1970s was a backlash against the guerrilla violence and leftist radicalism of the 1960s.

The revolution in Nicaragua, far from being exemplary of hemispheric trends, in fact owed its success to four distinct though interrelated factors that combined to render the situation in that country unique. Not only was the Nicaraguan system deteriorating from the late 1960s, but the guerrillas had learned enough from the travails of their predecessors to earn substantial support from among the agrarian population. Moreover, the insurgents enjoyed significant foreign backing, not only from Moscow and Havana, but from other Latin American nations as well. Finally, the Carter administration, by means of a confused and incoherent foreign policy, effectively weakened or destroyed the traditional levers of U.S. influence in Nicaragua. The period of revolutionary ferment in 1980s Central America, when viewed through the lens of foreign intervention, reveals the meddling of several players; external intervention, writes Brands, “was not a one-sided affair.”

The wave of democratization that swept the region in the 1980s was rooted in many causes but had much to do with the relationship between dictators and the radical left. In Central America, the strength of the guerrilla insurgencies forced a measure of liberalization, while in South America the destruction of the extreme left deprived the military regimes of their legitimacy. The debt crises of the 1980s, however, were the most determinate factor in democratization, as they provided the pretext for prying open the economies of Latin America to neoliberal reforms. In the final analysis, the course of the Cold War in Latin America was shaped not only by the zero-sum struggle between Washington and Moscow for ideological and strategic dominance in the global south, but by conflicts over internal political dynamics and power structures, the extent – and more importantly, the limits – of U.S. influence, and the emergence of the Third World as both a political bloc and a rhetorical device. Brands has made an impressive and valuable contribution to our understanding of the Cold War in Latin America, and while his interpretation may spark controversy in certain academic circles, this reviewer fervently hopes that he will succeed in driving the debate forward, rather than prompting a rehash of hackneyed claims about the primary responsibility of the United States for Latin America’s problems.

Propaganda or Progress?

Latin America’s Cold War by Hal Brands (2010)

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