What went wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis / Dan La Botz / 2018 and The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History / Mateo Jarquin / 2024
Reading both of these histories side by side was incredibly illuminating.
La Botz provided a wide-ranging overview, all the way from the independence movement forward. Readers get to read about filibuster William Walker, Sandino’s resistance, the Somoza regime, the original Sandinista regime, the neoliberal period led by Chamorro, then finally the Ortega regime. Although he’s occasionally old-timey in a weird white way, such as referring to indigenous people as “Indians,” he’s otherwise extremely astute on the hard facts and social dynamics. He diagnoses weaknesses and strengths in the organization structure of the top-down Marxist Leninist leadership, which failed to account for democratic processes. He then notes how this weakness led the state to exacerbate the conditions of a civil war, when it disappointed indigenous and peasant communities it claimed to represent, people who literally fought alongside the Sandinistas during the revolution. It had a great breakdown on the successes and failures of the literacy campaign, for example, that both lifted the country out of illiteracy and felt like a colonizing campaign for many indigenous communities. The last two sections of the book, both Chamarro’s victory (partially through US intervention) and Ortega’s rise. Chamarro’s and Ortega’s betrayal of the revolution are staggering to read, especially Ortega’s. This book definitely clarified the terrain for me, especially because there are Ortega apologists and tankies on the left who still celebrate Ortega’s dictatorship, despite its deep compromises with capitalists and its betrayal of basic human rights and progressive values.
Jarquin’s book, on the other hand, is written with more fire and focus, narrowing its attention to the Sandinista revolution itself, capturing the zeitgeist and delineating the diplomatic efforts that enabled and ended the revolution. Jarquin’s great argument is that reductionist Cold War analyses of the Sandinistas fail to account for the bold statesmanship of several Latin American countries to defy the US’s will to take down Somoza and later end the war without totally annihilating the Sandinistas. In Jarquin’s book, you’ll get the excerpts from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Laureate speech and other cultural contexts that will make you feel the heat of the situation.
I give both books 5/5 and consider them some of my most important reads in 2025. My degree in Latin American studies really should’ve made me learn more about the Sandinistas. Up until recently, I didn’t realize how pivotal it was to understand Central America as a region in order to understand the countries individually. You cannot understand the political conditions of the Salvadoran Civil War without understanding the Sandinistas.