Carlos Fonseca
Carlos Fonseca Amador was a Nicaraguan professor, politician, writer and revolutionary who was one of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Fonseca was later killed in the mountains of the Zelaya Department, Nicaragua, three years before the FSLN took power. He has posthumously received the titles of National Hero of Nicaragua and Commander in Chief of the Sandinista Popular Revolution.
Early years
Carlos Fonseca Amador was born in the El Laborío neighborhood of the city of Matagalpa on 23 June 1936. He was the son of Agustina Fonseca Úbeda, from San Rafael del Norte, a peasant and cook, and Fausto Amador Alemán, a member of a wealthy coffee-growing family and administrator of the La Reina mine in San Ramón, Matagalpa. Fonseca was born in a "corner house" his aunt Isaura owned, where his mother lived in a back room. At the age of 9, he began selling candies that his mother made and later sold newspapers on the streets of the city. His father did not acknowledge Fonseca as his son until his elementary school years.Fonseca's father broke from the Conservative Party to align himself with the Somoza regime, managing several Somoza enterprises and acquiring large land holdings in the Managua and Matagalpa regions. Although his father later helped him go to school and educate himself and occasionally invited him to his mansion in Matagalpa, Fonseca held greater admiration for his mother because of her work ethic and strength. Because of this, Fonseca inverted the usual naming convention in Latin America and used her surname first, and was consequently known as Carlos Fonseca Amador. His relationship with his father was more ambivalent: Fonseca admired his father's intelligence and abilities and wanted his approval but opposed his politics and privilege.
In 1950 Fonseca entered secondary school at the Instituto Nacional del Norte, where he was named best student in his class while also working odd jobs during holiday breaks. He became best friends there with Tomás Borge, with whom he shared a fondness for the writings of Thomas More, John Steinbeck and Howard Fast. A voracious reader, he studied French to be able to read works that were available only in that language while working his way through the library's section devoted to the history of the US.
Early political activity
Fonseca also began his work in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship while at the INN by participating in a strike that demanded the removal of a plaque honoring Somoza from the University of León campus. Around this time he attended meetings of a Conservative Party youth group and joined the Unión Nacional de Acción Popular, a party led by intellectuals who had taken part in the anti-Somoza demonstrations of the mid-1940s. He left the UNAP in 1953 or 1954, however, later complaining they were "too well off economically,... too perfumed, too bourgeoisified" and not active enough against the Somoza regime.Fonseca became increasingly interested in Marxism and joined the Partido Socialista Nicaragüense in 1954. In 1955, after graduating from INN, Fonseca moved to Managua, where he was named director of the library at the Miguel Ramírez Goyena Institute. He combined that work with studies at the School of Economics of the National University.
The following year he moved to León, Nicaragua and enrolled in the Faculty of Law while working at the La Prensa agency. He remained active in the PSN, devoting himself to student organizing and forming a student cell of the Party with Silvio Mayorga and Tomás Borge.
Fonseca still embraced the PSN's commitment to peaceful and gradualist political struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and did not approve of the September 21, 1956 shooting of Anastasio Somoza García by Rigoberto López Pérez. Fonseca was nonetheless arrested in Matagalpa six days after the assassination when Anastasio Somoza García's son and successor, Luis Somoza Debayle, declared a state of siege, arresting hundreds of students and other dissidents. Some were held for several years; Fonseca was held until November 14, 1956, when he was released without charges, possibly due to his father's intervention.
In 1957, Fonseca traveled to the Soviet Union as a PSN delegate to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth. Fonseca later wrote a book chronicling his visit to the USSR entitled Un Nicaragüense en Moscú. The book featured uncritical praise of the accomplishments of the Soviet government, including its "free press, complete freedom of religion and the efficiency of its worker-run industries." He returned to Nicaragua on December 16 and was immediately arrested at the Las Mercedes International Airport in Managua by the Guardia Nacional.
In March 1958 he signed the Minimum Program of the Movilización Republicana party, which called for a general amnesty and the return of exiles. He took part in the day of protest of the visit to the University by Milton S. Eisenhower, brother of the then-president of the United States. He organized a student strike in November to demand the release of Tomás Borge and other students who had been in prison since the assassination of Somoza. He was arrested several times, in Managua and Matagalpa.
In March 1959 he helped found Juventud Democrática Nicaragüense. Fonseca and his allies hoped to use the JDN to attract youth outside the relatively small number of university students to the resistance to the Somoza regime, primarily by leading demonstrations and painting slogans against tyranny on walls, while pointing out the shortcomings of the Unión Nacional Opositora controlled by the Conservative Party.
Taking up arms
and the 26th of July Movement took power in Cuba on January 1, 1959. In February of that year, Fonseca, as well as many other more prominent Nicaraguan radicals, traveled to Cuba.The Cuban Revolution was a major event all over Latin America and sparked both great concern and a sense of possibility in Nicaragua. The Cuban Revolution was a central event in Fonseca's political evolution as it convinced him that a revolution was possible and that organisation to prepare for that was necessary. He also came to believe that the PSN was not suited to that task and that a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement could be created outside of the PSN and other existing groups.
