The Journal of Peasant Studies

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The nation is our mother: Augusto Sandino and

the construction of a peasant nationalism in
Nicaragua, 1927–1934

Richard Grossman

To cite this article: Richard Grossman (2008) The nation is our mother: Augusto Sandino and the
construction of a peasant nationalism in Nicaragua, 1927–1934, The Journal of Peasant Studies,
35:1, 80-99, DOI: 10.1080/03066150801983337

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150801983337

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The Nation is Our Mother: Augusto Sandino
and the Construction of a Peasant
Nationalism in Nicaragua, 1927–1934

RICHARD GROSSMAN

This article explores the creation of a nationalist identity in

Nicaragua during the guerrilla war of Augusto Sandino against the
occupying United States. The social base of Sandino was the
mountain peasants of northern Nicaragua; a social sector usually
described as unlikely to become the creators and carriers of a
national identity. Yet by using a gendered and familial discourse,
which described Nicaragua as the ‘madre patria’ (mother homeland)
and the members as his army as brothers, Sandino was successful in
activating strong nationalist feelings amongst his peasant followers.
The article examines both Sandino’s discourse, and how it was
interpreted by his peasant followers. It is this attempt to bring their
perspectives into the discussion that contributes to this new
assessment of the construction of a national identity in Nicaragua.

‘‘Beloved brother in the Homeland’’, is the salutation in correspon-

dence among members of our Army. With this our intention has been to
keep present in our people the concept that the Homeland is our
Mother, that since we are brothers in her, it is our duty to go to the
forefront of her defense, because in defending her, we defend
ourselves.’ – Augusto Sandino1

INTRODUCTION

In 1927 Augusto C. Sandino organised the Ejército Defensor de la Soberanı́a

Nacional de Nicaragua (EDSNN, or the Defending Army of the National

Richard Grossman, Department of History, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 N. St. Louis
Ave., Chicago, IL, 60625, USA.E-mail: r-grossman@neiu.edu. An earlier version of this article
was presented at the Society for Latin American studies meeting in Leiden, the Netherlands.
I would like to thank Tom Brass for his insightful comments and skilful editing.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.35, No.1, January 2008, pp.80–99
ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9361 online
DOI: 10.1080/03066150801983337 ª 2008 Taylor & Francis
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 81

Sovereignty of Nicaragua) to oppose the occupation of Nicaragua by the

United States Marine Corps (USMC). The Ejército Defensor would fight the
Marines and the Marine created and commanded Guardia Nacional de
Nicaragua (GN) until 1933. In 1933, the last Marines were withdrawn
from Nicaragua and a ceasefire was signed between Sandino and the
newly elected Nicaraguan government. Sandino and the EDSNN were not
defeated in battle, but were at the height of their military and political
strength when the war ended.
Although there exists a fairly extensive body of scholarly works on
Sandino [Selser, 1981; Hodges, 1986; Bendaña, 1994, 2007; Vargas, 1995;
Wünderich, 1995; Dospital, 1996; Navarro-Génie, 2002; Grossman, 2006],
almost nothing has been written on the soldiers of the Ejército Defensor and
why they would fight alongside of Sandino. Thousands of Nicaraguan
peasants, mainly from the northern mountainous region known as the
Segovias, were mobilised by Sandino to join in his movement. One essential
source for understanding these original Sandinistas is the small number of
interviews, made during the 1980s, with individuals who had fought with
Sandino. Accepting both the strengths and difficulties of oral history
conducted decades after the events, these interviews give an important insight
to the rank and file members of the Ejército Defensor.2
In August of 1990, I interviewed Jerónimo Zelaya Hernández in the town
of El Jı́caro. This region had been the very centre of support for Sandino. My
interviews were not pre-arranged. I would arrive at someone’s home hoping
to find them. If they were there, and if they agreed, we talked. Don Jerónimo
was not at his house when I first arrived. When I returned several hours later,
he was walking down the road with a load of wood over his shoulder. Don
Jerónimo, who said he had been born in 1910 and hence was about 80 years
old, had been in the forest cutting fire wood for his family. I introduced
myself and he gladly agreed to speak with me.
Even before I could ask any questions, he began to eagerly explain the
Sandinista movement: ‘The struggle of Sandino was to defend the homeland
without any compromise. The struggle of Sandino legitimately was to make
free the peasants . . . We went to free our mother homeland. This was what we
ourselves wanted . . .’ Don Jerónimo then described the 3 years he spent as a
soldier in the Ejército Defensor.3
Most of those who were interviewed were similar to Don Jerónimo, old
men who were extremely proud of their participation in the Sandinista
movement. Of the survivors who gave testimonies, very few were women
(only 6 out of 118). One of those was Doña Angelina Rugama. In 1983, at the
age of 69, she also vividly remembered her activities of more than 50 years
ago when, as a young woman, she also went into the mountains to support
Sandino. Doña Angelina emphasised that the peasants backed Sandino
82 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

