The Sandinista Front was going to win. Just days before the 1990 elections, a Washington Post/ABC poll gave Comandante Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez a 16-point lead over Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and her running-mate, Virgilio Godoy. In a 2008 interview with Envío, cabinet official and party boss Nicho Marenco recalled Sandinista military leaders gathering on election day itself —February 25, 1990— to place bets on the result; the question was not if, but by how much they would win.
The FSLN needed a big margin —and a widespread sense of fairness, sustained by full opposition participation and guaranteed by thousands of foreign journalists and electoral monitors— for the results to stick. Sandinista leaders believed a clean victory would finally afford them the stability and domestic legitimacy required to govern effectively, as former FSLN Comandante Luis Carrión told me. U.S. foreign policy would continue posing a threat, but surely the elections would be a turning point in the relationship. As Nicaraguans filled polling stations, Daniel Ortega —in a gesture of good will— invited U.S. President George H.W. Bush to attend his inauguration.
As day turned to night, however, Ortega must have worried that the invitation had been premature. The FSLN high command was summoned to Comandante Humberto Ortega’s office at the Loma de Tiscapa, the former hilltop bunker and residence of Nicaragua’s previous ruler, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Internal monitors were suggesting that Ortega and Ramírez were losing even in some Sandinista strongholds; the national picture was correspondingly bleak.
In light of the numbers coming in (the opposition Unión Nacional Opositoria had picked up the lion’s share of the undecided vote; Violeta Barrios de Chamorro would go on to defeat the incumbent 55 to 41 percent), there was little to no debate among the National Directorate about recognizing the results. Given that the Sandinista Front had already signaled its inability to continue the war, refusing to accept defeat would have been “suicide,” Carrión recalls. “The little we had won,” he said, “we would have lost altogether.” Ortega privately conceded defeat in the middle of the night and made the concession public by sunrise the following day.
First, there was shock. “Laying in my hammock,” Culture Minister Ernesto Cardenal recalled in La revolución perdida, “I struggled to understand God’s will.” Next, adjustment to a new reality. U.S. military intervention was no longer an immediate threat. George H.W. Bush, who enjoyed a good personal relationship with Chamorro, promised to ask Congress for reconstruction aid.
Inside Nicaragua, a transition protocol saw Contra commanders bury their weapons in a symbolic ceremony, while the Sandinista Popular Army re-organized as a downsized Nicaraguan Armed Forces, perhaps the first non-partisan military in the country’s history. In his own memoir, Antonio Lacayo Oyanguren —Barrios de Chamorro’s campaign manager and chief of staff— described the transfer of power as involving a monumental, “triple transition”: from war to peace, from a hegemonic party regime to one of liberal democracy, and from a state-centered economy to an open, market-based system along the lines of the so-called Washington Consensus. But there were important continuities, too. The basic state institutions constructed during the revolutionary period, including the 1987 Constitution, were left in place.
Importantly, Ejército Popular Sandinista founding chief Humberto Ortega stayed on as head of the military (René Vivas, the Comandante Guerrillero in charge of the police, also kept his job). And even as the Chamorro administration slashed the government bureaucracy, privatized state-owned enterprises, and rolled back most social spending, the transition agreements legalized some of the redistribution of land and property that had taken place in the 1980s. These and other compromises, such as amnesties for Contra and EPS military officials, corresponded with the reality of the strategic stalemate that ended the war. They served as the foundation for a fraught, but surprisingly stable period of free elections and peaceful changes of government in the 1990s and early 2000s.
The Revolution was over. “The great paradox,” Sergio Ramírez observed in his 1999 memoir Adiós muchachos, “was that in the end, Sandinismo left a legacy that it had not intended: democracy. It was not able to leave what it had proposed: an end to backwardness, poverty, and marginalization.” Cardenal offered a similar assessment, as did scholarly analysts of varying degrees of sympathy for the Sandinistas.
When they were founded, and up until the 1980s, Central American revolutionary movements had seen the achievement of social justice as their main goal. “We went to la montaña to help the poverty-stricken population break free from its political paralysis and fatalism, so that it would once again fight for its dignity and happiness,” recalled Yolanda Colom, a member of Guatemala’s Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), in her memoir. But such efforts, as she explained in Mujeres en la alborada, were ultimately “overtaken by events.” For armed Left movements in and out of power, priorities —along with realities— shifted during the final years of the Cold War era.
