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Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934)Nicaraguan revolutionary. Son of a wealthy plantation owner, Augusto César Sandino was born on 19 May 1895. He joined the guerrilla movement in 1921 to take part in the struggle against US colonial occupation of Nicaragua. Under Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, the US army left the country in the early 1930s. Then, Sandino opposed – as imperialist puppets – President J B Sacasa and Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the leader of the US-trained National Guard, who soon became the dictator of Nicaragua. Sandino agreed to meet the authorities to try and reach a peace agreement. However, on 21 February 1934, he was abducted and murdered – on Somoza's orders – as he left the presidential palace. Sandino nevertheless remained a potent symbol in the war to liberate Nicaragua from foreign domination. He inspired the revolutionaries who subsequently fought against the dictatorial Somoza regime (1937-56), and lent his name to all those who united in 1961 to form the Sandinistas (Sandinista Movement of National Liberation, or SMNL). In 1979, the Sandinistas were finally successful in overthrowing Somoza, who was assassinated in Paraguay on 17 September 1980. A bitter civil war was waged until a ceasefire in 1989. The following year, the SMNL candidate for president, Daniel Ortega, was defeated by the right-of-centre candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who was backed by the US. |
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