because ‘. . . we did not want that the Yankee gave orders, dominated in
Nicaragua’.4
The war was centred in the Segovias, and the soldiers of the EDSNN
were almost exclusively Segovian peasants. How and why were these
individuals mobilised to fight to defend the national sovereignty of
Nicaragua? What was ‘the nation’ to these men and women, to Jerónimo
Zelaya Hernández and Angelina Rugama? There is no doubt that Sandino
was an ardent nationalist. The very name of his army, the Defending Army
of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua, evoked his main concern. All the
interviewees, like Don Jerónimo and Doña Angelina, embraced Sandino’s
nationalist language.
The crucial question remains: how did the peasant soldiers of the EDSNN
become ‘nationalists’? Nicaragua did not meet many of the classic criteria for
nationhood. Nicaragua was a pre-industrial and almost illiterate society.
Within Nicaragua, the nation-state was still in the process of formation when
the war started. Nicaraguan nationalism was both stimulated and stunted by
the repeated U.S. military interventions into Nicaragua. Although some were
dismayed; much of the Nicaraguan political and economic elite accepted the
reality of U.S. power and tried to accommodate themselves to it. Nationalism
was not yet a well defined political expression.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Nicaraguan elite was divided into two historic factions, the Liberals
and the Conservatives, which had fought a series of civil wars since the
time of Independence from Spain. By the twentieth century there were few
political differences between these factions but the quest for personal or
collective power. Nicaraguan nationalism was also suppressed by this
factionalisation of the elite. Most Nicaraguans, including members of the
subaltern classes, identified themselves more with one or the other faction
than as Nicaraguans.
In 1926 another civil war developed between the Liberals and the
Conservatives factions of the Nicaraguan elite. Sandino himself arose as a
leader during this war, when he organised one of the largest Liberal military
force in the Segovias. With the Liberals on the verge of victory, this civil war
was ended by the occupation of the Nicaragua by the United States Marines;
and, at least initially, the Conservatives retaining the presidency. It was at that
moment that Sandino launched a struggle to oppose the U.S. intervention.
The social base of Sandino was the mountain peasantry of the Segovias,
possibly the least modern and literate section of Nicaragua.5 The region was
also deeply divided by the Liberal/Conservative schisms, and almost all the
interviewees identified themselves as Liberals. Therefore, besides Sandino’s
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 83

rhetoric, how can one describe this Segovian peasant army as a nationalist
movement?
Florencia Mallon [1995] has begun to help redefine nationalism. She
emphasised that there was no ‘single ‘‘real’’ version’ of nationalism.
Instead, nationalism was ‘a broad vision for organizing society’. In
Mallon’s conception ‘nationalism would become a series of competing
discourses in constant formation and negotiation, bounded by particular
regional histories of power relations’. [Mallon, 1995: 4] With this new
framework, one can turn around the traditional studies of nationalism so
that a bottom-up viewpoint is also incorporated. This is one challenge of
this article. My hypothesis is that the EDSNN was both a peasant and a
nationalist army. Therefore, to understand Sandinista nationalism one must
examine not only Sandino, but also the Segovian peasants and their views
and concerns.
So, why did the Segovians fight with Sandino against the Marines? Most
did not join the EDSNN out of a pre-existing patriotic fervour. Particularly in
the first years of the war, the major factors leading individuals to join was
either continuing support for the Liberal cause or, even more important,
revenge against real and perceived atrocities committed by the Marines and
Guardia. For example, one Ascención Iglesias described the murder of his
brothers thus: ‘. . . the gringos and guardia, in the patio of my house, killed
them . . . They shot them and beheaded them . . .’ Following these events,
Ascención Iglesias joined the EDSNN.6
Sandino’s movement developed in the wake of the U.S. Marine occupation
of Nicaragua. Foreign intervention can be an important catalyst, not merely in
the reproduction but also in the creation of nationalism. It is suggested here
that the social and economic grievances of rural population combined with
Sandino’s nationalist appeal to create a ‘peasant nationalism’ in the Segovias.
The peasant grievances were a necessary pre-condition for Sandino’s
successful mobilisation, but they were not sufficient. Civil war and U.S.
intervention opened the political space for new discourses. Different visions of
the nation began to develop within Nicaragua. As part of the battle, Sandino
and the Sandinistas developed a new version of Nicaraguan nationalism, one
which included the Segovian peasantry as the centre of the nation.
The war between the Sandinistas and the Marines and Guardia lasted for
nearly 6 years. This long conflict was very difficult for the soldiers of the
EDSNN. Many died in battle. At times they went hungry. They were usually
outnumbered and always outgunned. Since the Marines relied on a strategy that
included massive destruction within the Segovias, many saw their homes and
farms destroyed, and their families suffering. Still, over the years of the war the
Sandinista movement grew both in actual numbers and in cohesiveness.
Thousands of Segovians joined or collaborated with the EDSNN.
84 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

Sandinista consciousness and identity

A number of factors helped hold together the Sandinistas through the years of
war. The hypothesis advanced here is that the world views of Sandino and his
followers fused into a new ideology that might be termed ‘Sandinista
consciousness’. It was this new group consciousness that created a movement
strong and unified enough to withstand the pressures of the war. The process
of involvement in the movement was transformative. Although individuals
joined for many different reasons, once within the movement a group
cohesiveness did develop [Grossman, 1996]. This new consciousness
expressed the realities experienced by the Segovians during the war, but
built upon their ‘traditional’ belief systems.7 In short, it was a consciousness
that invoked an active ‘re-construction’ of traditional beliefs. Although this
new consciousness and identity grew out of the experiences of the war, their
development was not accidental. Sandino worked hard to give these
experiences a meaning. Accordingly, in the Segovias what might be called
a new historic subject emerged, with its own consciousness and identity.
Sandinista consciousness combined many distinct elements, which were
fused into a whole new identity, what might be described as the ‘Sandinista
family’. The latter helped define a concept of ‘the nation’, a new ‘imagined
political community’ [Anderson, 1991]. This notion of nation þ society (or
‘society-as-nation’) was therefore doubly structured, by the ideas of Sandino
and by the traditions of the Segovians.
Although Sandino’s ideology has been the focus of numerous scholarly
works, the views of the Segovians have rarely been examined. Thus, a
better understanding of this new consciousness depends on a corresponding
grasp of the Segovians’ worldview. Crucial aspects of the latter were family
and gender roles, and an important element of the Segovian value system
was accordingly their understanding of the concept ‘honour’. In their
discourse, an ‘honourable’ man was one who provided for and protected his
family.
Although this particular facet of the Segovian discourse was not unique, in
other ways the Segovian mountain peasantry was indeed a distinctive sector
of the Nicaraguan population. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries the Segovians experienced a dramatic process of socio-economic
transformation. Commodification of both land and – especially – labour
threatened the ability of Segovian peasants to retain their status as petty
commodity producers.