Having set their sights on the outright defeat of El Salvador’s U.S.-backed government, with the hope of implementing a socialist-inspired reform agenda, the rebel Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) revised its strategic goal: it ultimately decided to negotiate the demilitarization of the Salvadoran government and a liberal-democratic transition through which the FMLN could legally participate in politics. For its part, the FSLN upper echelon accepted its defeat in 1990 and settled for affirming national sovereignty in the face of U.S. intervention, building an electoral democracy, and perhaps ending the country’s historical cycles of war and dictatorship.
It was a new era. Guerrillas across the isthmus wrestled with the weight of defeat as they learned to play by the rules of electoral politics. Some, like Colom, equated democratic transition with bitter defeat, but vowed to continue the struggle by other means: “The circumstances and mode of struggle have changed,” she wrote, “not the ideals, convictions, or social needs.” Others claimed that liberal democracy was a victory won by armed struggle. In a 2021 interview with CNN, Sandinista leader Humberto Ortega referred to the “revolutionary act” he and his comrades brought about in 1979 in the following terms: “its most important product was our having opened, despite all of the limitations, the road to democracy.”
* * *
What legacy of change did the FSLN government leave behind in Nicaragua? After overthrowing a personalist dictatorship in 1979, the Sandinista Front built representative institutions and ultimately abided by the rule of law. When they lost the 1990 elections, they handed power to a former ally in that overthrow, rather than someone who had been associated with the old Somoza regime. And beyond institutional transformation toward electoral democracy, most scholars agree that the country’s political culture changed as a result of the revolutionary government’s promotion of popular participation in politics. Sergio Ramírez recalled how the late conservative intellectual Emilio Álvarez Montalván had noted that if the Sandinista Revolution accomplished anything it was the introduction, for the first time in Nicaraguan history, of “compassion for the poor” in national discourse.
In socioeconomic terms, the Sandinistas tried to build equality through reforms in the areas of land tenure, housing, health, and education, but their effects were not as profound as had been hoped. This last point remains a matter of much debate. Nicaraguans on average left the revolutionary period poorer (measured by income) than they were before it, but many of them enjoyed access to healthcare (measured, for example, by infant and maternal mortality or the prevalence of infectious diseases) and education (see the literacy rate, or the number of teachers per 100,000 inhabitants) that they previously lacked. While union membership and property ownership both expanded during the 1980s, labor relations and land tenancy patterns remained extremely unequal in the 1990s and beyond. The revolutionary government also sought to empower women by enacting progressive social policies and promoting their participation in politics, but some feminist critics saw Ortega’s defeat by a female candidate as consequence, in part, of the unfulfillment of the FSLN’s agenda for women’s liberation. In other words, every section on the Revolution’s balance sheet contains ambiguities.
Why did the revolutionary government lose popular support over the course of the 1980s? This question, like that of the Sandinista record, is difficult to answer because it cannot be separated from that of who was responsible —the government, anti-government rebels, or foreign actors (most notably, the U.S. government)— for the violence and social misery associated with the Contra War. Analysts typically agree that undecided voters flocked to Chamorro because they believed her victory would pacify the country and stabilize its economy.
Insofar as U.S. policies determined the realities underlying the vote —armed conflict and economic collapse— Washington could take credit for bringing down the revolutionary government. But decisions taken by North Americans cannot by themselves account for what transpired; the intended effects of North American intervention were either enhanced or constrained by their interplay with various political forces inside Nicaragua and beyond: in Latin America, Europe, and the Socialist Bloc.
Because it brought immediate joy and relief to a traditional economic elite previously challenged by the Sandinistas’ governing agenda, some FSLN supporters saw in the transition to democracy both a revolutionary conquest and a bitter retreat that evoked pre-1979 fears that Somoza’s overthrow might simply lead to “somocismo without Somoza.” Adding to the outcome’s ambiguity was the fact that the Sandinistas’ U.S.-backed defeater in 1990 had been an important personality in the 1979 anti-Somoza alliance and member of the revolutionary government’s first executive junta.
