In 1961, when the FSLN was founded by Fonseca, Noel Guerrero, Borge and one other young Nicaraguan, its original name was the National Liberation Front (FLN). Fonseca's motion to add "Sandinista" to the name got no votes except his own. It took him an entire year to convince the others. During this period, Fonseca led the group in studying everything they could find about Sandino, including Gregorio Selser's Sandino: General de hombres libres, which they reprinted.
A decade later, the symbol of Sandino would come to have broader appeal in Nicaragua. Stressing the continuity with Sandino would become a way of showing that the revolutionary movement had Nicaraguan roots and was not a foreign import. But in 1961 and 1962, according to Borge, Fonseca fought for the name Sandinista as a way of narrowing rather than broadening the new organization. What was needed, insisted Fonseca, was an organization of revolutionaries, not a broad opposition front, and using the word Sandinista was a way "of giving it a revolutionary stamp without sounding sectarian."(19)
Fonseca was not the only Nicaraguan taking a new look at Sandino following the Cuban Revolution. Sandino, along with Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, rapidly became the heroes of radical students in Nicaragua. In May of 1959 there were student commemorations of the 25th anniversary of Sandino's death--the date had not been publicly marked on any of the previous 24 anniversaries. By mid-1960 there were huge, sometimes-violent student demonstrations in Managua demanding that Avenida Roosevelt be renamed Avenida Augusto César Sandino.(20)
A theme that recurs frequently in Carlos Fonseca's writings is the discontinuity of the Nicaraguan revolutionary tradition, the break that occurred between the death of Sandino in 1934 and the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Because of the weakness and backwardness of the left and the resulting domination of anti-Somoza activity by the Conservative Party, the country experienced a quarter-century of "darkness," of "paralysis." Fonseca referred to a "legacy of political backwardness truly something out of the cave-men era."(21) It took an external jolt, specifically the Cuban Revolution, to make it possible for a new generation of rebels to reknit the continuity that had been broken in 1934 with Sandino's assassination.
An analysis of Fonseca's writings on central political issues shows how he combined the legacy of Sandino with Marxist ideas and the example of the Cuban Revolution. The remainder of this paper looks at the issues that most concerned Carlos Fonseca, with a focus on how he incorporated the writings and experiences of Sandino.
• What was the relationship between anti-imperialism--in particular the fight against US domination--and the struggle for socialism?
• What role did different social classes play in maintaining or changing the existing system, and could the traditional elite parties be vehicles for change?
• Should the goal of proponents of radical change in Latin America be socialism or something else?
• Was social change to be achieved through armed struggle or through elections?
• What kind of organization and what kind of leadership was necessary to build a revolutionary movement that could actually take power? These political questions, dealt with by Carlos Fonseca in analytical articles, interviews, historical essays and manifestos written over a fifteen-year period, were being discussed and debated by radical students and members of revolutionary organizations all over Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. They involve both analysis of the political and economic situation facing Nicaragua, and concrete strategies for changing it through armed struggle and building the FSLN.
There is nothing in Fonseca's published writings about what he thought would happen after a victorious revolution, although he spent a good deal of time studying Che Guevara's writings on the types of economic changes and changes in political consciousness that were involved in the transition from capitalism to socialism.
"Yankee, go home:" The anti-imperialism of Sandino and Fonseca
In a 1968 mimeographed statement entitled "Yanqui Johnson, go home" Fonseca wrote:
The people of Nicaragua and the other peoples of Central America know through cruel experience how Yankee investment in our economies does not bring progress but rather poverty and grief. Agricultural workers on the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company know it all too well. Mineworkers of the Nicaraguan concessions of the Gold Mining Company know it all too well.(22)
Like Sandino, Fonseca writes about the economic side of United States intervention in Nicaragua as well as the political and military aspect. Unlike Sandino, he rarely misses an opportunity to condemn members of the Nicaraguan elite for their complicity with foreign domination. In the above leaflet, for example, he calls three prominent Liberal and Conservative party politicians "foxes from the same capitalist and neocolonial den."
Sandino identified with the interests of workers and peasants against the wealthy, but--at least when he first began his war against the Marines--he still considered himself part of the Liberal Party tradition. The U.S.-imposed government that ruled Nicaragua in the 1920s was a Conservative Party government. When Sandino wrote to the Nicaraguan Liberal general José María Moncada and volunteered to raise an army to help fight the Conservatives, he was in the tradition of the Constitutional Liberals of the Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Diaz. Sandino's Liberalism was always unorthodox, however. The first time he met Moncada, he handed the general a written statement of his ideas, the last sentence of which was "PROPERTY IS THEFT."(23) While fighting under Moncada's command, Sandino got in trouble for insisting on flying his own flag: red and black with a skull and crossbones in the middle.(24)
Sandino lived in Mexico in the years after the Mexican Revolution, working as a mechanic at a U.S.-owned oil company. He was deeply influenced by the Mexican Revolution. The event that had a comparable impact on Carlos Fonseca was the Cuban Revolution. Aside from the occasional reference to the heroism of Emiliano Zapata, Fonseca's writings hardly mention the Mexican Revolution. When Fonseca wrote about the impact of an early-twentieth-century revolution on his own movement, he referred to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Sandino and Fonseca faced different situations. United States Marines occupied Nicaragua in the 1920s and early 1930s, and the purpose of Sandino's war was to drive them out. Sandino was always confident that Nicaragua would be able to solve its problems once the Marines left.(25) In the 1960s and 1970s, no North American troops occupied Nicaragua, although the U.S. government financed and trained Somoza's National Guard. As in the 1920s, United States economic investment was extensive, and foreign companies faced few restrictions on their ability to exploit Nicaraguan workers and peasants.
For Fonseca the struggle only began with doing away with foreign domination. He told a student audience in 1968:
"We state plainly that our main goal is returning to the workers and peasants, to all working people, the wealth that was violently stolen from them. National independence, the overthrow of foreign imperialism, is a pre-requisite for the building of a new world."(26)
Fonseca studied and wrote extensively on the history of United States intervention in his country and on Nicaraguan resistance. These themes were central to all his historical writings. Even in high school, according to Tomás Borge, Fonseca was known as the only student who had read in its entirety the long history of the United States in the school library. In Cronología de la resistencia sandinista, written over a period of several years in the early 1970s, Fonseca gives a detailed, sometimes day-by-day chronology of the resistance to U.S. domination from 1823 to 1966. He cites literally hundreds of different sources--books from the United States and Latin America, newspapers, diplomats' and journalists' cables, official documents, and interviews. Other historical works by Fonseca include: Cronología histórica de Nicaragua, Sandino, guerrillero proletario, Reseña de la secular intervención norteamericana en Nicaragua, and Crónica secreta: Augusto César Sandino ante sus verdugos. All were written during the early 1970s, when Fonseca was living in Cuba.