Nation as kinship
Segovians like Jerónimo Zelaya Hernández and Angelina Rugama, did
indeed become nationalists; but the ‘nation’ was defined by Sandino. How
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 85

did Sandino convey the meaning of ‘the nation’ and nationalism to the
mountain peasantry? The quote of Sandino cited above is an example of
how he went about this task, and in particular the idioms and analogies
he used. Sandinista nationalist discourse was both patriarchal and familial,
and belonging to the nation was no different from being part of an
extended family. The members of his army were all described as brothers;
the homeland was their mother; and, implicitly, Sandino himself was the
father.
As well as emphasising solidarity between its different components, the
notion of an extended family also invokes authority based on a hierarchy that
is deemed ‘natural’. Although all the constituent elements of the kinship
group – brothers, mother, family – all unite to defend one another in the face
of external aggression, there is nevertheless a line of command within this
organizational unit, stretching down from the father to junior kin. Such a
command structure, based as it is on what appear as innate (or ‘natural’)
social ties, is very effective when deployed against an ‘outsider’ (non-kin, a
‘foreigner’), especially when this is done in defence of the mother (¼ ‘the
nation’).
Because of the war, this new national ‘family’ came under attack from just
such an ‘outsider’. A clearly expressed concern on the part of many
Sandinistas was that they felt they had to fight to defend themselves, their
families, and their country from the Marines and Guardias. As Matias Reyes
told me: ‘We didn’t fight out of pleasure, but to defend the people of our
republic . . . How many they murdered only God knows. Thousands of babies,
they raped women, and they grabbed babies and threw them there. I can tell
you so many things about them, this was why we defended our
homeland . . . .’8 Sandino’s nationalist language and symbolism provided a
framework for the rural population of the Segovias to give vent to their
feelings about the perceived and real injustices being committed against
them, and thus also functioned as a reason for joining the EDSNN.
Essential to understanding this process is the discursive overlap between
the family and the nation, between the Segovians’ and Sandino’s world view.
Utilising Segovian traditions, Sandino successfully mobilised most of the
Segovian mountain peasants, men and women, into a powerful social
movement. To echo the words of Wolf [1969], it was the attempt of the
Segovians to remain traditional that made them nationalist revolutionaries.
However, at the same time as this new ‘nation’ was coming into being, it was
confined to the Sandinista base of the Segovian mountain peasants. This was
its strength, but also its fatal weakness. Although the Sandinistas could
dominate the Segovian mountains, the Segovians were not Nicaragua. This
isolation greatly contributed to the final defeat and dismemberment of the
Sandinista movement.
86 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

RURAL SEGOVIAS AS AGRARIAN FRONTIER

The base and core of the Sandino movement was the region of Nicaragua
called the Segovias, and it was from there that almost the entire membership
of the Ejército Defensor was drawn. Moreover, nearly all of the fighting took
place within this region [Schroeder, 1993]. The Segovias, and Segovians,
were in some important respects distinct from the rest of Nicaragua, and these
differences would help shape and define the Sandino movement [CIERA,
1984; Gould, 1990, 1998; Schroeder, 1993; Grossman, 1996].
In terms of physical location, the Segovias are situated in the north central
section of Nicaragua, along the border with Honduras, an area that generally
covered the departments of Nueva Segovia, Jinotega, Estelı́ and Matagalpa.9
These four departments contained over 9000 square miles, and according to
the 1920 Nicaraguan Census the total population was 178,631 inhabitants, or
nearly 30 per cent of the national total [República de Nicaragua, 1920]. A
U.S. Marine report, written in 1930, accurately depicts the region in the
following manner: ‘The Area is very extensive and mountainous, with poor
communications. The population is generally scattered.’10
The Segovias was an agricultural frontier zone, and while some
communities had indigenous or colonial origins, there were still large
sections of virgin forest. Thus population density was low, and there was
uninhabited land potentially available for farming. This was true in all of the
Segovian departments. Much of the vacant land, however, was in the isolated
mountainous regions, and hence was not easily accessible.
The rural economy of the Segovian region was characterised by a mixture
of several different kinds of agricultural activity. The expansion of the
market, the penetration of capitalist social relations, and the accompanying
process of state formation, were slowly transforming the region. These
changes were perceived by the majority of the Segovians in negative terms.
As Schroeder [1993: 103] clearly states, ‘the half-century before the Sandino
Rebellion witnessed profound social, economic, and political upheavals
across the Segovias, most all of which were experienced by the majority of
the rural poor as detrimental to their already precarious way of life’.11
By the beginning of the twentieth century, both commercialisation and
proletarianisation had been initiated in the Segovias. Commercial agriculture,
especially coffee production, was expanding into the region, and the most
important question for the success of any commercial enterprise was access
to labour. Historically, Nicaragua had been a country of mainly self-sufficient
peasant and indigenous communities, and in Nicaragua and the Segovias, the
process of proletarianisation, and the resulting creation of a wage labour
force, entailed the attempt to separate the peasantry from their ability to
survive economically by cultivating their own land.
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 87