Nicaragua in the 1980s experienced a political phenomenon common to many revolutions: once the old regime was defeated, the insurrectionary coalition began to fall apart. After conducting a survey of voters in the months after the electoral defeat, an FSLN-aligned Managua think tank (Instituto para el Desarrollo y la Democracia, IPADE) concluded in August 1990 that both U.S. intervention and a long list of policy mistakes —including ineffective price controls, clashes with Christian institutions, abuses by security officials, and marginalization of popular sectors not formally integrated into the Sandinista Front— combined to reduce the revolutionary government’s support to less than half of the population. That post-mortem report grouped the mistakes under a broader umbrella: “The model that we began to execute, of socialist orientation, clashed in practice with the program of reconstruction and national unity that allowed for the toppling of the Somocista dictatorship.”
At a global level, the fall of the Revolution marked the end of the Cold War era and the beginning of a new one. The Central American Peace Accords that resolved the war in Nicaragua had been lubricated by the denouement of the superpower conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had backed the Contras and Sandinistas, respectively. It had also been the last gasp of armed revolution in what was then known as the Third World — a historical climax, as Sergio Ramírez noted in his memoir, for an entire generation who admired Lumumba and Guevara, read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, celebrated decolonization in Asia and Africa, protested in 1968, and believed that socialism held the key to modernity and development. In 1990, the Sandinistas became the first socialist movement in the world which, having taken power by armed struggle, handed it over peacefully in democratic elections.
* * *
The Revolution’s collapse left few clear winners and losers. Because neither had been militarily subdued, both the Contra and Sandinista Front could plausibly claim some form of victory. Yet they could also feel defeated because their true aims were not met. In this sense, Nicaragua looked like —and indeed was inextricably linked to— contemporaneous Cold War-era upheavals in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Sandinista defeat in February 1990, along with the fall of the Berlin Wall just a few months earlier, helped convince the FMLN and Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) to negotiate national peace settlements framed by the larger Central American Peace Accords, wherein they renounced the armed struggle but also extracted key concessions from the establishment.
After decades of revolution and counterrevolution, social scientist Carlos Vilas noted, it was possible for everybody to feel disenchanted: neither could left-wing forces hold power and build toward an imagined future of social justice, nor could those on the other side resist reform altogether and cling to the past.
A decade earlier, the slogan had been si Nicaragua venció, El Salvador vencerá. Somoza’s overthrow in 1979 had provided an example; in practical terms, the new revolutionary government in Managua offered a headquarters for the FMLN high command and helped coordinate assistance from Cuba. The Salvadoran Left ultimately did not follow the Nicaraguans in seizing state power. One reason, paradoxically, was that —contrary to the prophetic slogans— the success of left-wing guerrillas in Nicaragua, by provoking a transnational reaction from right-wing forces, actually made success elsewhere less likely. But the U.S.-backed military could not rout the FMLN, either. The achievement of “strategic parity” allowed the Salvadoran rebels to win significant concessions through the Chapultepec Accords, named after the Mexico City castle where peace was signed in January 1992. As part of the U.N.-sponsored agreement, the FMLN promised to demobilize; in exchange, the Cristiani government agreed to reform and downsize security forces. Both sides accepted the FMLN’s participation in politics as a political party.
Mirroring their Nicaraguan counterparts, many Salvadoran guerrilla leaders modified their revolutionary outlook over time. Joaquín Villalobos, founder and leader of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP), one of the FMLN’s constituent factions, later reflected upon his career in the following terms: “When the continent was governed primarily by dictatorships, the dominant belief was that we guerrillas were the solution, but in reality we were just another symptom of the conflict that the dictatorships themselves were generating.” In dropping the ideal of armed struggle, Villalobos found another one in the form of demilitarizing El Salvador and giving citizens the right to vote. “Before that,” he explained, “the only thing that made a difference was changing points of view among the generals and colonels of the Armed Forces.” Not everybody within the FMLN shared this mixed assessment of the armed struggle or the rosy view that the insurrection succeeded in that it helped build democratic institutions.
Another slogan from the era was Nicaragua ayer, El Salvador hoy, Guatemala mañana. After a U.S.-backed coup against democratically-elected leftist Jacobo Árbenz in 1954, the country alternated between façade electoral regimes and outright military dictatorships. The various Marxist-led guerrilla groups that proliferated in rural areas —the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR), the Organización del Pueblo en Armas (ORPA), the armed branch of the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo (PGT), and the aforementioned EGP– ultimately unified under the flag of the UNRG.
