Nicaraguan Revolution

The revolution produced some profound and lasting changes in Nicaragua. The Somoza dynasty, which had ruled Nicaragua as its private estate for 40 years, was overthrown, and the powerful National Guard was destroyed. Literacy levels rose significantly, and youth, women, and the rural poor took a more active part in national life than ever before. The Miskito regions of the Atlantic coast achieved limited self-rule. After decades of dictatorship and civil war, a democratic government emerged, allowing the first consecutive, peaceful transitions of power between elected officials in Nicaragua’s history.

But the Sandinistas had a larger goal: to change the structure of Nicaraguan society and improve the lives of the poorest citizens. They had declared that all Nicaraguans had a right to food, shelter, education, and health care. But their ambitious health, education, and other programs, though initially successful, had few lasting results. By the 1990s literacy rates had fallen, though they were still higher than under Somoza, and health and nutritional levels actually declined from pre-revolution levels.

Efforts to change the economy, through a combination of private enterprise and socialist-style, central-government controls, led to disaster. Agricultural production, needed both to feed Nicaragua’s people and to provide crops to sell, declined. Sandinista confiscation of property created uncertainty over ownership rights, discouraging investors into the 1990s. Nicaraguans and outside observers have sharply debated to what extent the economic crisis and the failure to improve living conditions resulted from the Sandinistas’ Marxist ideology and flawed economic policies, and to what extent they were caused by U.S. opposition and the contra war.

Nicaragua was changed fundamentally by the experience of the revolution, becoming a freer but poorer and deeply divided nation. More than six years after the Sandinistas were voted out of power, the nation continued to struggle toward economic recovery and national reconciliation from the turmoil of the 1980s.