A threatened autonomy
In the Segovias, therefore, it was the process of proletarianisation which was
resisted most strongly. The economic elites in Nicaragua relied on the
coercive power of the state, and not market forces, to effect the separation of
peasant farmers from their land, and thus compel them to hire out their
labour-power for a living. To this end, over the last third of the nineteenth
century and beginning of the twentieth, the Nicaraguan Government passed a
variety of forced labour, debt, and land tenure laws, in attempts to create a
workforce composed of wage labourers available for employment when and
where commercial enterprises so desired.
As the agrarian history of Latin America affirms [Landsberger, 1969;
Florescano, 1975; Duncan, Rutledge and Harding, 1977], petty commodity
producers in particular tenurial systems and in specific national and
ecological locations have responded differently to the pressures of
proletarianisation. For the purposes of this analysis, however, it was the
formation and expansion of the agrarian sector classified as Segovian
mountain peasants that is most important. These individuals relocated into the
agricultural frontier zones in an attempt to reproduce themselves economic-
ally as peasant cultivators, in the process maintaining their independence
from both the labour market and the state.
As Tutino [1986: 26] has pointed out with regard to Mexican peasants,
autonomy is the ‘peoples’ abilities to produce the necessities of subsistence
independently’ of any outside control. For the family smallholding farmers
who constituted Segovian mountain peasants, an ‘honourable’ man was a
rugged individual who provided for his family by working his own land. In
the eyes of such petty commodity producers, others options – such as
working for wages for someone else – were a less than honourable way to
provide for one’s family. Thus the inaccessible mountainous areas of the
Segovias could be seen by them as an area both of opportunity and of refuge,
where the possibility existed of maintaining a much-vaunted ‘autonomy’.
The vast majority of Segovians lived in undefined (or not clearly defined)
rural communities or scattered houses. Mountain peasant society was based
not on physical communities but rather on family ties. During the war against
Sandino, the U.S. Marine Corps described many of the towns and
communities of Nicaragua, and two examples from this report convey the
scattered nature of these Segovian rural communities:

Pericon. Consists of 4 wooden houses . . . 3 1/2 leagues from Telpaneca,

4 hours on footover rough trail . . .
Los Robles. Consists of 2 houses, 1 at the foot of Mt. La Flor de los
Robles and the other about 1/4 mile east and about half way up the side
88 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

of the mountain. 3 leagues 4 hours on foot over very bad trail to Santa
Maria. . . .12

It is important to note, however, that the Segovian mountain peasantry

differed from the standard kind of petty commodity producer peasantry in
Nicaragua. Unlike the latter, the former constituted a new and growing
sector of rural society, composed as a result of recent migration into the
agricultural frontier zones. Having established themselves there as
‘autonomous’ cultivators, Segovian migrants were determined to remain
self-reliant (¼ independent) peasant producers. In furtherance of this end,
not just new communities but also new ‘traditions’ came into being.
Hence the ideological significance of ‘autonomy’, referring as it did not
just to the economic independence of migrants-turned-smallholders, but
also to variants of this identity: honourable men who were able to provide
for and defend their families. It was these Segovian mountain
peasants who became the social foundation and heart of the Sandinista
movement.

SANDINISTA NATION AS BROTHERS, FATHER AND MOTHER

Given this discourse structured by multiple and overlapping identities –

whereby peasant ¼ family provision ¼ autonomy ¼ honour – it is in a sense
hardly surprising that Sandino invoked the core belief in familial solidarity as
synonymous with the nation.
By quating the family, and especially the mother, with the nation (‘;the
Homeland is our Mother’), he appealed to the most basic socio-economic
institution and links informing rural identity. Most importantly, it is a
discourse where national identity – like that of the family – is presented as
‘natural’, a form of ‘belonging’ that is beyond question. Elsewhere in his
writings Sandino developed this theme: for instance, ‘. . . the meeting of many
families of distinct last names in a region forms what is called Homeland; the
Homeland of ours for example, is called Nicaragua.’ Authorities, he added,
are elected ‘in order to represent all the cases of the interests of the Country;
in other words, of all the families reunited in the region that is denominated
Homeland.’13
The members of the Ejército Defensor did indeed describe themselves as
‘brothers in the Homeland’. Although male bonding is implicitly important to
most military organizations (both regular and irregular), Sandinista discourse
made explicit the kinship relation uniting its combatants to one another. This
emerges clearly from interviews with the survivors, who confirm that for
most members of the EDSNN the concept of a ‘brotherhood’ was more than a
slogan. One such, José Calderón Centeno, put this into the following words:
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 89