Fonseca stressed the importance of members of the FSLN studying history, both for its political and military lessons and also to get a longer-term perspective, a sense that history was on their side. "We must take seriously the responsibility that history has put in our hands," he wrote in 1960. "We have demonstrated our combativeness, but we also need wisdom. We need to be learning all the time."(27)
Fonseca analyzed Sandino's successes and failures in a long essay entitled Viva Sandino, written in the early 1970s. He argued that even though Sandino's army was more effective militarily than the FSLN's, it was impossible, because of objective conditions of the time, for Sandino to build a political movement.(28) This was the reason, according to Fonseca, why Sandino was only able to win a partial victory. North American troops were forced to withdraw, but no revolutionary transformation occurred. By 1933, Sandinista guerrillas were fighting not the "blond pirates" of an invading army but a National Guard made up of Nicaraguans. In February, 1933, Sandino signed a peace agreement with the government forces.
Fonseca analyzed in some detail the various pressures on Sandino to come to terms with the Nicaraguan government once the foreign troops were removed and the country had an elected Liberal president. Sandino had always looked to Mexico for support, but the Mexican Communist Party refused aid or solidarity and even slandered Sandino as an agent of the United States and/or the Conservative Party. This caused considerable confusion, according to Fonseca, because of the prestige of the Mexican revolutionary movement. As a result, other Latin American Communist parties, as well as middle class groups like the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance of Peru, turned against Sandino. He had also become estranged from his one-time aide, Salvadoran Communist Farabundo Martí.
Middle-class Nicaraguan intellectuals who had once supported Sandino also put pressure on him to sign an agreement and disarm his troops. "From a class point of view," said Fonseca, "the illusions of these intellectuals can be understood as an expression of a petty bourgeoisie that is tired of struggling and anxious to devote itself to defending and enjoying its own particular interests."(29) "Ten bandits:" Class structure in Nicaragua
"Five Conservative Party oligarchs plus five Liberal Party oligarchs makes ten bandits." Carlos Fonseca--who quoted this Nicaraguan proverb with approval(30)--argued consistently that the Liberal Party of the Somozas and the opposition Conservative Party both represented the same social and economic class. Neither party, and none of their various offshoots, could be a vehicle for effecting revolutionary change, or even for doing away with the Somoza family dictatorship. Fonseca never quoted a famous Sandino quip about bandits that had a different message. In 1928 Sandino asked U.S. journalist Carleton Beals whether he still thought the Sandinistas were "bandits" and went on: "Tell your people there may be bandits in Nicaragua, but they are not necessarily Nicaraguan."(31)
The traditional landowning elites of Nicaragua, owners of vast cattle ranches and coffee plantations, tended to support the Conservative Party. The Somoza family belonged to the Liberal Party, as did most of the cotton-plantation owners, who introduced modern agrarian capitalism to Nicaragua after World War II. Fonseca wrote in 1969:
Although the governmental [Liberal] capitalist sector represents the dominant segment of the country's capitalist class, it must be pointed out that the sector of capitalists who call themselves "oppositionists" [Conservatives] are also involved in exploiting the Nicaraguan people. Many times, the governing and "opposition" groups jointly exploit important sectors of the national economy, as is the case regarding sugar, milk, the press, banking, liquor distilleries, etc.(32)
The same essay goes on to show how both capitalist sectors were based on an extremely unequal land distribution derived from expulsion of peasants from their land. While both Conservatives and Liberals prospered, said Fonseca, the majority of Nicaraguans faced a decline in food production, widespread hunger, poor health, high infant mortality, illiteracy and lack of educational opportunities.
The Somoza family dominated the government and owned much of the wealth in Nicaragua throughout Fonseca's lifetime. But Fonseca always insisted that the problem was bigger than the Somoza family and that the capitalist class as a whole was committed to preserving an oppressive system, with or without Somoza. He rejected the idea that the wealthy families would ever seriously challenge Somoza's rule, unless it was to put themselves in Somoza's place. He wrote in 1969:
Historical experience has taught us that there are no possible alternatives except the following: either the rich will exploit the poor, or the poor will free themselves by wiping out the privileges of the millionaires.(33)
The FSLN adopted as its own Sandino's slogan that "only the workers and peasants will go all the way." Fonseca in Guerrillero Proletario quoted Sandino at length to make his point that members of the elite and the middle class give up their pretenses of opposition when they come up against repression:
Those who vacillate, those who are frightened, abandon us when they see what the struggle is really about. Only the workers and peasants will go all the way, only their organized power will guarantee victory.(34)
Fonseca and the FSLN were ideologically committed to the perspective that only the working class could lead a socialist revolution. In practice, however, they spent much more time working with peasants and even students than they did with urban or rural workers.
The military campaigns of the FSLN were concentrated in the countryside. The orientation to rural areas was based not solely on geographical or military advantages but also on the revolutionary tradition of the peasantry, the oppression suffered by the rural poor, especially the many thousands who lost their land in the 1950s and 1960s, and in general on the dominant role of agriculture in the Nicaraguan economy.
In 1974 the FSLN, by holding some of the most prominent men in the country hostage, forced the government to broadcast two manifestos. This was an unusual opportunity for the organization to make its program known throughout the country. Communique #1 dealt almost exclusively with peasant issues, with concrete facts on the poverty of Nicaraguan peasants, their loss of land, and the repression they suffered at the hands of the National Guard. It included a series of demands related specifically to peasant needs.(35)
In an analysis written a month before his death, Fonseca concluded that it was correct for the FSLN's "center of gravity" to be in the countryside, but he criticized the organization for failing to do serious political work with peasants. Pointing out that the only large-scale mobilizations of peasants took place in 1964 (when the FSLN's activity was concentrated in the cities), he said the organization's successes consisted of winning the support of certain select individuals, "which should never be confused with the mobilization of thousands of peasants."(36)
Most of the leaders of the FSLN, including Carlos Fonseca, were neither peasants nor workers but rather students. (Some were from the lower classes; Fonseca had peddled newspapers and candies in the streets of Matagalpa as a child to help his mother.) In a country like Nicaragua, Fonseca wrote in 1968, with an industrial proletariat that was "very new and in its overwhelming majority not organized in unions," students could be expected to lead the revolutionary movement for a certain length of time.(37) Fonseca acknowledged that students--particularly university students--were a privileged minority in a poor country like Nicaragua. He noted that there were only 5,000 college students and 20,000 high school students in the entire country in 1968.(38) Fonseca believed, however, that even relatively well-off students, because of their youth and rebelliousness, could be won to a revolutionary movement.
