Nicaragua: From Sandino to Chavez
by toni solo
"I come from the north american embassy where I had a conference with ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane who has assured me that the government in Washington supports and recommends the elimination of Augusto Cesar Sandino, considering him to be disruptive of peace in Nicaragua." -- Anastasio Somoza to National Guard colleagues, February 21, 1934 (from Sandino, General de Hombres Libres by Gregorio Selser).
The US government's murder of Augusto Cesar Sandino marked the culmination of US government efforts to destroy Nicaragua's independence. Those efforts first came to a head in 1910 with the use of the battle cruiser Paducah to protect pro-US rebel forces holed up and cornered in Bluefields on the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast. US imperial military muscle smoothed the way to the presidency for a US company employee, Adolfo Diaz.
Diaz oversaw the imposition of penal financial and trade terms through the Knox-Castrillo treaty and the renunciation of Nicaragua's territorial sovereignty in the Chamorro-Bryan treaty. In 1912, thousands of marines under General Smedley Butler disembarked at the Pacific port of Corinto to crush Nicaraguan Liberal party efforts to reclaim the country's sovereignty. One of the baser hypocrisies of contemporary US collaborators in the Nicaraguan ruling classes is the public lip service they pay to Liberal martyr Benjamin Zeledon who died fighting US marines at that time.
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