‘We loved each other as brothers, there was a tremendous brotherhood

there. . . .’14
As with kinship, so the Ejército Defensor too had its authority structure,
one that mimicked that of the family. Although soldiers-as-brothers were
equal, Sandino himself occupied a more senior position in the same familial
hierarchy, as a father to them all. He treated them fairly and with respect, and
for their part they followed him and loved him like a father. Jerónimo Zelaya
Hernández stated that Sandino was their leader because he ‘dominated, like a
father of the family.’15 Another interviewee stated that: ‘He was my father,
yes that man was loved by us. . . .’, adding that ‘we were ‘‘brothers’’, and to
him we said ‘‘the old man’’. . . .’16 Although Sandino himself was only in his
30s during the war, to his followers he was nevertheless a father-figure, a
patriarch who was in charge because – like a parent – he ‘knew what was
best’ for his children.
Significantly, Sandino was referred to as the Jefe Supremo, jefe being a term
‘used to address both fathers and leaders’[Alonso, 1988: 148] He wanted
nothing for himself, and everything for his ‘family’ and Nicaragua. Sandino is
remembered as a person who embraced everyone he met, and if they were
poor he would give them money to buy food.17 This was a common
description among survivors: Sandino as a generous and loving father figure.
As a good patriarch, therefore, Sandino was supposed to take care of his
‘family’.
There is no mystery as to the ideological potency of equating the nation
with the mother of a family. Like a mother, the nation rears, instructs and
looks after its young: the latter, in turn, look after and protect her. Hence the
symbolic efficacy of Nicaragua as the madre patria: ‘belonging’ to a nation,
and solidarity with it are ‘natural’, insofar as she (¼ ‘our mother’) knows who
we are, and we (¼ ‘her children’) know who she is. The potency of nation-as-
mother is underlined by Yuval-Davis [1993: 627], who suggests that ‘women
are often the ones who are given the social role of intergenerational
transmitters of cultural traditions, customs, songs, cuisine, and, of course, the
mother tongue (sic!).’ Thus ‘[w]omen often come to symbolize the national
collectivity, its roots, its spirit, its national project. Moreover, women often
symbolize national and collective ‘‘honour’’’.

The nature of belonging, belonging to nature

This discourse about the Sandinista family contained within it the embryo of a
new nation, with its own flags, songs and other symbols. As Hobsbawm and
Ranger [1984: 12] have noted, ‘most of the occasions when people become
conscious of citizenship as such remain associated with symbols and semi-
ritual practices . . . most of which are historically novel and largely invented:
flags, images, ceremonies and music.’ Of interest, therefore, is the fact that,
90 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

while the traditional national colours of Nicaragua were blue and white, the
Sandinista flag and colours were red and black. The latter were also the
colours of anarcho-syndicalist movements in Spain: Sandino himself had lived
in Mexico, and adopted his colours from the anarcho-syndicalist movements
there [Grossman, 2006: 152], since they embody an opposition to authority
that is not so different from the striving by the Sandinistas for autonomy.18
The development of this new ‘imagined’ community necessarily poses the
question of its membership. As Gellner [1983: 7] has observed, those with
similar cultural backgrounds are members of ‘the same nation if and only if
they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation.’ Although the
Sandinistas were part of this nation, by virtue of ‘belonging ‘to the same
‘family’, other Nicaraguans were just as clearly excluded. Those in the latter
category were labelled the vende patrias, that is to say – literally – people
who ‘sell out their country’, or betrayers of the nation.
The term vende patria had important political connotations. Not only were
those in this category dismissed as corrupt, evil people who would do any
thing for money, including betraying (¼ ‘selling’) their own country to a
‘foreigner’, but it was also implied they would even sell their own mother,
that most heinous of offences against the family. The very words suggest
people without honour, who put that ‘cannibal God’, as Sandino had
described money, over all else.19 Such persons, this discourse proclaims,
were concerned only with their own individual interest, a demeanour which
overrides and thus negates the well-being of society, or the national family.
By their actions, therefore, the vende patrias reveal themselves not to be real
sons of the common mother, Nicaragua, and ceased thereby to be part of the
Nicaraguan family and nation.
By invoking the concept of a patriarchal family, Sandino succeeded in
extending the concept of personal honour from the kinship domain to one that
applied to the defence of the nation. In short, the Defending Army was the
family, the homeland was the mother, and Sandino was the father. All the
latter were ‘natural’ forms of ‘belonging’, and it was equally ‘natural’ to
cherish and protect them. To be honourable, therefore, one must defend not
just the immediate family (and its smallholding in the Segovias) but also the
larger family (and its national territory of Nicaragua). A ‘real’ Nicaraguan
protected both his home and his homeland, in other words.

SANDINISTA FAMILY HONOUR

The concept of honour occupies a crucial position in this discourse about

family and nation. Ramón A. Gutiérrez has argued that the concept of male
honour has deep historical roots in Latin America, noting that honour ‘was
one of the core values of the moral system [that] mediated social relationships
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 91

between individuals and groups’ [Gutiérrez, 1991: 177] Historically,

therefore, the concept of honour has defined the ‘correct’ functioning of
both individuals and society, and informed social obligation within both the
family and wider society.
Significantly, the concept of ‘honour’, and what it means to be
‘honourable’ extends from the figure of the patriarch into the labour process
that – it is inferred – operates under his (and only his) control. As Ana Alonso
observes, ‘a man’s status and identity . . . .as an honourable patriarch, is
contingent upon his role in production. Power and autonomy are viewed as
aspects of personal identity which can only be realized if a man is his own
master . . . if he controls both his work and its object, the land’ [Alonso, 1988:
344–5]. This is a crucial distinction missed in much of the debate about
patriarchy: the latter is not merely about control exercised within the family,
but also about control exercised over the resources – land – on which the
family depends for its (and his) livelihood. The Sandinista discourse – like
that of the Segovias – clearly fits within such Latin American traditions about
the importance and characteristics of honour.
Sandino used these concepts in many of his manifestos and letters. For
example, he wrote, ‘[w]e fight for honour not for prestige, because if we lose
honour, we will have lost our right to live’ [Ramı́rez, 1984: 134–136]. Many
of these same concepts were also expressed by the members of the Defending
Army, both in the interviews and in the songs. They described themselves as
‘real men’ who defended the honour of their families and their extended
family, Nicaragua. An interviewee, Ascensión Iglesias Rivera, explained that
Sandino had told them that the ‘yanquis’ came to steal their land (‘. . . these
lands [that] are those we walk, that are the inheritance our fathers left us . . .’).
As an afterthought, he added: ‘the fight was ours, to fight for our homeland, to
fight for our land, because it is a duty to fight. Who would not fight for what is
his!’20 Equating nation with family, and family with land, they believed that
the war was a fight to defend not some abstract concept but what was
rightfully theirs. This, they felt, was the only honourable option.

