Who was Augusto César Sandino?
Augusto César Sandino was born in 1895 in Niquinohomo, Nicaragua, to a poor unmarried mother. He worked in coffee fields and later as a mechanic in Tampico, Mexico, where he met anarchist, socialist and communist ideas. Back home in 1926 he joined the Liberal opposition. When the US Marines landed in 1927 and the Liberal leader Moncada accepted a truce, Sandino refused to stop fighting and founded his own army. From the mountains of Las Segovias his guerrillas harassed the Marines until they left in early 1933. A year later the National Guard seized and killed him.
Political views
- Rejected the May 1927 truce that ended the Liberal war and kept fighting, insisting he was not for sale.Source: encyclopedia.com
- Founded the Defending Army of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua in September 1927 and pressed for social justice for workers and peasants, though scholars dispute how coherent his thinking was.Source: encyclopedia.com
- In the San Albino Manifesto of July 1927 he called the Marines invaders, accused Washington of arming the Conservative leaders Adolfo Diaz and Emiliano Chamorro, and warned that a US hold on a canal would make Nicaragua subordinate to the Colossus of the North.Source: latinamericanstudies.org
- Cast his struggle as a regional cause, addressing Nicaraguans, Central Americans and the Indo-Hispanic race and drawing on Indigenous heritage as a source of patriotism.Source: latinamericanstudies.org
- Proposed that a Nicaraguan canal be financed by world capital, half from Latin America and half from other countries, with the revenue paying for railroads and education.Source: latinamericanstudies.org
- In the districts his army controlled, his supporters reorganized agriculture along collective lines and built a cooperative movement.Source: newleftreview.org
- Disarmed his army after the Marines withdrew in early 1933, then was seized by the National Guard in February 1934 and killed with his brother and two generals.Source: encyclopedia.com
Legacy
Many Nicaraguans remember Sandino as the symbol of resistance to foreign domination, and the later Sandinista movement took his name. Admirers credit him with wearing down a far better equipped occupation force and with standing up for peasants and workers. In his own day opinion split over whether he was a patriot or a bandit, and scholars still question whether he had a coherent program. His killing was ordered by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, head of the US-trained National Guard, without consulting President Sacasa. Somoza went on to build a dictatorship that lasted more than four decades, and the Guard broke up the cooperatives, hunted down Sandino's followers and killed hundreds of families.