Sandino Quotes

La verdad de todo ello, la triste y dolorosa verdad, es que los Estados Unidos ni nos adoran ni nos odian; que el Museo de la Inquisición española no significa nada, ni el Chateau Sevilla tampoco, y que para Norteamérica, España resultará siempre una mezcla muy confusa de la Inquisición, el arroz con pollo, los Reyes Católicos, el general Sandino, Sevilla, Antofagasta, Salvador de Madariaga, la Pastora Imperio, los toros, la rumba, Cristóbal Colón y Don Niceto Alcalá-Zamora.

Amidst these barbed tales of old Managua, I remembered another instance in which Cardenal had adapted an old poem to a new purpose. He had drafted a poem about the death of Sandino, and the fact that his grave was unknown. Then, in 1954, an attempt to capture Anastasio Somoza García, the then dictator, ended in failure. One of the conspirators, Pablo de Leal, had his tongue cut out before being killed. It is said that another, Adolfo Báez Bone, was castrated. The main torturer was Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who would be the last dictator of the line. When Cardenal heard the news, he decided to make Báez Bone the subject of his poem instead of Sandino: Epitaph for the Tomb of Adolfo Báez Bone They killed you and didn’t say where they buried your body, but since then the entire country has been your tomb, and in every inch of Nicaragua where your body isn’t buried, you were reborn. They thought they’d killed you with their order of Fire! They thought they’d buried you and all they had done was to bury a seed.

As Noam Chomsky so well explains in his book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants: When his rule was challenged by the Sandinistas [the insurgent group named after Augusto Cesar Sandino] in the late 1970s, the US first tried to institute what was called “Somocismo [Somoza-ism] without Somoza”- that is, the whole corrupt system intact, but with somebody else at the top. That didn’t work, so President Carter tried to maintain Somoza’s National Guard as a base for US power. The National Guard had always been remarkably brutal and sadistic. By June 1979, it was carrying out massive atrocities in the war against the Sandinistas, bombing residential neighborhoods in Managua, killing tens of thousands of people. At that point, the US ambassador sent a cable to the White House saying it would be “ill advised” to tell the Guard to call off the bombing, because that might interfere with the policy of keeping them in power and the Sandinistas out. Our ambassador to the Organization of American States also spoke in favor of “Somocismo without Somoza,” but the OAS rejected the suggestion flat out. A few days later, Somoza flew off to Miami with what was left of the Nicaraguan national treasury, and the Guard collapsed. The Carter administration flew Guard commanders out of the country in planes with Red Cross markings (a war crime), and began to reconstitute the Guard on Nicaragua’s borders. They also used Argentina as a proxy. (At that time, Argentina was under the rule of neo-Nazi generals, but they took a little time off from torturing and murdering their own population to help reestablish the Guard -- soon to be renamed the contras, or “freedom fighters.”)3 Again, we see Jimmy Carter not really living up to all of his lofty human rights rhetoric.

Sandino dismissed all the married men in his army and wen to the hills...His men reverently called him San Digno (The Worthy Saint). When he went into battle he hung extra cartridge belts around his neck, shined up his puttees and stuck a jungle flower into his shovel-shaped cowboy hat. The Nicaraguan Government could not stop him. Five thousand U.S. Marines chased him for five years, killed nearly 1,000 of his followers, reported him dead a score of times, but never laid hands on him. U.S. newspapers uniformly called him "bandit." But what Sandino wanted, and what he finally got in January 1933, was the withdrawal of all U.S. Marines from Nicaragua.

Somoza admitted that he had issued the order to have Sandino murdered after receiving the approval of the American minister. The minister hotly denied any involvement in the plot and and the State department issued a statement disclaiming any part in Sandino's death.

American dominance of Nicaraguan politics finally led Sandino to an explicit rejection of American imperialism and his historic struggle became a working model for guerrilla action by worldwide revolutionary movements for the next fifty years. It also marked the first time American intervention experienced defeat in Latin America.

Sandino proved to the world that a "people's army" could resist every effort of the most modern military machine.

In South America a governing creole elite, ruling in most cases with US political and military support, held the continent with relative ease. Rebellions, such as that led by Sandino in Nicaragua, were isolated and crushed. Physical and cultural repression of the indigenous population (with the exception of Mexico) was regarded as normal. Populist experiments (Argentina and Brazil) did not last too long. Few thought of Cuba as the likely venue for the first anti-capitalist revolution. (Introduction by Tariq Ali)