SANDINO:
The Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot,
1921 - 1934
Robert Edgar Conrad
(edited and translated by...)
VG/VG. (Princeton, NJ,: Princeton University Press, 1990). Jacket in mylar.
Bibliography, index, 516 pages. Compiled & edited by Sergio Ramirez; edited and translated with an
introduction and additional selections by Robert Edgar Conrad.
"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, constitutes a spontaneous
autobiography, a record not only of Sandino's adventurous life but also of a crucial and often
over-looked aspect of the long struggle 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 his men. But a year later he was seized near the
presidential mansion by soldiers 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 this practical concerns about worker organization
and legislation, the rights of women and children, the protection and development of Nicaragua's
Indians, Central American unificaation construction of a Nicaraguan canal for the benefit of
Nicaraguans and the world in general, Indo-Hispanic cooperation, and land reform.
~~~ Sergio Ramirez, a novelist and historian, was vice president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990.
~~~ Robert Edgar Conrad has written extensively on Latin America. He is the editor and translator of
Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton).
OUT OF PRINT.
$45.00
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