SELLING ONE’S COUNTRY, SELLING ONE’S MOTHER

By contrast, those on the opposing side – the Marines and Guardia – were
described as shameless, without honour or loyalty. They would rape both
Nicaragua and the women of Nicaragua, the Marines being labelled brutes or
machos. The use of the term ‘macho’ here is not the modern usage – the
epitome of masculinity – but a more archaic, and peasant meaning. For rural
inhabitants, the macho was a mule, a strong animal but incapable of
reproduction: in short, a creature without a family. Only the Marines were
called machos; their Nicaraguan allies were the vende patrias.
92 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

These themes inform many Sandinista songs; one remembered by José

Eulogio Espinales López combines many of them:

I have seen my homeland, my loved homeland

cry in silence its bitter pain,
that was assassinated by foreign hands
that never had shame nor honor.
I am a soldier of the defenders
that never has lost faith or honor.
I prefer death for my mother homeland
in order not to be a slave to the macho invader.21

Many of the interviewees expressed their opinion that it was their personal
honour they were defending, together with the virtue of their women. Thus a
common theme was that the other side raped women, while on the Sandinista
side such acts were strictly forbidden. Several interviewees described rapes,
but none claimed to have been an eyewitness. Luis Boedeker González
outlined how a Marine had grabbed two young women: ‘. . . one for me’, said
the Marine, ‘the other for the sergeant. They abused them. They violated
them. Then after they had finished, he grabbed them and bang! bang! he
killed them as well’.22
Another interviewee, Francisco Cruz Martı́nez, described what he said was
a speech by Sandino to his men. Sandino had told them ‘he that has a mother
will be the son-in-law of the . . . yankees, he that has a sister will be the
brother-in-law . . . .and he that has a woman will be the cuckold of the
yankees, and it is preferable to die and not be a slave of the yankees.’23
Although, interestingly, it entails extending kinship – albeit affinal
categories – to include the enemy, this is a good example of the way
Sandino invoked the concept of defending personal family and honour, and
then extended it to the higher level of the nation. In the course of the struggle,
the honour of the madre patria – as well as that of one’s own mother, sister,
wife, and daughter – was to be defended.
In contrast to narratives about rapes committed by the Marines and
Guardia, such action was strictly forbidden by members of the EDSNN.
Several survivors insisted that there were strict orders against rape, and that
any member of the Ejército Defensor who committed this crime would be
shot. Sandinista men, however, were not expected to be celibate. As more
than one of those interviewed noted, having girlfriends was perfectly
acceptable, as long as the women consented. This was made clear by one
Sandinista in the following manner: ‘one could get [a] woman with her
consent . . . but without her consent, no. It was forbidden, capable of getting
one shot’.24
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 93

According to this Sandinista discourse, in addition to rape, the other side

attacked the entire family. As part of the popular memory of the war, there
were numerous accounts of the US Marine Corps or the Guardias killing
babies: for example, by throwing infants up in the air and then impaling them
on their bayonets. The lack of evidence for such episodes notwithstanding,
many of the survivors described these ‘events’ in detail. Angelina Rugama,
for one, remembered that the ‘yanques were cruel’, and described one version
of them bayoneting babies.25
Although a number of the stories about rape and baby murder might be
termed propaganda, the US Marine Corps and the Guardias did in fact
attempt to destroy much of the property belonging to members of the Ejército
Defensor. The Marines and Guardia unleashed a wave of destruction in the
Segovias that continued unabated throughout the war. Hundreds of houses
were burnt or bombed, farm animals and crops were destroyed or confiscated,
damage that proved economically disastrous for smallholding peasants
[Grossman, 1996]. In the eyes of the Sandinistas, therefore, acts committed
by their opponents (rape, murder, destruction) threatened not just their own
families and the nation, but also their capacity to gain a livelihood by
cultivating their own land.

DEATH AND REBIRTH OF THE SANDINISTA MOVEMENT

The war ended in 1933, when U.S. Marines withdrew from Nicaragua and
a ceasefire was signed. As a result of his dual role – conducting the war
and securing the peace – Sandino himself emerged as a national hero. For
their part, the Sandinista soldiers were demobilised, and returned home.
The members of the EDSNN could look upon their achievements
with pride: they had protected both their own families and the national
family.
In accordance with the peace treaty, Sandino was allowed to establish a
new agricultural community at Wiwili, on the Atlantic Coast region, and –
outside of the Segovias – one of the most isolated areas of the country. It was
here that Sandino retired with his most loyal followers. Wiwili was supposed
to become a new form of community, carved out of the rural wilderness.26
The form taken by this new community underlines the fusion of Sandino’s
post-capitalist vision with the pre-capitalist vision of the peasantry he led in
battle.
Of interest, therefore, is the fact that Sandino had become a member of the
Magnetic-Spiritual School of the Universal Commune, a small anarcho-
communal organization based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Although he had
not abandoned his original political positions, his views had nevertheless
evolved. Thus the anarchism of Sandino had in effect merged with the
94 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

