Bandits and blanket thieves, communists and terrorists: the politics of naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua, 1927 – 36 and 1979 – 90

Abstract

This article examines the politics of naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua during two periods of intense political and military struggle: the era of the Sandinista Revolution and Contra War (1979 – 90) and the era of the Sandino rebellion against the US Marines and Nicaraguan National Guard (1927 – 36). Focusing principally on the rhetorical and narrative strategies used by the USA and its Nicaraguan allies, the article explores the delegitimising master narratives concocted by these dominant groups and the efforts of two generations of Sandinistas and their allies to challenge these narratives. It argues that the politics of naming was embedded within a larger politics of storytelling, and that effective challenges to dominant groups' epithets must be grounded in historically informed challenges to the larger narratives from which they spring.

Notes

I would like to thank Michael Bhatia, Thomas W Walker, an anonymous reviewer and especially Nora Faires for their incisive comments on drafts of this article. Special thanks are also due to Doug McCabe, Archives and Special Collections, Alden Library, Ohio University, for his very kind assistance

President Reagan's Remarks at the Annual Convention of the American Bar Association, 8 July 1985, at www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/1985/70885a.htm. It is noteworthy that ‘fanatical hatred’ of the USA, its people, its way of life, or its international stature—or, for that matter, ‘fanatical hatred’ of anything when not linked to actual criminal behaviour—was not and is not defined as a crime in either US or international law, and that Reagan's remarks therefore contained smaller and more discrete lies embedded within his larger lies about a ‘confederation of terrorist states’.

See http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/554FAF3A-B267-427A-B9EC-54881BDE0A2E.htm; and www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-negroponte4,0,2326054.story.

See www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/18/interviews/negroponte/.

See C Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution, London: Monthly Review Press, 1986; and M Zimmermann, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

T Walker (ed), Nicaragua: The First Five Years, New York: Praeger, 1985; and T Walker (ed), Nicaragua without Illusions, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1997. The secret ‘Presidential Finding’ of 1 December 1981, whose ‘Purpose’ was to ‘support and conduct paramilitary operations against…Nicaragua’ and which officially authorized the cia's Contra war against the Sandinistas, can be found at www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/usa/publications/nicaragua/nicadoc2.html.

‘Notes and comment on the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers’, The New Yorker, 25 March 1985.

The full English-language text of the ‘Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare’ manual can be found at www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/tacayantoc.html. That the Gestapo was a Nazi organization, and that the Nazis were dedicated to the extermination of communists and communism, was evidently of little moment to the manual's author(s).

R Brody, Contra Terror in Nicaragua, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1985. See also the resources listed at www.library.utoronto.ca/robarts/microtext/collection/pages/nicaragu.html.

The concept of master narrative, totalising narrative or meta-story—terms used interchangeably here—derives mainly from scholarship inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. See A Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971; and M Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon, 1972. See also EW Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978; and H White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, MD: 1973.

See D Barndt, ‘Popular education’ and Elizabeth Dore, ‘Culture’, in Walker, Nicaragua: The First Five Years, pp 317 – 346 and 413 – 422. See also V Miller, ‘The Nicaraguan literacy crusade’ and EA Wagner, ‘Sport and revolution in Nicaragua’, in TW Walker, Nicaragua in Revolution, New York: Praeger, 1982, pp 241 – 258 and 291 – 302.

Among the most widely read English-language books on the Sandinist Revolution in the early and mid-1980s were M Randall, Sandino's Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle, ed L Yanz, Vancouver: New Star Books, 1981; TW Walker's two edited volumes, Nicaragua in Revolution and Nicaragua: The First Five Years, as well as his monograph, Nicaragua: The Land of Sandino, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1981; G Black, Triumph of the People: The Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, London: Zed Press, 1981; H Weber, Nicaragua: The Sandinista Revolution, London: Verso, 1981; JA Booth, The End and the Beginning: The Nicaraguan Revolution, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1982; S Christian, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, New York: Vintage, 1985; CM Vilas, The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central America, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986; P Rosset & J Vandermeer (eds), Nicaragua: Unfinished Revolution, New York: Grove Press, 1986; P Davis, Where Is Nicaragua?, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987; and P Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention, Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1987.

From an expansive literature a superior general history of US intervention in Nicaragua remains K Bermann, Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States Since 1848, Boston, MA: South End Press, 1986.

A Somoza G, El verdadero Sandino o el calvario de las Segovias, Managua: Robelo, 1936.

For excellent treatments of comparable instances of popular patriotic struggles being rejected and dismissed by native elites as mere ‘banditry’, see F Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995; and GPC Thompson, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas and the Pueblo Sierra, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999.

The phrase ‘robbery, pillage, rape, and murder’ is in Lt HR Huff, R-2 Report, 17 December 1929, US National Archives, Record Group 127, Entry 209, Box 1 (hereafter cited as RG127/[entry no.]/[box no.]). The phrase ‘false standard of patriotism’ is in JC Smith et al, ‘A review of the organization and operations of the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua’, unpublished manuscript, Personal Papers Collection, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, DC; the phrase ‘bandit hordes’ appears in The Leatherneck, January 1928, p 13; ‘cancerous growth’ is in General McDougal to Francis White, 10 October 1930, US Department of State, M633, reel 1; and ‘exterminating bandits’ is from Robert L Denig, Northern Area Commander, ‘Restriction for certain areas of Nueva Segovia, recommendation for’, 10 May 1930, RG127/202/17. Most of these terms are so diffuse throughout the material in RG127 and elsewhere that they require no citation.