Because of their youth, students are the people whose spirits have been penetrated least deeply by the lies and the vices of a corrupt capitalist society. Students represent today the popular sector that the capitalist regime has the hardest time deceiving. This explains the important role that youth play in all great revolutionary events. We can even say that dictators, the enemies of humanity, come to a point, as the revolutionary struggle picks up strength, where they consider the simple fact of being young to be a criminal act.(39)
Here Fonseca drew from the experiences of Cuba and especially the international youth radicalization of the late 1960s rather than from Sandino. Observers refer to boys of 12 or 13 in Sandino's army, but these youngsters were peasants, not students. In Sandino's stronghold of Las Segovias, the "criminal act" was being a peasant, not being young.(40)
Fonseca also criticized the weaknesses of the student movement. He said it was a crime that there were no massive student protests in Nicaragua when Che Guevara was murdered in Bolivia in 1967, a failure Fonseca attributed to lack of discipline, a leadership default, and the influence of capitalist ideas.(41)
Fonseca wrote less about the revolutionary role of the proletariat than about the rebelliousness of students. He and the FSLN helped form and lead half a dozen different student groups but few workers groups or unions. He put more emphasis on recruiting workers to the guerrilla army than on organizing around labor issues. Even in one of his last writings, Fonseca insisted that:
"One worker who joins the guerrillas clearly represents a danger to the Somocista regime and its system--a much greater danger than an economic strike by hundreds of workers at some workplace."(42)
Fonseca believed that workers in a country like Nicaragua were not that far removed from peasants, pointing out that most workers still had rural backgrounds and family connections, were at home in the countryside, and were better prepared to survive the rigorous life of a guerrilla than most student recruits.(43)
Sandino identified strongly with the working class, although he did not write much about the political or military role of workers in the fight against U.S. occupation. "I am a city worker, an artisan as they say in my country," Sandino said in a 1927 manifesto. He went on: The oligarchs, that is, the geese that paddle in the muck, will say I'm plebeian. Good enough: my highest honor is having come from the oppressed masses who are the soul and nerve-system of the race.(44)
In the years between Sandino and Fonseca, the industrial working class in Nicaragua, although still a minority of the population, had gotten larger and more unionized. Agricultural workers were still completely unorganized, however, and the unions to which urban workers belonged were linked either to the PSN or to the Somoza government.
In 1975 and 1976, as support for the FSLN became widespread and the possibilities for a generalized uprising increased, Fonseca began to pay more attention to industrial workers. In 1975 he wrote that rank and file workers, even though they continued to look to their PSN-led unions for satisfaction of economic demands, saw the FSLN as their political organization.(45) This was a big change from the situation in the 1960s, and one that for a Marxist like Carlos Fonseca, opened up the possibility of the kind of deepgoing social revolution that had been unrealizable in Sandino's time.
Socialism and National Liberation
In a 1970 interview, Fonseca explained that:
In our revolutionary struggle, we are guided by the most advanced principles, by Marxist ideology, by Commandante Ernesto Che Guevara, by Augusto César Sandino. We know that socialism is the only hope the masses of people have for achieving a fundamental change in their living conditions.(46)
In 1957 Fonseca had said that his goal was a regime that could do away with the semifeudal and semicolonial economy of Nicaragua and create "an independent, national capitalism."(47) After the Cuban Revolution, he never again suggested that his goal was anything but a deepgoing social revolution, which--as he said as early as 1960--"would reverse and turn upside down the entire order of things in Nicaragua, in which the rulers would become the ruled, and the ruled the rulers."(48)
Fonseca did not believe that a revolution would be made in Nicaragua by committed Marxists alone. As he said in the 1970 interview quoted above:
Although we think the fundamental guide must be the principles of scientific socialism, we are ready to march alongside people of very diverse beliefs who are interested in the overthrow of the dictatorship and the liberation of our country."(49)
Sandino was not a Marxist, and his goal was not socialism. But he showed a similar willingness to march alongside others fighting to rid the country of U.S. domination, even if they were members of the Conservative or Liberal parties. Or, as he said in 1927: "I welcome you to my ranks without distinction of political color, only asking that you come in the right spirit."(50)
In 1969 Fonseca drafted a 13-point platform that came to be known as the "Historic Program" of the FSLN. It combined nationalist, democratic and anticapitalist demands. It called for a revolutionary government that would distribute land to the peasants, enact far-reaching labor legislation, grant equal rights to women, end discrimination against Blacks and Indians, respect religious freedom, and carry out "a revolution in education and culture." It also called for the nationalization of all property owned by the Somoza family and its cronies, of all natural resources owned by foreigners, of all landholdings above a certain (unspecified) size, and of the banking system.
The Historic Program did not call for socialism. It included many of the demands of the Mexican Revolution. It is quite similar to the Freedom Charter drawn up by the African National Congress of South Africa in 1954, a program for a popular, democratic revolution.(51)
Fonseca thought that all those who agreed with the central democratic and nationalist demands of the Historic Program had a role to play in the revolution. At the same time, he believed that the FSLN itself, and especially its leadership, should be firmly grounded in Marxism. In 1976 he attributed some of the severe internal problems the FSLN was suffering to the ideological weakness (by which he meant non-Marxism) of some members. The FSLN was to some extent suffering from its own success, he said. As the FSLN became a pole of attraction on a national scale after 1967 and especially after 1974, it recruited more and more people with middle-class backgrounds and "liberaloid" and individualistic ideas.(52)
In 1976 Fonseca criticized the decision to give a responsible party position to Luis Carrión, "a person of bourgeois extraction and non-Marxist ideology."(53) Responding to the arguments of other FSLN leaders that Carrión did good practical work, Fonseca said that while it was true "that a correct ideological line is worthless unless it leads to practical action, good practical work is not enough if it is not accompanied by a Marxist ideological orientation."(54) This did not contradict Fonseca's other writings on the relationship between theory and practice. Theory without action will get you nowhere, Fonseca always insisted. Action without theory might get you somewhere, but not to socialism.
At the same time, Fonseca had little patience with what he called revolutionary phrasemongering:
Giving speeches in the name of socialism and rattling off the names of all the best-known revolutionary theories doesn't guarantee that you are going to be able to make the kind of fundamental changes we are proposing.(55)
He sounded the same theme from the early 1960s, when he polemicized against the "false Marxists" of the PSN, to 1976, when he launched a sharp attack on the FSLN grouping that called itself the "Proletarian Tendency."