concept of ‘autonomy’ that was so important to the self-perception of petty

commodity producers in the Segovias.
Because a central goal of the Magnetic-Spiritual School was the formation
of agrarian cooperatives, Sandino once the war had ended did not move either
to the national capital, Managua, or to one of the Segovian towns where he
still had a base. Instead he retired to the wilderness of Wiwili, there to create
the kind of rural society desired by Segovian peasants who wished to remain
independent smallholders. The difficulty with this is that, whereas Sandinista
ideology was nationalist, the focus of the specifically Segovian component
was on peasant autonomy at a local level. It was the ‘peasantness’ of this
consciousness which was both its strength and its fatal weakness. Although
there were other Nicaraguans who subscribed to the broader vision of
Sandino’s nationalism, few outside of the Segovias endorsed the narrower
Sandinista version of a peasant utopia. For this reason, although Sandino
continued to negotiate with the central government, he was politically, as
well as physically, isolated in Wiwili.

The father dies, but the mother lives on

Peace had left unresolved the future of the Guardia Nacional, for whose
role there was no provision in the ceasefire accords. Thus the EDSNN was
officially disarmed, while the Guardia proceeded to function as the sole
military force within the country, and – despite the signing of the peace
accord – continued to harass the Sandinistas. Sandino quickly realized his
mistake, and began to call for the dismantling of the Guardia as an
unconstitutional force. The newly inaugurated President of Nicaragua, Juan
B. Sacasa, also feared the Guardia, but restricting its power would have
opened the possibility of a total Sandinista victory, since no other military
force existed.
Its institutional existence at stake, the Guardia leadership decided to act.
On February 21, 1934, Sandino went to Managua for another negotiating
session. After dining with President Sacasa, Sandino was arrested by the
Guardia and murdered. Almost simultaneously the Guardia attacked and
destroyed Wiwili. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sandinistas were
killed or fled into exile in the repression that followed.
With the death of Sandino, the Sandinistas lost their father figure. As a
patriarchal figure – the head of the family – Sandino had not only held
together disparate groups and social forces but also legitimised their struggle.
Coupled with attacks by the Guardia on the Sandinista base camp at Wiwili,
and the hunting down of many other scattered Sandinistas, his murder dealt
the movement a blow from which it was unable to recover. Although others
in the Sandinista leadership attempted to remobilize the movement, none
were successful [Blandón, 1982].
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 95

The consciousness and consensus which united them was shattered, but not
forgotten: many a militant retained his/her Sandinista consciousness and
remained loyal to the nationalist cause. Even before the triumph of the
modern Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional in 1979, a number of the
survivors of the EDSNN were cooperating with the Frente. One of the most
moving stories of that war was recalled by a new generation Sandinista, Omar
Cabezas, when he remembered meeting a survivor of the earlier struggle:

. . . the old guy was overjoyed to see him. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘you see I
knew you would come again! The fact is I have some things of yours
buried here, that you left a long time ago’. . . . Inside was a pile of
Enfield bullets, can you believe it? The old man had kept them, can you
imagine that? . . . Because he knew that someday the Sandinistas would
return again. [Cabezas, 1985: 169–70]

The old Sandinista, Don Bonifacio Montoya, was killed by the Guardia
Nacional shortly after he had begun to collaborate with the Frente Sandinista.
Over the decades, he had remained loyal to Sandino and the movement.
Because he never accepted the Somoza regime, he – like Sandino himself –
had finally paid with his life.
Don Bonifacio’s story was not unique. Despite the Somocista repression,
Sandinista ideas remained hidden among the Segovian mountain peasants,
men and women. Although their political views were suppressed, their vision
was not, as the circulation of Sandinista discourse within popular culture
attests. They could still sing along with Doña Angelina Rugama and Don
Jerónimo Zelaya Hernández, each of whom concluded their separate
interviews by singing the same Sandinista song:

I am of the defenders
Who with blood and not with flowers
Fight to conquer
My second independence
That traitors without conscience
Have come to profane.

CONCLUSION

In the course of the conflict over the late 1920s and early 1930s, a new
Sandinista vision was constructed in the Segovias, where – it could be
argued – the Sandinistas had achieved an ideological hegemony among the
rural population. This Sandinista consciousness was both nationalist and
agrarian, based as it was on a combination of the ideals of Sandino and the
96 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

traditions of the Segovians. Although Sandino was not a Segovian peasant, he

was nevertheless able to formulate a discourse in such a fashion as to
incorporate the views of the Segovians. Yet Sandino’s vision did not coincide
exactly with that of the Segovian peasantry: having seen the impact of
capitalist development, he clearly desired a new form of society that
transcended capitalism [Hodges, 1986; Bendaña, 1994, 2007; Dospital, 1996;
Navarro-Géni, 2002].
Although Sandino looked to the future, however, the members of the
Ejército Defensor looked to an idealised past. For most of them, their fight
was to preserve, or re-create, this past. Insofar as neither Sandino nor the
petty commodity producers from the Segovias desired an industrial capitalist
society, the idealised past of the rural Segovians looked a lot like Sandino’s
perception of the future. This ideological overlap accounts in no small part
for the success Sandino had in mobilizing the Segovian mountain peasantry,
and persuading them to participate in a revolutionary nationalist movement to
defend Nicaragua, its future (as defined by Sandino) and its past (as defined
by the peasantry).
This much is evident from the way in which nationalist and agrarian
ideological merged during the course of the struggle. The self/other
dichotomy structuring Sandinista discourse was both symbolically potent
and ideologically consistent. Ranged against them were a host of ‘others’, the
machos and vende patrias who destroyed the land, and violated women and
nation alike. As such, these ‘others’ were unable to reproduce themselves
naturally, either as regards a family or a nation and its society. Only
Sandinista men could achieve this, as a result of which they – not these
‘foreign others’ – were the authentic defenders of family, land and nation.

