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

1934, the Sandinista revolution began (Macauley 1967). In 1960, students from
Matagalpa took to the mountains to engage in clandestine operations to mount an
insurrection against the U.S.-supported Somoza regime.
Anastacio Somoza Garcia was put in power in 1937 after having been trained by
the U.S. military. The Guardia Nacional, his elite army, policed the populace and
defended his interests. Dissidents were persecuted harshly for speaking out against
Somoza’s government and U.S. influence in Nicaragua. Somoza was cruel to those who
dissented, and it is rumored that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said of him: “He’s
a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Over this period, refuge for the politically
and ideologically marginalized was again in the mountains.
Segovian campesinos have experienced the political battles of Nicaragua’s elite
most painfully. In 1963, Somoza enacted agrarian reform with the intention of converting
indigenous communities into cooperative enterprises. Somoza sought these land reforms
as a way to eliminate indigenous communities who were literate, organized, and savvy
enough to maintain ejidal rights and settlements (Rizo Zeledón 1992:73).
Historically, land reforms revolve around the discourses of progress,
development, and private property. In some Latin American cases, such as Mexico,
Honduras, and Guatemala, land or agrarian reform has been a way to usurp power and
redistribute land to individuals or corporations that will act in ways that reflect the
hegemonic ideal (Nash 2001; Warren 1998; Benjamin 1987). This was the case during
the Somoza dynasty, and from a different ideological standpoint the Sandinista Agrarian
Reform of 1982 functioned similarly.
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