3.6 KiB
| title | aliases | created | updated | category | tags | summary | start | end | location | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nicaraguan National Guard |
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2026-05-17 | 2026-10-08 | Paramilitary |
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Somoza's military force that served as army, police, and intelligence service, trained at U.S. military schools, whose dispersed officers formed the founding cadre of the Contras. | 1925-01-01 | 1979-07-17 | Managua, Nicaragua |
Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua (National Guard) was the military, police, and intelligence service of Nicaragua under the Anastasio Somoza dynasty.1 Created by the United States in the 1930s, the Guard served as the power base of the Somoza family's forty-six-year rule. Its officers formed the leadership core of the Contras after the Sandinistas revolution.2
Creation and U.S. Training
The U.S. created the National Guard in the 1930s and spent millions of dollars a year supplying weapons and training its officers in anticommunist counterinsurgency.2 Training took place at Fort Gulick, Fort Benning, and Fort Leavenworth. Anastasio Somoza told U.S. ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo in 1979 that of approximately nine hundred Guard officers, "eight hundred or so belong to your schools."
The Guard also encompassed the OSN, Somoza's secret police unit that monitored political dissidents. It managed the national police, state security and intelligence services, the postal service, and customs agency.
Capuchin allegations, March 1977
In a March 3, 1977 telegram, the embassy in Managua under James D. Theberge reported a March 2 meeting with Somoza at which Theberge raised new charges by American Capuchin priests of recent National Guard massacres of 86 campesinos in two incidents northeast of Matagalpa. The telegram records that Somoza denied the charges and admitted that innocent bystanders, including women and children, sometimes had been killed in crossfire between the National Guard and FSLN guerrillas, especially in early 1976.3
Collapse
When Somoza fled Nicaragua on July 17, 1979, the vaunted National Guard collapsed within hours.2 Officers who could escape poured across the borders into El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica, or sought refuge in the Colombian embassy in Managua. Those who could not escape were imprisoned or faced firing squads.
Reconstitution as the Contras
The Central Intelligence Agency began reassembling the scattered National Guard brigades in 1980 under Enrique Bermudez, a former military attaché in Washington, D.C. who had been hired by the agency specifically for this purpose.2 The Legion of September 15, an early Contra group made up primarily of ex-National Guardsmen, was based in Guatemala and commanded by Ricardo Lau and Bermúdez. This group later became the core of the FDN, the largest and most powerful Contra faction.1
Footnotes
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Glossary of Organizations and Locations ↩︎
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Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 1: "A Pretty secret kind of thing" ↩︎
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Telegram 1032, Embassy in Nicaragua to Department of State, Managua, March 3, 1977, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977-1980, vol. XV, doc. 60. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1977-80v15/d60 ↩︎