The_Info_Web/20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PARAMILITARY/Sandinistas.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	start	location	relations
Sandinistas	Sandinistas Sandinista FSLN Sandinista National Liberation Front Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional	2026-05-17	2026-10-05	Paramilitary	Organization Political Nicaragua FSLN ContraWar IranContra 1970s 1980s DarkAllianceInvestigation	Nicaraguan revolutionary front founded in 1961 that overthrew the Somoza dynasty in July 1979, governed under Daniel Ortega, and fought the CIA-backed Contras until losing the 1990 election.	1961-07-26	Managua, Nicaragua	type with reverse start role fn founded Carlos Fonseca true 1961-07-26 Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga and Tomas Borge Martinez founded the FSLN 1 type with reverse start role fn founded Tomas Borge true 1961-07-26 co-founder of the FSLN 1 type with reverse start role fn member_of Daniel Ortega true 1979-07 member of the five-person governing directorate of 1979; elected president in the election of November 4, 1984 and inaugurated January 10, 1985 2 type with start end role fn partner_of Manuel Noriega 1978 1979-07 Noriega's arms-resale business counted the Sandinistas among its earliest clients, per the Kerry Committee 3

The Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN) was formally organized in Nicaragua in 1961. The Library of Congress country study states that it was founded by Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga and Tomas Borge, who began in the late 1950s as Marxist student activists at the National Autonomous University in Managua, and that it was "officially founded in Honduras on the symbolic date of July 26, 1961," the eighth anniversary of the launching of the Cuba Revolution by Fidel Castro; its rural tactics were patterned after Castro's army and its forces were trained in Cuba.¹

The war against Somoza

The FSLN first drew wide attention with its December 1974 raid and hostage-taking at a reception for the U.S. ambassador, after which the government of Anastasio Somoza accepted demands for ransom and the release of fourteen prisoners. The seizure of the National Palace by a small group in August 1978 set off a mass uprising, and the Front mounted a "final offensive" in May 1979; Somoza resigned on July 16 and fled, and the National Guard collapsed two days later.¹ The congressional Iran-Contra Committees give July 17, 1979 as the date Somoza and his family fled, ending a 43-year dynasty and a civil war with more than 130,000 casualties.² The Sandinista victory was supplied in part through Panama: the Kerry Committee reported, on the testimony of Jose Blandon, that Manuel Noriega resold weapons through Panamanian end-user certificates and that "his earliest clients included the Sandinistas." The arms were bought in Europe, moved to Costa Rica under the eye of Noriega's partner, Costa Rican Security Minister Johnny Echevarria, and flown in on planes from Panama loaded with Cuban weapons, refueled and repaired at the crop-dusting business of the Costa Rican Jaime Guerra in the north of the country. Former Costa Rican law enforcement officials told the subcommittee that during the revolution they were instructed to keep their narcotics investigators away from the Nicaraguan border and to let flights go even when they had information about drugs aboard the aircraft delivering weapons.³ David Westrate told the subcommittee in July 1988 that "people on both sides of the equation (in the Nicaraguan war) were drug traffickers, and a couple of them were pretty significant."³

Government, 1979 to 1990

A five-person Provisional Government directorate took office in 1979: Violeta Chamorro, widow of the murdered La Prensa editor, Alfonso Robelo, Sergio Ramirez, Moises Hassan and Daniel Ortega. The Committees' report states that the Sandinistas took over television and radio stations, censored La Prensa, forced Chamorro and Robelo to resign from the governing council, and announced on September 19, 1980 that national elections would not be held until 1985; the Jimmy Carter administration gave $39 million in emergency food aid and suspended it as U.S. intelligence found the Sandinistas helping the Marxist rebels in El Salvador. Cuban military personnel helped set up the Sandinista army.²¹

In the election of November 4, 1984, about 75 percent of registered voters went to the polls, the FSLN won 67 percent of the vote, the presidency and 61 of the 96 seats in the National Assembly. The Library of Congress study states that foreign observers generally reported the election to be fair, while opposition groups said Front domination of government organs, mass organizations and much of the media precluded a truly open election. Ortega was sworn in on January 10, 1985, the seventh anniversary of the assassination of the editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro. The Front lost the 1990 elections, and a government headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was installed in April 1990.¹

Webb wrote that after taking power the Sandinistas imprisoned or executed captured National Guard officers, and that former officers who escaped into El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica became the founding cadre of the Contras, reassembled by the Central Intelligence Agency starting in 1980.⁴ Webb is the sole source for the passages so cited. The congressional Committees describe the Contras as three elements: former National Guardsmen and right-wing figures, anti-Somocistas who had supported the revolution but felt betrayed, and Nicaraguans who opposed the Sandinistas' increasingly anti-democratic regime; "initial support" came from another country, understood to be Argentina, which organized and supplied paramilitary forces in early 1981.²

United States policy and the Contra war

In December 1981 President Ronald Reagan signed a Finding authorizing a covert CIA operation to support the Contras, with the administration telling Congress the aim was to limit the spread of communism in the region. The first Boland Amendment of December 21, 1982 barred use of federal funds to overthrow the Nicaraguan government; in April 1984 press accounts reported that the CIA had mined Nicaraguan harbors; and the October 1984 Boland amendment barred any agency "involved in intelligence activities" from supporting military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua "directly or indirectly."²⁵ Lawrence Walsh's Final Report records that Reagan compared the Contras' struggle against Nicaragua's "communist-supported Sandinista government" to that of the American revolutionaries.⁶ The International Court of Justice, in its judgment of June 27, 1986 in Nicaragua v. United States, rejected the U.S. claim of collective self-defense and found the United States had breached customary law duties not to interfere in another state's internal affairs, not to use force, not to violate sovereignty and not to interrupt peaceful maritime trade, and that it had broken the 1956 Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation; the United States had announced on January 18, 1985 that it would not participate. Nicaragua discontinued the proceeding in September 1991 and the case was closed on September 26, 1991.⁷

On October 5, 1986 a C-123 cargo aircraft belonging to the Enterprise run by Oliver North and Richard Secord was hit by a Sandinista SAM-7 missile over Nicaragua, killing three of the four crew; the survivor, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured.²⁸ The Contras' principal arms and money pipeline of those years is described on the Iran-Contra Affair page.