Others felt the same, as the rebel victory in Cuba was mirrored by an increase in armed anti-Somoza actions in Nicaragua. In 1959 Fonseca left Guatemala for Honduras and joined the "Rigoberto López Pérez" guerrilla column led by Commander Rafael Somarriba. That group had the support of the Cuban government through Che Guevara in the fight against the Somoza dictatorship; there were also numerous Cuban members in the column.
On June 24, 1959, the brigade was ambushed by Honduran and Nicaraguan troops in El Chaparral, Honduras, ending in the death of several rebels and the wounding and capture of many others, including Fonseca, who suffered a bullet wound to the lung. He was treated at the San Felipe General Hospital in Tegucigalpa.Fonseca was eventually flown, along with other guerillas held by Honduras, to Cuba.
The incident marked the end of Fonseca's relationship with the PSN. Whereas Fonseca's revolutionary zeal increased in the aftermath of the ambush, the PSN became convinced that a revolution in Nicaragua was impossible. Labeling Fonseca and other Nicaraguans who fought in the brigade as too "guerrilla-ist," the PSN expelled Fonseca and the others.
The failed incursion led to another incident that would have lasting impapct on the anti-Somoza movement, when the Guardia Nacional fired on a peaceful student demonstration in León, called to demand proper care for Fonseca and to protest the killings at El Chaparral, killing four students and two bystanders and wounding nearly a hundred others, on July 23, 1959. Nearly the entire city turned out for the funeral march the next day and both students and faculty forced the University to permanently bar the Guardia Nacional from the campus. The student movement—sometimes referred to as "the Generation of '59"—took on a more radical cast than the earlier "Generation of '44" that had been aligned with the Conservative and Liberal Parties.
The JDN that Fonseca had helped found collapsed in 1959. It was soon followed by Juventud Revolucionaria Nicaragüense, which operated primarily in Costa Rica and was just as ineffective, and then by Juventud Patriótica Nicaragüense, a group originally founded by children of Conservative Party members opposed to Somoza that led a number of protests throughout the country. It, too, later folded, following Luis Somoza's declaration of a state of siege in November 1960. These short-lived groups did, however, leave a tradition of militant street action, solidarity with the Cuban revolution, and independence from both the existing mainstream parties and the PSN.
Sandinista
Once in Cuba Fonseca began to seriously study Augusto César Sandino, whom Fidel Castro and Che Guevara respected greatly; Guevara repeatedly cited Sandino as a revolutionary hero. Fonseca also began to host political meetings in a small apartment in the Miramar section of Havana that were frequented by a number of Nicaraguan exiles who would later become part of the FSLN.On his return to Nicaragua, after visits to Venezuela and Costa Rica, he was arrested again and extradited to Guatemala where he was confined in El Petén and made friends with the future Commander of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias of Guatemala, Luis Augusto Turcios Lima. Fonseca escaped from custody and fled to El Salvador, from which he returned to Nicaragua via Havana with the help of Tomás Borge and Julio Jérez.
Initial attempts at insurrection
Between 1959 and 1963, Fonseca and those who would become the earliest members of the FSLN began to organise in the hopes of forming a true revolutionary organization. In 1961, together with other comrades, Fonseca founded the Movimiento Nueva Nicaragua. The MNN had three cells, in Managua, León and Estelí. He published "The Ideology of Sandino" at this time. The MNN then transformed itself into a group known as the Frente de Liberación Nacional, which took its name from the movement fighting French colonialism in Algeria.At a meeting of the FLN held in Honduras in July, Fonseca proposed the name "Sandinista National Liberation Front" for the armed revolutionary organization. His suggestion met opposition from more orthodox Marxists within the organization who argued that Sandino fought against foreign occupation but not imperialism. It took several years for the organization to rename itself the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional.
Together with the veteran Sandinista Santos López, Fonseca studied the possibility of armed struggle on the ground reaching the banks of the Coco River. Inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution, and in particular Castro and Guevara's insistence on the primary role of an armed uprising, while giving less importance to political organizing among the peasantry and urban workers, Fonseca and Santos López tried to copy the Cuban movement's tactics, down to adopting a timetable modeled on the amount of time that passed from the outbreak of hostilities in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains to the guerrillas's march into Havana.
The results were disastrous. In mid-1963, a poorly-armed, largely inexperienced and disorganized guerrilla cadre entered the Rios Coco y Bocay area of Nicaragua. Largely unable to communicate with the Sumo-speaking peasants of the region, and having done little advance work in the area, several guerrillas were killed by the Guardia Nacional in a confrontation in August, while Fonseca and others were able to make it across the Honduran border over the next month.