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

oth countries portrayed him as merely a nuisance, much of the world revered and
imitated his novel guerilla tactics (Macauley 1967; Beals 1980).
Much of Sandino’s activities took place in the area of San Juan del Río Coco.
Sandino recruited the support of several towns and villages throughout the mining and
coffee-growing regions of Nueva Segovia and Matagalpa. In 1927, while fighting
Sandino, the U.S. Marines bombarded Ocotal, the capital of Nueva Segovia, making it
one of the first cities to be attacked by aerial bombardment. Sandino’s Lieutenant General
Miguel Angel Ortez met his death on the streets of Palacagüina when a Marine launched
a grenade into his abdomen (Macauley 1967).
During this seven-year engagement, the U.S. Marines trained Nicaraguan national
troops (also known as the National Guard), cut roadways through the mountains for
improved military access, and harassed rural inhabitants. The Marines established San
Juan de Telpaneca, later San Juan del Río Coco, as a concentration camp for campesino
sympathizers of Sandino’s effort. As in many cases, the campesinos were cannon fodder
in this armed struggle. They likely were descendants of the participants in the 1881
Indigenous Revolt and their antipathy towards the Nicaraguan central government had
not waned.
The U.S. Marines, in an attempt to reduce Sandino’s popular base of support,
gathered the inhabitants of the surrounding area and concentrated them in the center of
present-day San Juan. They were forced to build permanent dwellings that eventually
constituted the casco urbano (urban center) of San Juan del Río Coco. The resulting
settlement was designed a “campo de reconcentración cívica,” or civic concentration
camp (Echánove and Rabella 2002).
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