i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

Sandino’s Influential Rebellion
Augusto César Sandino was a general in the Liberal army, stationed on the Atlantic Coast
at the port of Puerto Cabezas, when he began his rebellion against the U.S. Marine
intervention into Nicaragua’s civil strife in the late 1920s. The conflict between the
Liberals of León and the Conservatives of Granada 26 for control of the nation had been
ongoing since before independence from Spain in 1821. Sandino’s seven-year resistance
in the Segovian highlands reinvigorated indigenous contempt for the national
government.
The United States intervened and worked to ensure the Conservative faction from
Granada retained power. The Liberal faction, with ideologies akin to those of the
Mexican Revolution, was supported by Mexico. The Stimson Accord resulted in a
ceasefire and a truce between the rival national factions in 1928 (Stimson 1991:80). In
response, Sandino repudiated the Liberal faction leaders who had surrendered and
dedicated his remaining two thousand or so troops to the cause of resisting the
“imperialist intervention of the Yankee invader” (Selser 1955). Sandino and his troops
fled to the mountains of Las Segovias and Matagalpa. His impenetrable fortress, El
Chipote, was located outside the town of El Jícaro (renamed Ciudad Sandino during the
era of the revolutionary government) only 30 km from San Juan del Río Coco. The
Nicaraguan (Conservative) government enlisted the aid of the U.S. military to help
suppress the rebellion. Sandino was depicted as a bandit in the Nicaraguan and U.S.
press, not as a rebel who adhered to a political agenda. Although the mainstream media in
26 This is classic Liberalism that sought separation of church and state and reduce barriers
to trade and international commerce. The Conservatives are socially conservative and
closely tied to the Catholic Church. They had stricter, oppressive laws regarding
women’s’ rights and marriage.
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