Fonseca warned against using Marxist jargon and cliches that could confuse and alienate potential supporters. "We can find words in our own traditional historic vocabulary and in the richness of our own language to give a sense of the radical character of the process we are talking about, without resorting to over-used cliches."(56) He continued (in a document from 1976):
Does this mean that all those references we made in the past to Marxist theory and to the goal of socialism were errors? NO, they were not errors, because over this whole period it has been necessary to educate several waves of members of the FSLN in proletarian ideas."(57)
"The duty of every revolutionary"--the debate on armed struggle
Based on his analysis of the political and economic domination of Nicaragua by the United States and the complicity of both traditional parties in maintaining a dictatorial regime, Fonseca believed that revolutionary war was necessary even to win genuine national independence. This was the lesson of Sandino, who said "the sovereignty of a people is not to be debated, it is to be defended arms in hand,"(58)and "we won't beat the Marines with flowers." It was also the recent experience of the Cuban Revolution.
The first document written by Fonseca after his return from Cuba focused on the question of taking up arms.(59) He said that the victory of the Cuban Revolution posed the question of organizing a revolutionary army in Nicaragua, and that, while foolhardy or adventuristic armed actions should be avoided, "the danger of adventurism must not be used as an excuse for moving at a snail's pace."(60) Fonseca polemicized against the position of "so-called socialists" who said armed struggle should be postponed until revolutionaries had the technical and military capacity to defeat government forces. Fonseca insisted that the only way for a revolutionary group to acquire such a capability was to show its seriousness by taking up arms.(61)
He was able to point to the fact that in May 1927 Sandino had only 30 men in his Army in Defense of National Sovereignty. All the other Liberal generals had signed the Treaty of Espino Negro on May 4, 1927. (This pact, according to Carlos Fonseca, "showed that the Nicaraguan national bourgeoisie had linked itself, once and for all, with the feudal and reactionary classes."(62)) The first battles between Sandino's guerrillas and the U.S. Marines were military disasters for the Sandinistas.
The exact timing and circumstances of Fonseca's formal break with the PSN are obscure,(63) but the debate over armed struggle played a prominent role in the split. The political issues involved were much broader than just a difference over whether it was time to launch an armed revolt. The reason the PSN opposed armed struggle was because it believed the task of Nicaraguan socialists for the indefinite future had to be pressuring either the Somoza regime or a Conservative Party alternative to reform the labor code and legalize the left. After the victory of the Cuban Revolution, this limited approach was unaceptable to Carlos Fonseca.
In 1968 Fonseca polemicized against a university organization's praise of "peaceful coexistence" and its call for bringing about change through dialogue and mutual respect rather than combat. Fonseca called this "obscurantism" and said such positions were responsible for the defeats that revolutionaries suffered in Nicaragua and around Latin America.(64)
Fonseca, like Che Guevara, said that the best revolutionary theory was worthless without implementation. Practice--in other words, the armed struggle--was more important than theory, at least in determining who was a genuine revolutionary. "The duty of every revolutionary," said Guevara, "is to make the revolution." Fonseca said that "a Conservative who breaks with the leadership of his party and decides to go into the mountains to fight on the side of the peasants" is a better revolutionary than "the charlatan who can talk until the cows come home about the transformation of society but doesn't join actively in the struggle."(65)
In the conditions of Nicaragua, said Fonseca, the appropriate form of armed struggle was guerrilla war, the struggle of "one against ten," based in the countryside. Fonseca referred to "the bearded ones" of the Sierra Maestra, and he drew on Che Guevara's writings on the moral and physical qualities of the guerrilla fighter. Fonseca pointed out in 1976 that "guerrilla warfare in the mountains offers the advantage that its physical demands put the human and revolutionary caliber of the combatant to the test in a matter of days, something that requires a much longer time in the city."(66) Like Che Guevara, Fonseca wrote about the practical attributes that made a good guerrilla: it helped to have peasant roots, to be young--twenty was a perfect age, he said--and to be good at sports.(67) (He thought it was important to be in good health, although he himself--like Che--had serious health problems. Among other things, Fonseca suffered from night-blindness.)
Fonseca's writings also draw heavily on the military strategy and practical experience of an earlier generation of Sandinista guerrillas in Nicaragua. The FSLN studied the survival techniques of Sandino's Army in Defense of National Sovereignty: what they ate in the jungle, how they posted guard, how they protected themselves against the cold and rain.(68) In Guerrillero Proletario and other writings, Fonseca describes how Sandino built support among the peasants of Las Segovias--distributing food and tools, building peasants' confidence by taking harsh reprisals against hated landlords and officials, disciplining, sometimes even executing, Sandinista soldiers who stole or raped.(69) The FSLN made its own version of the famous "Sandino bombs"--the sardine cans discarded by U.S. Marines that Sandino's soldiers packed with dynamite and nails stolen from U.S.-owned mines.(70) Fonseca also drew attention to the role of women in Sandino's army, both as combatants and as auxiliaries or supporters.
In his writings on the armed struggle, Fonseca answered "certain terrorists" who proposed carrying out acts of sabotage in the factories in order to bankrupt the economy, pointing out that, even without sabotage, "the Nicaraguan economy is by its very essence a bankrupt economy, in a state of permanent crisis."(71) He also took his distance from acts of individual terrorism, such as the assassination of Anastasio Somoza García by Rigoberto López Pérez in 1956. "What will end the oppression that the Nicaraguan people suffer will not be any particular individual action but rather the action of the mobilized masses in their majority."(72)
Fonseca favored combining armed struggle with other forms of revolutionary activity: demonstrations of students and workers, peaceful land occupations by peasants, activities in coalition with legal organizations. (The FSLN itself was never a legal organization in Nicaragua until it took power on July 19, 1979.) In a 1968 call-to-action addressed to "revolutionary students," Fonseca says: "The strategic line of the FSLN is that the popular masses without rifles will be defeated, just as rifles alone without the masses will also be defeated."(73)
One form of legal political activity that Fonseca rejected--and argued vehemently against from 1960 until his death--was elections. He rarely used the word "election" by itself--his normal term was "electoral farce." All the other groups on the left (the PSN and various split-offs from the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party) supported the series of opposition candidates put forward by the Conservative Party. The FSLN under Fonseca's leadership opposed all these campaigns. The idea of the FSLN running its own candidates was never suggested.
Sandino also rejected electoralism--at least after his 1927 break with the Liberal generals who signed the pact of Espino Negro. In his 1932 call for a boycott of the upcoming elections, Sandino wrote: To expect national dignity from [Conservative candidates] Chamorro and Díaz or from [Liberal candidates] Espinosa and Sacasa, is foolishness of the worst kind, especially when the Army Defending the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua is approaching in triumph... Do not obey a single order of the marines in this electoral farce. No one has to go to the polls, and there is no law to make you. Show yourselves to be worthy of freedom.(74)
