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Nicaragua The Rise of the FSLN
The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente
Sandinista
de Liberación Nacional--FSLN) was formally organized in
Nicaragua
in 1961. Founded by José Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio
Mayorga,
and Tomás Borge Martínez, the FSLN began in the late 1950s
as a
group of student activists at the National Autonomous
University
of Nicaragua (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
Nicaragua--UNAN)
in Managua. Many of the early members were imprisoned.
Borge
spent several years in jail, and Fonseca spent several
years in
exile in Mexico, Cuba, and Costa Rica. Beginning with
approximately twenty members in the early 1960s, the FSLN
continued to struggle and grow in numbers. By the early
1970s,
the group had gained enough support from peasants and
students
groups to launch limited military initiatives.
On December 27, 1974, a group of FSLN guerrillas seized
the
home of a former government official and took as hostages
a
handful of leading Nicaraguan officials, many of whom were
Somoza
relatives. With the mediation of Archbishop Obando y
Bravo, the
government and the guerrillas reached an agreement on
December 30
that humiliated and further debilitated the Somoza regime.
The
guerrillas received US$1 million ransom, had a government
declaration read over the radio and printed in La
Prensa,
and succeeded in getting fourteen Sandinista prisoners
released
from jail and flown to Cuba along with the kidnappers. The
guerrilla movement's prestige soared because of this
successful
operation. The act also established the FSLN strategy of
revolution as an effective alternative to Udel's policy of
promoting change peacefully. The Somoza government
responded to
the increased opposition with further censorship,
intimidation,
torture, and murder.
In 1975 Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the National Guard
launched another violent and repressive campaign against
the
FSLN. The government imposed a state of siege, censoring
the
press, and threatening all opponents with detention and
torture.
The National Guard increased its violence against
individuals and
communities suspected of collaborating with the
Sandinistas. In
less than a year, it killed many of the FSLN guerrillas,
including one of its founders, José Carlos Fonseca Amador.
The
rampant violation of human rights brought national and
international condemnation of the Somoza regime and added
supporters to the Sandinista cause.
In late 1975, the repressive campaign of the National
Guard
and the growth of the group caused the FSLN to split into
three
factions. These three factions--Proletarians
(Proletarios),
Prolonged Popular War, and the Insurrectional Faction,
more
popularly known as the Third Way--insisted on different
paths to
carry out the revolution. The Proletarian faction, headed
by
Jaime Wheelock Román, followed traditional Marxist thought
and
sought to organize factory workers and people in poor
neighborhoods. The Prolonged War faction, led by Tomás
Borge and
Henry Ruiz after the death of Fonseca, was influenced by
the
philosophy of Mao Zedong and believed that a revolution
would
require a long insurrection that included peasants and
labor
movements. The Third Way faction was more pragmatic and
called
for ideological pluralism. Its members argued that social
conditions in Nicaragua were ripe for an immediate
insurrection.
Led by Daniel José Ortega Saavedra and his brother
Humberto
Ortega Saavedra, the Third Way faction supported joint
efforts
with non-Marxist groups to strengthen and accelerate the
insurrection movement against Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
The
FSLN's overall growing success led the factions to
gradually
coalesce, with the Third Way's political philosophy of
pluralism
eventually prevailing.
Data as of December 1993
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