The Wheel Has Come Full Circle
What Went Wrong: The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis
Gonzalez, Mike
http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/5077
Date Written: 2017-09-01
Publisher: Against the Current
Year Published: 2017
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX21696
Book review of Dan La Botz's What Went Wrong: The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis.
Abstract:
-
Excerpt:
After 1979 there was a flurry of writing on Nicaragua and a rush to find out more about this obscure organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
They were guerrilla fighters in the Guevarist mould, whose first appearance in the international press came with the seizure of the National Congress in 1977 and the subsequent release of imprisoned leaders, including Daniel Ortega.
Their victory in 1979 came as an antidote to Chile, and suggested the opening of a new "road to socialism," after the Chilean strategy had been drowned in blood.
Yet it was clear at a very early stage that the Sandinistas were not all that they appeared to be. The discourse they shared with the theology of liberation, and with elements of the emerging movement in Brazil, sat uneasily with their political practice.
In his analysis, La Botz explores the political origins and the ideology of the Sandinistas in exhaustive detail. He is emphatic and uncompromising in his conclusions.