Fonseca's 1966 communique, "¡Sandino sí, Somoza no; revolución sí, farsa electoral no!" has the same theme and even uses the same language.(75) "A nose for power:" building a revolutionary organization(76)
During the first dozen years of the FSLN's existence, it was nearly wiped out by the National Guard several times. Crushing military defeats were suffered in 1963 and 1967. Hundreds of young militants and the majority of the organization's national leadership were killed. Peasants were massacred for real or presumed support to the guerrillas. Fonseca and other Sandinistas referred to the years between 1967 and 1974 as "the period of slow accumulation of cadres in silence." Even during the period when the FSLN was most isolated, Fonseca stressed the importance of building a political organization and not just training a guerrilla army. He criticized the theory of "foquismo," which held that guerrilla bands alone, without a political party, could ignite a revolutionary situation.(77)
Article 1 of the FSLN Statutes (written in the late 1960s) states: "The FSLN is a political-military organization whose goal is taking power through a popular war and putting into practice its program."(78) This was different from Sandino's movement. Sandino broke with the other Liberal generals and politicians in 1927, but he never started his own political organization. Fonseca argued that the reason a revolutionary change did not occur in the 1930s was because it was impossible for Sandino to complement his successful military strategy with a "correct political strategy."(79)
Building a political organization meant studying the history of other revolutions, and it also meant looking honestly at the history of one's own group and learning from its mistakes. Fonseca said in 1976 that the FSLN in the course of its history had made "a good number of mistakes, some that were unavoidable for dialectical reasons, some that were probably avoidable, and some that were most definitely avoidable."(80)
Fonseca said that leaders (such as himself) had to be frank about the past and take responsibility for mistakes that were made. This was one of the themes of the historical analysis, "Hora Cero," written in 1969. Fonseca was quick to criticize cases where history was falsified or quotations modified for political reasons. Borge describes in his autobiography what happened at a mountain encampment when one FSLN guerrilla recited a poem by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and substituted the word "people" for the word "God."
Carlos took advantage of this to launch a frontal attack on . . . the tendency which, he said, "is not unknown among revolutionaries, especially in the case of victorious revolutions, to falsify texts and historical events in the interest of supposed political goals." [Carlos] went on: "if we let ourselves fall into this habit, we will leave a false or incomplete history for future generations."(81)
Fonseca's ideas on the moral qualities needed to be a member of a revolutionary organization drew on both Sandino and Che Guevara. One of the main educational and propaganda texts used by the FSLN from the early 1960s was Carlos Fonseca's selection of quotations from Sandino published as Ideario Sandinista.(82) It includes a section on "Morality" with subheads like "Selflessness," "Sacrifice," and "The joy of struggle."
Although many recruits to the FSLN were students, and some came from elite families, Fonseca always stressed the importance of trying to recruit those from working- class or peasant backgrounds. He believed that there was a class basis to certain character traits, as well as to political leanings. He considered individualism, selfishness, vanity, and a disinclination to function in a collective way as "middle-class"(83) characteristics. The personal qualities that made it possible to function in a revolutionary organization--modesty, respect for others, honesty, self-discipline--he considered "proletarian."(84)
He also claimed that workers and especially peasants were better able to keep secrets, less likely to turn informer, than FSLN members and collaborators who came from a middle or upper-class background. (In fact, the most famous FSLN turncoat, Tito Chamorro, came from one of Nicaragua's wealthiest families. According to Tomás Borge, Chamorro's betrayal of the organization's secrets to the National Guard was responsible for Carlos Fonseca's death, as well as the capture and murder of Chamorro's own sister, Claudia.)
Fonseca also wrote about the role of the intellectual in society and his or her relationship to the democratic and revolutionary movements. During the period 1934-59, he says, because of the weakness of the working-class movement and the ideological bankruptcy of the Conservative opposition, the role of intellectual leader fell to the Catholic movement. Some of these Catholic ideologues were attracted to fascism; a few, such as Ernesto Cardenal, became revolutionaries.
Fonseca wrote almost nothing about the relationship between Christianity and revolutionary thought, which became an important theme of Sandinista ideology after his death. Ricardo Morales Avilés, the second-most-important intellectual leader of the FSLN, wrote some articles in the early 1970s that Borge says also represented Fonseca's thinking. These articles affirm the fundamental ideological incompatibility of Marxism and Christianity, but stress the willingness of Marxists in the FSLN to join in action with Christians working for social change.(85)
In the last few years of his life, Fonseca paid increasing attention to the type of leadership a revolutionary organization needed, and how such an organization should function internally. Was the FSLN a party? Yes and no, said Fonseca.
If it is not realistic to have a party with a central committee and conventions, newspapers and theoretical magazines, it is still necessary to carry out some of the tasks of a party: the study, especially in combat zones, of national issues..., a better way of combining military with political training, forging links with the exploited masses, wherever they might be,..., steeling ourselves against ideological divisionism... etc.(86)
In his last known writing, Fonseca argued that the revolutionary struggle was in a better situation in 1976 than it had been in Sandino's day, precisely because a political-military organization had been created that would be able "to move from a military victory into a political victory that would consist of the establishment of a popular Sandinista government."(87)
In December 1974, FSLN commandos carried out a daring raid on a cocktail party in Managua. Several dozen of the richest and most powerful people in the country, including relatives of Somoza, were taken hostage. The FSLN demanded and got the release of eight of its leaders from jail, transport of the ex-prisoners and commando members to Cuba, one million dollars cash and the publication of two manifestos.
According to Fonseca, this began a new stage of the Nicaraguan revolution. In 1975 and 1976, opportunities opened up for organizing revolutionary activity on a scale that had never been possible before, and the Somoza government went into a deep political crisis. "In other Latin American countries," said Fonseca in 1976, "it may not be such a novelty that a revolutionary organization has appeared that has the ability to win over broad layers of the poor. But in Nicaragua this is a real event."(88)
Fonseca thought the possibility of a massive insurrection was on the horizon in Nicaragua after 1974. During this period he organized the FSLN leaders who were in Cuba into four task forces to plan various aspects of the insurrection: one to study Sandino's strategy (headed by Fonseca himself), and others on the military aspects of the insurrectionary war, the economic and social conditions of Nicaragua and organizational aspects of the FSLN.(89)
In 1975 there was a three-way split in the FSLN, and it became clear to Fonseca that the organization would not be able to take advantage of the new revolutionary opportunities that existed unless it could solve its internal problems. (He refers in one document to El Salvador, where a similar internal split had become violent. There the poet Roque Dalton, Fonseca's friend since 1957, had just been murdered by members of an opponent tendency.) Fonseca's purpose in returning to Nicaragua from Cuba in 1975 was to meet with leaders of the different tendencies and try to clarify the political issues involved in the split.