But for various reasons they were unable to build a broad, multi-class revolutionary coalition like the one that triumphed in Nicaragua in 79, or to challenge their country’s brutal U.S.-backed counterinsurgent apparatus as effectively as counterparts in El Salvador. Because the Guatemalan military was in such a stronger position than the guerrillas by the middle of the 1980s, the ensuing peace process was less about ending the war than it was about preventing future armed conflicts, and the transition was messier than in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
Guatemala’s “agreement on a firm and lasting peace”, signed by the government and the URNG in 1996 capping off a process begun in Oslo five years earlier, envisioned a series of major reforms in health, education, and social security for “overcoming the root causes of the conflict,” most of which went unimplemented. When civil society groups published Guatemala: ¡Nunca Más! —a fact-finding report that blamed the Guatemalan government for the bulk of human rights abuses committed during the civil war— its chief proponent, the Catholic Bishop Juan Gerardi, was brutally murdered in a conspiracy carried out by members of the military. Still, it ended a war which, according to Guatemala’s Historical Clarification Commission (CEH, by its Spanish acronym), claimed 200,000 lives. Moreover, U.N.-sponsored truth and reconciliation initiatives like the CEH allowed Guatemalan society to document crimes against humanity that took place during the war and eventually hold some perpetrators accountable.
In an influential 1997 essay, Revoluciones sin cambios revolucionarios (Revolutions without Revolutionary Change), Guatemalan sociologist Edelberto Torres Rivas tried to balance the legacies of the revolutions. On the one hand, military rule had become discredited, landowners were forced to accept at least some redistribution, and free elections and greater civil society participation had been introduced and consolidated. For the very first time, an entire generation of Central Americans was living in relative peace, without dictatorships. On the other hand, poverty and inequality persisted, social malaise was widespread, and the social and institutional foundations of these new democracies were fragile. He ended the essay by sharing a “cursed question,” one that kept him, and others who had supported the armed rebellion against the established order, awake at night: “Was it worth it leaving behind 300,000 dead, a million refugees, 100,000 orphans?”
* * *
Immediately upon her release from prison and expatriation in 2023, Comandante Guerrillera Dora María Téllez reflected in historical terms: “I feel that the Sandinista Revolution’s conviction in democracy was not as deep as its conviction for social justice, but I never would have imagined that it would evolve into a dictatorship in the style of the Somozas,” she said in an interview with BBC. Nicaragua’s experiment with democracy —begun with Somoza’s ouster and the holding of the 1984 elections, developed with the 1987 constitution, and consolidated with the 1990 elections— is now over.
The emergence of a second family dictatorship in Nicaragua has naturally raised questions about the Sandinista Revolution’s legacies. Specifically, observers have been debating whether the contemporary political situation can be understood as a direct result of the 1980s revolutionary period. Some, such as President Daniel Ortega himself, emphasize the continuities. The officialist narrative holds that the current regime is carrying on a new phase of the 1979 revolution which, according to this mythology, Ortega and his wife —Co-president Rosario Murillo— led all along. Many from hardline anti-Sandinista backgrounds share the emphasis on continuity; despite the obvious differences in context, they draw a direct line between Ortega’s violent authoritarianism and Sandinista rule in the 1980s, which they understood as tyrannical, repressive, and totalitarian.
Podcast: The Rise of Rosario Murillo, Co-Dictator of Nicaragua
Meanwhile, other Nicaraguans see a break with the past. Dissident Sandinista leaders, for instance, have tended to portray Ortega as a traitor who usurped leadership of the revolutionary cause and betrayed its values. For them, there’s little left of the Revolution, and comparisons to the earlier Somoza regime are more instructive.
Over the coming years, historians must address these questions by balancing the continuities and discontinuities. It will likely be a long debate, with scholars locating the “place” of orteguismo in the history of the Nicaraguan Revolution much in the same way that they do for Bonapartism and Stalinism in the French and Russian revolutions, respectively.
Today, events elsewhere in Central America are no more inspiring: the strongman in El Salvador, the coup and post-coup muddle in Honduras, the corruption that consumes hope for renewal in Guatemala — to say nothing of the violence. Together they reveal the fragility of the democracies that emerged from the Cold War cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. Most Central Americans today were born after all that. But they grew up in the rubble it left behind.
Mateo Jarquín is a Nicaragua-born academic, Assistant Professor of History, and Director of the Program in War, Diplomacy, and Society at Chapman University. This number of The Tertulia is adapted from his book, The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History. Copyright 2024 by The University of North Carolina Press. Used with permission of The University of North Carolina Press.