NOTES
1 ‘La Patria es nuestra Madre. . . .’ In English La Patria can be translated as ‘Motherland’,
since the word is feminine; it has also been translated as ‘Fatherland’, or the gender neutral
‘Homeland’, the latter being the term used here. However, Sandino is clear about the gender
of the nation: the country is our Mother. The epigaraph citation comes from a letter written by
Sandino to Enoc Aguado, on 26 October 1930 [Ramı́rez, 1984: 152].
2 The Instituto de Estudio de Sandinismo conducted over one huindred interviews in the early
1980s. I personally conducted another twenty interviews in 1990. Several people were
interviewed by both the IES and myself. Altogether some 118 individuals were interviewed.
The Instituto de Estudio de Sandinismo changed its name in 1990 to El Instituto de Historia
de Nicaragua y Centroamérica. Selections of the interviews were published [Instituto de
Estudio de Sandinismo, 1995] as Ahora Se Que Sandino Manda. There are limitations to the
use of these interviews, not least because those interviewed were not selected on any
scientific basis. They were people who were still alive fifty years and more after the war. Most
of the interviewees were very young when they joined. They were also people willing to talk
about their experiences. Obviously after a half century memories can fade, and also be shaped
by political changes. These interviews all took place after the 1979 revolution and the change
CONSTRUCTION OF A PEASANT NATIONALISM IN NICARAGUA 97
in the public representation of Sandino, from villain to the national hero. My interviews took
place after the 1990 elections.
3 Personal interview with Jerónimo Zelaya Hernández, August 14, 1990.
4 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 046, p. 8.
5 This mountain peasantry was similar to that described by Eric Wolf [1969: 291] as free
peasants ‘located in a periperal area outside the domains of landlord control’. Petty
commodity producers for the most part, they constitute what he also termed a middle
peasantry, neither buying nor selling labour-power.
6 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 065, p. 9.
7 The view of what is traditional is always under revision. Alonso [1988: 22] has noted that
traditional is ‘a form of understanding and legitimating the present in relation to a past which
is never passively reproduced but always actively (re)constructed.’
8 Interview with Matias Reyes, 14 August 1990.
9 In 1936, the department of Madriz was created when Nueva Segovia was divided into two.
The Segovian region also extended across the border into Honduras. Some Honduran
Segovians fought alongside Sandino.
10 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Records of the United States Marine
Corps, Record Group 127, Entry 206, Box 3, Folder: Northern Area; Lt. Colonel Arthur
Racicot, ‘Estimate of the Situation’, February 28, 1930. Hereafter referred to as NARA, RG
127, E #, followed by the Folder and Document.
11 Both the extent and success of capitalist penetration, and its accompanying modernization, is
the subject of debate. Schroeder [1993] has emphasized the success of the transformations
that were underway, and suggests that Segovian rural society was being ‘dramatically’
transformed. My research [Grossman, 1996], by contrast, departs from this view in two ways.
First, it indicates that the transformations in the agrarian structure were (and continue to be)
very incomplete. And second, its emphasis is on the resistance to the changes. There is no
disagreement, however, with regard to the fact that the processes had begun, with far reaching
effects.
12 National Archives and Records Administration, Department of State (DOS), microfilm
#817.00/7294 1/2.
13 NARA, R G 127, E 206, Folder Bandit Activities, ‘Circular A Todas Nuestras Autoridades, 1
October, 1932.
14 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 00998-129, p. 3.
14 Interview with Jerónimo Zelaya Hernández, August 14, 1990.
15 Francisco Centeno Fonseca, El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 066, p. 5,
p. 13.
16 Calixto Tercero González, El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica,
097-2-2.
17 Red and black were the colours of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), a Spanish
anarchist organization within the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo (CNT).
18 ‘Today, money has turned to be a new God, but it is a cannibal God, because money is
destroying humanity’ (Sandino to Col. Inéz Hernández and Sargeant Major Ladislao Palacios,
May 20, 1931, NARA, RG 127, Entry 202, Folder 35).
19 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 065, pp. 1, 4.
20 Interview with José Eulogio Espinales López, August 14, 1990.
21 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 055-1-2, p. 11.
22 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 108, p. 5.
23 Eulogio Espinales López, El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 062, p. 15.
24 El Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 046, p. 8. At least ten of the
interviews described babies being killed.
25 According to Wolf [1969: 294–95], ‘The peasant utopia is the free village, untrammeled by
tax collectors, labor recruiters, large landowners, officials . . . . peasants in rebellion are natural
anarchists.’ Perhaps the most symptomatic images of what a ‘peasant utopia’ might look like
are those in Chayanov’s fictional depiction [Kremnev, 1977] of just such a society as it might
have existed in an imaginary 1980s Russia had the Bolshevik revolution been defeated in the
1920s.
98 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

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