Fonseca's concept of democratic centralism is revealed in a 1976 document dealing with these internal problems. The document is a blistering attack on the behavior and political views of Jaime Wheelock, who had been expelled from the FSLN. It is also sharply critical of Humberto Ortega and Eduardo Contreras, who were, like Fonseca, members of the National Directorate of the FSLN. He accuses them of indiscipline, disloyalty, dishonesty, and carrying out factional maneuvers behind the backs of the rest of the national leadership.(90)
Fonseca's writings during the last year of his life dealt with many practical questions involved in the approaching revolutionary situation. He urged the FSLN not just to step up military operations but also to carry out political work on a much wider scale in the poor urban neighborhoods, factories, and high schools. He said it was time for FSLN guerrillas to come down from the mountains and try to carry out political work in rural areas that were close to population centers.(91) He made concrete proposals about stepping up recruitment to the FSLN, especially in workplaces and working-class communities. He suggested setting up a category of "affiliates" of the FSLN, broader than the established categories of member ("militant"), collaborator, and sympathizer. "This might help thousands and thousands of people feel like they are more part of the FSLN," Fonseca said.(92) Even though it had become a pole of attraction for "thousands and thousands," the FSLN may have had fewer than 200 actual members at the time of Fonseca's death.(93)
By 1976 the FSLN was militarily strong enough to carry out more than just harassing actions against the National Guard. Fonseca urged them to be extremely selective about carrying out executions ("ajusticiamentos") of particular National Guard and government officials, and not to take actions that would isolate the FSLN from potential followers. "In many cases, certain people deserve to die, because of the horrible crimes they have committed, but the overall interest of the movement doesn't allow them to be killed."(94) He discusses at one point, for example, whether it would help or hurt the movement for Somoza to be assassinated, concluding that--although it would be one of the most popular actions the FSLN could take--its overall impact would be negative.
Along similar lines, Fonseca took up the practical political question of how to encourage splits and desertions in the National Guard, pointing to the difference between officers and peasant recruits, and insisting they be treated differently when captured. He pointed to the lessons of other countries where a popular revolutionary upsurge had demoralized and divided government troops.(95) He had a long discussion with Ernesto Cardenal about the role the Church could play in preventing too many National Guardsmen from being lynched at the point when the revolution actually won.
He also urged great caution in taking actions that might involve the lives or property of North Americans, in order to avoid a direct or premature conflict with the United States. (The December, 1974, raid, for example, had been planned for another party, but was called off when the FSLN found out the U.S. Ambassador was going to be there.) Fonseca suggested in 1976 that the Liberal President of Nicaragua Benjamin Zelaya (a hero for both Sandino and the FSLN) had inadvertently provided the pretext for U.S. military intervention when he had two U.S. citizens executed in 1909.(96) Fonseca thought there was a danger that Washington would send troops to keep the FSLN from taking power in Nicaragua, and he did not want to make it easy for the U.S. to justify such a move. These tactical military considerations did not imply pulling back from the political campaign against U.S. domination. If anything, the theme of national liberation became even more central as the FSLN began to appeal to broader sectors of society.
A theme of Fonseca's final writings was that FSLN had to present itself to the Nicaraguan people and the world as serious about making a revolution and make sure that it was ready to take power when time came, not get maneuvered out of it by other Central American governments, the Organization of American States, Washington, or the capitalist opposition to Somoza.(97) He said that even a successful armed insurrection did not guarantee a revolutionary transformation of society. More often than not, he said, "the bourgeoisie has been able to consolidate its hegemony again"(98) after a popular revolution. The only exception in Latin America was the Cuban Revolution. Fonseca believed that if the FSLN were able to lead a successful revolution and take power in Nicaragua, this could open the door to the second socialist revolution in the Americas.
It was the Cuban Revolution of 1959 that caused Fonseca to break with the reform-oriented traditional left and to resurrect the revolutionary example of Augusto Sandino. Until 1959, Carlos Fonseca's own writings were completely consistent with the PSN's perspective that a socialist revolution was impossible in a backward Central American country and that the tasks of Nicaraguan Marxists were to glorify and defend the Soviet Union and wait for the revolution to occur in an advanced country like the United States. For the Fonseca of Un Nicaragüense en Moscú, socialism is the automatic, mechanical result of state ownership of the means of production and Communist Party control of the government apparatus. There is nothing here of Che Guevara's--and the mature Fonseca's--idea of the importance of revolutionary consciousness, the concept that socialism meant the transformation of human nature.
The FSLN was organized in opposition to the perspective of the PSN, and Fonseca's writings from 1960 until his death regard the PSN (as well as the Conservative Party opposition) as an obstacle to the building of a genuine revolutionary movement in Nicaragua.(99) The FSLN and PSN both participated in an opposition coalition called the Republican Mobilization for a few years in the mid-1960s, but the two organizations maintained a separate and adversarial relationship throughout Fonseca's lifetime and afterwards.(100)
Fonseca's break with the PSN was intertwined with his rediscovery of Sandino. It was the "false Marxists" of the PSN even more than the "false oppositionists" of the Conservative Party who had buried Sandino during what Fonseca called the quarter-century of darkness.
Once Carlos Fonseca began studying Sandino's writings and the history of the war against the U.S. Marines, he found much that was useful for developing a revolutionary ideology and organizing a guerrilla war in the 1960s and 1970s. Fonseca believed that a revolution could only be successful in his country if it was rooted in the Nicaraguan revolutionary tradition--in the nineteenth-century resistance to William Walker, in the way Benjamín Zelaya tried to stand up to the United States, and especially in the example of Sandino. Fonseca did not think a revolution in Nicaragua could be imported or copied from another experience--even from the Cuban Revolution, which had had a dramatic impact on his own political thinking and which he believed offered the closest parallels to the Nicaraguan reality.
The importance of Sandino is illustrated by the fact that, when the FSLN decided to set up task forces to map out concrete plans for the taking of power, Fonseca himself chose to lead the committee charged with incorporating the lessons--both positive and negative--of the earlier Sandinista movement.
Fonseca's writings of 1975 and 1976 in particular anticipate the development in his country of a broad revolutionary movement led by the FSLN, a movement which could result in a general insurrection and the establishment of a Sandinista government.
On July 19, 1979, two and a half years after Carlos Fonseca's death, a successful revolution put an FSLN-led government in power in Nicaragua. The National Palace in Managua, where Somoza's government had met for more than 40 years, was hung with huge banners of Augusto César Sandino and Carlos Fonseca Amador.

