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

Agrarian Reform and Civil War in Las Segovias
Soon after the 1979 victory over the Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinista revolutionary
government implemented two important policies that restructured the social and political
landscape of Nicaragua. By sending literacy brigades beyond the typical frontiers of the
classroom and setting up popular learning centers in rural regions, the national Literacy
Crusade reduced the national illiteracy rate by 70 percent and received recognition from
UNESCO (Miller 1985). The disenfranchised regions of Nicaragua were learning the
language of empowerment, self-determination, and counter-exploitation. The Sandinistas
infused the literacy classroom with ideological themes of the revolution. Campesinos
would learn from Marx that people make their own history, but not under conditions of
their own choosing (Collins et al. 1982).
The agrarian reform, on the other hand, had mixed results. It entailed confiscation
and reallocation of agricultural lands. The Sandinistas imposed these reforms as a
response to the decades of agricultural domination by the Somoza oligarchy. After the
revolutionary victory, the FSLN directorate quickly formed a ministry that was
responsible for the agrarian reform, MIDINRA – Ministerio de Desarrollo Instituto
Nacional de la Reforma Agraria. The Sandinista policy of agrarian reform and
agricultural development sought to change Nicaragua’s role in the international market
and reduce the nation’s dependency on foreign imports of manufactured products. Jaime
Wheelock, historian and revolutionary, was an influential and inspirational member of
the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and the director of MIDINRA.
His works, Las raices indígenas de la lucha anticolonialista en Nicaragua (1974) and
Imperialismo y dictadura: crisis de una formación social (1975), are critical of the
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