Nicaragua, Back from the Dead An anthropological View of the Sandinista Movement in the early 21st Century

In 1979, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) overthrew the US-sponsored dictatorship that had ruled the Central American Republic Nicaragua. The revolutionaries were Marxists, and they worked together with Cuba and the Soviet Union. The USA funded a civil war against the new government and maintained an economic boycott of the country, which crippled it severely. In 1990, the FSLN then lost the presidential elections to a US-friendly alternative. In 2006, José Daniel Ortega Saavedra, the same Sandinista who ruled in the 1980s, was elected president of the country and ended thereby 16 years of neoliberal rule. Or did he? 40% of Nicaragua's population call themselves Sandinista, but since the 1980s the meaning of what a Sandinista is has changed. This book attempts to explain what Sandinismo meant in the past and what it is now.