BIBLIOGRAPHY/FOOTNOTES

1. Carlos Fonseca, "Síntesis de algunos problemas actuales"[1975], Obras (Managua:Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1981), 1:98-99. Emphasis in original.

2. Fonseca (1936-76) was the son of an unmarried domestic servant (Augustina Fonseca) and the well-to-do administrator of a Somoza enterprise. Unlike Augusto C. Sandino, who had a similar background but adopted his father's name, Fonseca always used his mother's.

3. See, for example, the semi-official history of the FSLN, Sandino y la doctrina de liberación nacional, by Victor Tirado López, a member of the FSLN National Directorate (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1989). Although it brings the history of the FSLN up to 1979 and is dedicated "to Carlos," the book does not quote Fonseca and includes none of his writings in its bibliography.

4. Sandino led a mostly-peasant army in a 1926-33 war against an occupying force of U.S. Marines. He was killed in 1934 at the order of Nicaraguan National Guard chief Anastasio Somoza García.

5. "Bajo las banderas del Sandino" was the title of a 1968 proclamation by Fonseca. See Obras, 1:248-251.

6. From Fonseca's 1964 declaration to a trial judge, Obras 1:182.

7. Carlos Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña y algunos otros temas"[1976], Obras, 1:125.

8. Carlos Fonseca, "Hora Cero"[1969], Obras, 1:83. The PSN was formed in 1944.

9. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 125.

10. Carlos Fonseca, "Viva Sandino"[1975], Obras, 2:35.

11. Carlos Fonseca, "Entrevista, 1970"[Interview by Ernesto González Bermejo], Obras, 1:217.

12. Fonseca, "Viva Sandino," 22.

13. Fonseca, "Entrevista, 1970," 219. The relative's name was also Carlos Fonseca.

14. Tomás Borge, La Paciente Impaciencia (Managua: Edit. Vanguardia, 1989), 121.

15. Carlos Fonseca, "Un Nicaragüense en Moscú"[1958], Obras, 1:322.

16. Borge, Paciente, 111-113; see also "Carlos Fonseca en Segovia," Casa de las Américas, 174:3-11.

17. Anastasio Somoza, El verdadero Sandino o el calvario de Las Segovias (Managua: Editorial "San Jose," 1976 [First edition 1936]. Las Segovias refers to a mountainous region of northeastern Nicaragua.

18. Borge, Paciente, 187.

19. Ibid., 188.

20. David Nolan, The Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables, FL: Institute of Interamerican Studies, 1984), 168.

21. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 123. See also "Entrevista, 1970," 217.

22. Carlos Fonseca, "Yanqui Johnson, go home"[1968], Obras, 1:251. The last two words are in English in the original.

23. Somoza, El verdadero Sandino, 83. Capitals in original.

24. Donald Hodges, The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Austin TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10.