Drug-trafficking allegations and the Seal sting

The Kerry Committee found that the U.S. United States Department of State, in an International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, noted "no evidence" of the use of Nicaragua to ship drugs to the United States "since the allegations made in 1984" in connection with the case of the DEA informant Barry Seal. Seal, working undercover after being caught smuggling drugs, flew to Nicaragua with cameras installed in his plane and obtained photographs of Federico Vaughn, whom U.S. authorities identified as a Nicaraguan government official, and Pablo Escobar loading the plane with drugs; the committee found this material "became the central evidence thereafter used by U.S. officials citing Sandinista involvement in narcotics." After the operation was exposed Vaughn disappeared, and the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime found that the telephone number Vaughn used in calls he received from Seal was controlled by the U.S. Embassy.³ The Kerry report also states that the Seal operation "directed at officials of the Sandinista government in Managua was prematurely announced publicly by U.S. government officials, shortly before a crucial Congressional vote on Contra aid, thereby jeopardizing an ongoing DEA investigation," and that DEA officials testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime on July 28, 1988 that in June 1985 North suggested that $1.5 million in drug money carried aboard Seal's plane be given to the Contras, which DEA rejected.³⁹

Webb wrote that the CIA informed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in April 1984 that "although uncorroborated reports indicating Nicaraguan involvement in the shipping of cocaine to the United States had been received, CIA was unable to confirm reports implicating high-level Sandinistas in drug trafficking," that United States Department of Justice officials reached the same conclusion two years later, that Reagan displayed a photograph of Vaughn, "a top aide to one of the nine commandantes," loading an aircraft with drugs, and that the House Judiciary Committee investigation found Vaughn likely a U.S. double agent whose house had been "continuously rented" by the U.S. Embassy since 1981 and who was associated with Norwin Meneses and North. Webb also wrote that the former Sandinista intelligence officer Enrique Miranda became a CIA asset, DEA informant and right-hand man to Meneses from 1989 to 1991.⁴ Webb is the sole source for the passages so cited.

The Kerry Committee recorded two other approaches. In a closed session on June 25, 1987 the money launderer Ramon Milian Rodriguez testified that he had offered to help entrap the Sandinistas in a drug sting in return for dropping charges against him; Felix Rodriguez denied his version of a meeting in which Milian offered drug money to the Contras, and no action was taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation or CIA. A Miami attorney who in 1985 met lawyers for the Medellin Cartel in Bogota and later its leaders in Medellin told the DEA in October 1986, and passed a polygraph on his account, that a Bogota lawyer for the Cartel said Jorge Ochoa "finances both Sandinista and anti-Sandinista forces in Nicaragua by setting up drug operations there"; the Cartel proposed to collect intelligence on guerrillas for six months to a year in return for amnesty, and the DEA and FBI broke off contact with the attorney.³

Footnotes

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1. Merrill, Tim L., ed. Nicaragua: A Country Study, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (December 1993; DTIC ADA288675), chs. 1 and 5, "The Rise of the FSLN," "Sandinista Guerrilla Movement, 1961-79," "Sandinista People's Army, 1979-90" and the account of the 1984 election. https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA288675 ↩︎

2. Brinkley and Engelberg, eds., Report of the Congressional Committees, Part I, chs. 1 and 2, and "Iran-Contra Chronology." https://archive.org/details/reportofcongres00unit ↩︎

3. U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, S. Prt. 100-165 (December 1988), chapters on Nicaragua and Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama and the Cartel, and Panama (testimony of Blandon, Westrate, Milian Rodriguez and the "Miami Attorney"; DEA debriefs of October 21 and November 13, 1986; Jacobsen testimony, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, July 28, 1988; Conclusions). https://archive.org/details/Kerry-Report-Drugs-Contras ↩︎

4. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998, ch. 1, "A pretty secret kind of thing"; Glossary of Organizations and Locations; ch. 13, "The wrong kind of friends." Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎

5. Walsh, Lawrence E. Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, vol. I (August 4, 1993), Part I, "The Reagan Administration's Contra Policy" and "The Funding Cut-Off." https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/part_i.htm ↩︎

6. Walsh, Final Report, vol. I, ch. 1, "United States v. Robert C. McFarlane." https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_01.htm ↩︎

7. International Court of Justice, Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Judgment of June 27, 1986 (merits), case overview and discontinuance order of September 26, 1991. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/70 ↩︎

8. Walsh, Final Report, vol. I, Executive Summary, "The Basic Facts of Iran/contra." https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/execsum.htm ↩︎

9. National Security Archive, "The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations," Electronic Briefing Book No. 2 ("In 1988, two DEA agents testified ... that in 1985 Oliver North had wanted to take $1.5 million in Cartel bribe money that was carried by a DEA informant and give it to the contras"). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html ↩︎