The Leatherneck, January 1928, p 13.

Emil Thomas Papers, Box 2, Folder 23, 4 January 1928, Box 3, Folder 25, 11 March 1928 and Folder 31, 3 September 1928, Alden Library, Ohio University, Athens, OH. I am indebted to Thomas W Walker, Political Science Department, Ohio University, and especially to Doug McCabe, Archives and Special Collections, Alden Library, for their very kind assistance with this source.

Major O Floyd, Field Message No 11, San Albino, 6 August 1927, RG127/43A/6; and Lt Larson, B-2 Report, 4 March 1928, RG127/43A/3.

Smith et al, ‘A review’, pp 2, 26, 50.

R-2 Report, 15 April 1928, NA127/209/2.

The Leatherneck, April 1928, pp 10, 52.

Bn-2 Report, 22 June 1930, NA127/209/1.

GN-2 Report, 1 September 1930, NA127/43A/29.

GN-2 Report, 1 October 1930, NA127/209/1.

GN-2 Reports of 1 January and 1 April 1932, RG127/43A/29.

GN-2 Report, 1 October 1932, NA127/43A/29.

See MJ Schroeder, ‘The Sandino rebellion revisited: civil war, imperialism, popular nationalism, and state formation muddied up together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926 – 1934’, in GM Joseph, CC LeGrand & RD Salvatore (eds), Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of US – Latin American Relations, Durham, NY: Duke University Press, 1998, pp 229 – 231.

A comparison of the names of alleged victims of Sandinista attacks, as these appear in Somoza, El verdadero Sandino, and in the records of the US Marines and Nicaraguan National Guard, with the names of Nicaraguans who collaborated with the US invasion and occupation, as these appear in RG127—a comparison made possible by the author's database of all names to appear in marine and Guardia intelligence, patrol and combat reports, in captured Sandinista correspondence, and other sources—reveals scores of instances in which the victims of rebel attacks had actively collaborated with the occupying forces. For example, Somoza, El verdadero Sandino, p 129, claims that in April 1929 Sandinistas murdered Juan Bautista Rivera of Somoto. In fact Rivera, who survived the attack, had acted as a guide, scout and recruiting agent for the Marines in the Somoto district from early 1928. See R-2 Report, 23 September 1928, NA127/209/1; R-2 Report, 12 February 1929, NA127/209/1 (‘Juan Bautista Rivera…is now reported to be…recruiting in the name of the Commanding Officer Somoto.’). See also the personal diary of Gen Robert L Denig, Northern Area Commander, ‘Diary of a Guardia Officer’, unpublished manuscript, US Marine Corps Historical Center, Personal Papers Collection, Denig Box, Vol I, p 89, which includes a letter from Rivera to Denig, dated 21 March 1930, in which Rivera informs Denig: ‘I have been working with the Marines for the last two years’. For another example, Somoza, El verdadero Sandino, p 192, claims that in December 1930 Sandinistas burned the farm of Emilio López near Yalí. A marine intelligence report of two years earlier indicates that the same Emilio López, owner of a farm near Yalí, gave the marines and guardia a list of 13 local men active in the rebel ranks. R-2 Report, 16 December 1928, NA127/209/1.

On violence making in the Segovian past, see MJ Schroeder, ‘Horse thieves to rebels to dogs: political gang violence and the state in the western Segovias, Nicaragua, in the time of Sandino, 1926 – 1934’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 28, 1996, pp 383 – 434.

On C Beals, see his series ‘With Sandino in Nicaragua’, The Nation, 22 February – 11 April 1928. See also Beals, Banana Gold, Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, 1932; and Beals, Great Guerrilla Warriors, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. On the US anti-imperialist movement in the 1920s and 1930s, see RV Salisbury, Anti-Imperialism and International Competition in Central America, 1920 – 1929, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1989; and J Zwick (ed), Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898 – 1935, at www.boondocksnet.com/ai/.

El Centroamericano, 21 June 1930 and 19 July 1928; and Diaro Moderno (Managua), 23 January 1931.

The most comprehensive collection of Sandino's writings remains AC Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, ed Sergio Ramírez, 2 vols, Managua: Nueva Nicaragua, 1984. The best English-language collection is RL Conrad, Sandino: The Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot, 1921 – 1934, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Petition from ‘workers and natives’ of Mosonte to Jefe Director GN, 27 December 1930, NA127/202/2/2.3. Similar letters can be found in NA127/220/3 (La Concordia and Jinotega, 14 and 15 May 1929); NA127/43A/15 (Jalapa, 15 November 1928); and NA127/198/1 (Matagalpa, April 1930).

Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, Managua (hereafter ies; these documents are currently housed in the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua, Universidad Centroamericana, Managua), Interview No 049, p 1.

ies, nos 032, pp 13 and 066, pp 5 – 6.

ies, nos 072, p 7 and 036, p 4.

ies, no 100, p 4.

Christian, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, pp 191 – 194.

‘US walks out of Iraq's address to UN’, at www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/27/sprj.irq.us.un.walkout/.

‘Negroponte visits mass graves site near Hillah, Iraq’, at http://iraq.usembassy.gov/iraq/20040715_mass_graves_hilla.html.