25. Gregorio Selser, Sandino (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 97.

26. Carlos Fonseca, "Mensaje del FSLN a los estudiantes revolucionarios"[1968], Obras, 1:67.

27. Fonseca, "La lucha por la transformación," in Obras, p. 37.

28. Carlos Fonseca, "Viva Sandino", 2:64.

29. Ibid, 75.

30. Carlos Fonseca, Sandino: Guerrillero Proletario (Managua: Serie Pensamiento Sandinista, 1980) 12.

31. Selser, Sandino, 135.

32. Fonseca, "Hora Cero," 76-77.

33. Fonseca, "Hora Cero", 69.

34. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 22.

35. Borge, Paciente, 463-466. Fonseca was not in Nicaragua during the December 1974 raid, but he participated actively in its planning. Since the publication of the communiques was one of the main purposes of the raid, it can be assumed that Fonseca had something to say about the general themes addressed.

36. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 133.

37. Fonseca, "Mensaje a estudiantes," 61.

38. Ibid., 71.

39. Ibid., 60.

40. Selser, Sandino, 115.

41. Fonseca, "Mensaje a estudiantes," 57.

42. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 139.

43. Ibid., 137.

44. Selser, Sandino, 91.

45. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 107.

46. Fonseca, "Entrevista, 1970," 227.

47. Carlos Fonseca,"Declaración, 1957," Obras, 1:168.

48. Carlos Fonseca, "La lucha por la transformación de Nicaragua"[1960], Obras, 1:26.

49. Fonseca, "Entrevista, 1970," 227.

50. Selser, Sandino, 92

51. See Nelson Mandela, The Struggle is My Life (London: Pathfinder, 1985), Appendix. There is no evidence that Fonseca was familiar with the Freedom Charter, although this is not impossible.

52. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 136.

53. Carrión, a former student at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, has described his activity as an FSLN leader as "building a Christian movement for revolution," and presenting "a new, revolutionary vision of Christianity." See Margaret Randall, Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983), 147, 162.

54. Carlos Fonseca, Nota sobre algunos problemas de hoy, unpaginated typescript manuscript, section 26.

55. Carlos Fonseca, "Síntesis de algunos problemas actuales," 98.

56. Ibid., 98. See also Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 116-117.

57. Fonseca, "Síntesis de algunos problemas," 99.

58. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 22

59. Fonseca, "La lucha por la transformación de Nicaragua," 25-38. This mimeographed manifesto was found in the files of Somoza's National Security police in 1979.

60. Ibid., 28.

61. See Fonseca, "Mensaje a estudiantes," 56, 59; also Borge, Paciente, 428-29.

62. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 12.

63. Borge and Nolan say that one of the times Fonseca entered Nicaragua secretly (in mid-1960), the PSN, which had opposed his return, published an announcement in its newspaper about the arrival of the "valiant young student fighter." Fonseca was immediately arrested and deported. (See Borge, Paciente, 163; Nolan, Ideology, 23.) There are other references to his being expelled from the PSN, without specific details.

64. Fonseca, "Mensaje a estudiantes," 59.

65. Fonseca, "Lucha por la transformación," 35.

66. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 138.

67. Ibid., 139-40.

68. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 18.

69. Selser, Sandino, 114.

70. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 19.

71. Fonseca, "La lucha por la transformación," 32.

72. Carlos Fonseca, "Breve análisis de la lucha popular nicaragüense contra la dictadura de Somoza"[1961], Obras, 1:45.

73. Fonseca, "Mensaje a estudiantes," 70.

74. Selser, Sandino, 146-7.

75. Fonseca, Obras, 1:243-247.

76. "From the beginning," said Tomás Borge in a 1983 speech, "we always had a nose for power." Tomás Borge, "The FSLN and the Nicaraguan Revolution," New International vol. 1, no. 3 (spring-summer 1984), 143.

77. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña", 140

78. Borge, Paciente, 323.

79. Fonseca, Guerrillero Proletario, 23-24. In the same work (page 30), Fonseca implies that Sandino was moving in the direction of setting up a political movement in late 1933: "the fact that he did not immediately form a party was only a formal difference, since his goal was building an independent political movement which could become the dominant influence in determining the future of Nicaragua."

80. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 130.

81. Borge, Paciente, 289.

82. The FSLN also published in the 1960s (under the same title of Ideario Sandinista) a similar collection compiled by another FSLN leader , Jose Benito Escobar.

83. Fonseca always used the term "petty bourgeois."

84. See Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 137, and Nota sobre algunos problemas de hoy.

85. Ricardo Morales Avilés, Obras: No pararemos de andar jamás (Managua: Editorial Nueva Nicaragua, 1982), 121-3, 129-166. Morales was killed by the National Guard in 1973.

86. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña", 140-141.

87. Ibid., 124.

88. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 131.

89. Borge, Paciente, 563.

90. This document has never been published in Nicaragua. Wheelock, Humberto Ortega, and Luis Carrión were all members of the nine-man National Directorate during the years the FSLN led the Nicaraguan government, from 1979 to 1990; Contreras was killed by the National Guard the day after Carlos Fonseca.

91. Fonseca, "Síntesis de algunos problemas," 119.

92. Ibid., 117.

93. Jeffrey Gould, To Lead as Equals (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 302. David Nolan (p. 25) says there were only a few dozen members in the mid-1960s. Although neither author cites any sources for these figures, they are not inconsistent with the way FSLN leaders, including Fonseca, described their organization at the time.

94. Fonseca, "Síntesis de algunos problemas," 104.

95. Ibid., 116.

96. Ibid., 103-4.

97. Ibid., 107-8.

98. Fonseca, "Notas sobre la montaña," 129.

99. Armando Amador, a long-time leader of the PSN who supported the FSLN by the early 1980s, presents a different view in his Un siglo de lucha de los trabajadores en Nicaragua (1880-1979) (Managua: CIRAL, 1990). His theory that there was never any fundamental ideological conflict between the PSN and FSLN makes virtually all of Carlos Fonseca's writings during the last sixteen years of his life unintelligible.

100. During the 1970s the PSN lost many of its younger and more radical members to the FSLN, and the organization itself split into two groups, one of which kept the name PSN while the other called itself the Nicaraguan Communist Party. Both the PSN and the PCN were pro-Moscow, anti-FSLN, bureaucratically-structured organizations, and both supported Violeta Chamorro against the FSLN in the 1990 elections.