Jonathan Steele

On 14 January 1981 the pack of Western journalists in San Salvador ‘scurried across town to the Presidential Palace’, as Raymond Bonner puts it in this important book. Alerted that the United States Ambassador, Robert White, would make a significant statement, they crowded round the entrance. ‘I believe reports that a group of approximately a hundred men landed from Nicaragua about 4 p.m. yesterday,’ Mr White told them as he emerged from a meeting with the ruling junta. ‘This changes the nature of the insurgency movement here, and makes it clear that it is dependent on outside sources … We cannot stand idly by and watch the guerrillas receive outside assistance.’ The Ambassador’s statement was the first ‘indication’ of outside support for the Salvadorean guerrillas, and it received enormous play on US television and on the front pages of American newspapers.

Like all revolutions, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua is about the present and the future – idealistic dreams of a new society built on impatience and anger with the dark reality of today. Like all colonial revolutions, it is also about the past. There is a half-remembered sense of a past which has to be restored: a more glorious time which must have preceded the arrival of the occupying invaders, a past when the people had their own sovereignty, their own dignity, their own freedom to make mistakes. The very name ‘Sandinista’, from Augusto Sandino who in 1934 was murdered by the National Guard with the complicity of the then US Ambassador in Managua, invokes the restorationist content of a movement whose leaders were, without exception, too young to have known Sandino as anything but a legend. Yet it is this basic element which the power-brokers of the Reagan Administration cannot understand. The core of Sandinismo is not an ‘imported’ ideology, but its exact opposite: resistance to ‘exported’ foreign domination. Omar Cabezas’s vigorous, funny and self-deprecating account of his four-year odyssey in the mountains of northern Nicaragua as a young guerrilla volunteer expresses the spirit of Sandinismo more fully than any other available work in English.’

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