"Washington is called the father of his country; the same may be
said of Bol var and Hidalgo; but I am only a bandit, according to
the yardstick by which the strong and the weak are
measured."--Augusto C. Sandino.
For the first time in English, here are the impassioned words of
the remarkable Nicaraguan hero and martyr Augusto C. Sandino, for
whom the recent revolutionary regime was named. From 1927 until
1933 American Marines fought a bitter jungle war in Nicaragua, with
Sandino as their guerrilla foe. This artisan and farmer turned
soldier was an unexpectedly formidable military threat to one of
the succession of regimes that the United States had imposed on
that country beginning in 1909. He was also the creator of a deeply
patriotic language of protest--eloquent, often naive, sometimes
cruel, and always defiant. The documents in this volume, presented
chronologically, constitute a spontaneous autobiography, a record
not only of Sandino's adventurous life but also of a crucial and
often overlooked aspect of the relationship between Nicaragua and
the United States.
Emblematic of the deep-rooted U.S. entanglement in Nicaraguan
affairs is the fact that Anastasio Somoza, who assassinated Sandino
in 1934, was the father of the Somoza overthrown by the Sandinistas
in 1979. By 1933 Sandino's guerrilla army had at last forced the
departure of the American Marines from Nicaragua, and in that same
year he had negotiated a peace agreement with the new president,
Juan Bautista Sacasa. Sacasa granted Sandino and a hundred
followers a large tract of government land to establish an
agricultural cooperative, and Sandino agreed to partial disarmament
of of his men. But a year later he was seized near the presidential
mansion by solders of Somoza's National Guard and assassinated with
two of his generals. The National Guard then attacked and destroyed
his cooperative.
Both before and after Sandino's brutal assassination, Somoza
tried to discredit the idiosyncratic blend of political, religious,
and theosophical ideas through which Sandino inspired his soldiers.
Included among the documents here are expressions not only of
Sandino's military preoccupations and of his philosophy but also of
his practical concerns about worker organization and legislation,
the rights of women and children, the protection and development of
Nicaragua's Indians, Central American unification, construction of
a Nicaraguan canal for the benefit of Nicaraguans and the world in
general, Indo-Hispanic cooperation, and land reform. This work,
which is based on the two-volume Spanish edition compiled by Sergio
Ramirez, includes an introduction by Robert Conrad setting
Sandino's life in historical context.
Originally published in 1990.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand
technology to again make available previously out-of-print books
from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these
important books while presenting them in durable paperback
editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly
increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the
thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since
its founding in 1905.
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