If The U.S. Couldn’t Beat Sandino 100 Years Ago, How Can It Defeat Iran Today?

They never learn.

In 1912, the United States extracted a huge indemnity from Nicaragua for having the nerve to request that U.S. companies pay taxes. American bankers generously loaned the cost of the indemnity, and Washington dispatched the Marines to compensate for a lack of collateral. Taking over the customs houses, national banks, and railroads, they never got around to leaving.

Fourteen years later General Augusto Cesar Sandino decided to serve an eviction notice, forming Nicaragua’s first army of national liberation with twenty-nine illiterate San Albino miners. The men were working fifteen hours a day hacking gold out of the earth for a U.S. company and sleeping jammed together in a shed. When Sandino gave the word they dynamited the mines and followed him into the mountains.

The patriotic prostitutes of Puerto Cabezas divulged the location of a Marine stash of rifles and cartridges they had learned from pillow talk, and soon the army of liberation had its first arms and ammunition.

Sandino’s men also grabbed rifles from fallen enemies and carved bullets out of tree bark where they had become embedded. Machetes proved useful for chopping off heads, and sardine-can grenades filled with glass, nails, screws and dynamite scattered the enemy efficiently. The State Department accused Sandino of using “the stealthy and ruthless tactics which characterized the savages who fell upon American settlers in our country 150 years ago.”

In short, Washington complained that “the General of Free Men,” as Sandino was known in Nicaragua, wasn’t conducting his killing in a civilized manner. Sandino’s reply indicated he was not one to be easily trolled: “Liberty is not conquered with flowers,” he said.

Enjoying overwhelming superiority of force, U.S. bombers blew apart cattle and horses, wrecked crops, and destroyed villages, but Nicaragua’s “crazy little army” (Gabriela Mistral) avoided toe-to-toe engagement, biding its time until attack was least expected. Then Sandino and his men would ambush from behind or strike the enemy along its flanks, before vanishing into the jungle unscathed.

With Nicaragua’s army of national liberation growing and winning, thousands of Marines and dozens of warships arrived to bolster Washington’s puppet president, Adolfo Diaz, and hunt down the “bandit” Sandino. Yet, of dozens of battles, large and small, the U.S. lost nearly all of them.

For all their firepower, the Marines proved to be no better than sitting ducks. Loaded down with heavy equipment, they stomped wearily through the jungle, baked by the sun, drenched by the rain, choking on dust, wilted by humidity, easy targets for repeated attacks by Sandino’s men, who popped out of the brush to slit their throats with alarming regularity.

Eventually, Washington resorted to a bribe, and let Captain Hatfield hint of surrender.

From his mountain hideout Sandino declined the offer with exquisite courtesy: “I don’t sell out or surrender,” he wrote, followed by his signature: “Your obedient servant, who desires to put you in a handsome coffin with beautiful bouquets of flowers.”

After years of occupation, U.S. officials dominated Nicaragua from top to bottom and did not want to leave. Clifford D. Ham was comptroller of customs and general tax collector, and also the Nicaraguan correspondent for United Press. Another U.S. official, Irving Lindberg, was the correspondent for the Associated Press. A U.S. colonel headed up the “Nicaraguan” army, a U.S. captain directed the police force, and U.S. Brigadier General Frank McCoy – dubbed by one U.S. newspaper “the Mussolini of Nicaragua” – was in charge of the National Electoral Junta. The elections of 1928 were organized by General Logan Feland, commander of U.S. occupation forces, who had 432 Marines and a dozen U.S. planes on hand to guarantee “security” at the voting tables.

The year before the elections, President Coolidge requested Colonel Henry L. Stimson visit Nicaragua to see if he could pacify the country behind the puppet Diaz. Stimson spoke no Spanish and regarded Nicaraguans as “like children and unable to maintain the obligations which go with independence.” In his view Nicaragua could only escape civil war through revolution, which he discounted, or else “a concentration of practically all the powers of government in presidential dictators,” which he regarded as the more reasonable option.

Stimson managed to get all warring Nicaraguan factions to lay down their arms – except Sandino – who he made the mistake of ignoring. Sharing the racist view that whites occupied the top rung on the world’s racial ladder, he failed to take the proper measure of his adversary and the people who overwhelmingly supported him.

“Sandino is a man of the people, and therefore nothing better than a bandit,” he said simply.

By 1928, Sandino was big news in the United States. The Washington Herald devoted pages to covering his “outlaw band.” With the U.S. suffering high troop losses and the war costing taxpayers millions, the U.S. faced increasing criticism at home. Montana Senator Burton Wheeler suggested that Chicago was a more appropriate location for fighting bandits than Nicaragua was. Another critic wrote that if Washington thought it could establish democratic elections so easily it might try its hand in corrupt Philadelphia. A U.S. businessman complained that U.S. policy “has proved a calamity for the American coffee planters . . . Today we are hated and despised” because the Marines were sent “to hunt down and kill Nicaraguans in their own country.”

Four years later Sandino triumphantly entered the capital Managua, causing the U.S. occupation forces to fall back in disarray. On the first day of 1933, the U.S. packed up its ships and planes and left Nicaragua.

That’s what happened when Washington tried to occupy and govern a small republic with virtually no military in the U.S.’s “backyard.” What are the chances it can now successfully govern a large West Asian nation of ninety-three million people armed with tens or hundreds of thousands of missiles and drones?

Sources

Hodgson, The Colonel – The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson 1867-1950 (Knopf, 1990)

David F. Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side – The United States & Right Wing Dictatorships (University of North Carolina, 1999)

Walter LaFeber, The American Age, (W. W. Norton, 1989)

Peter Davis, Where Is Nicaragua?, (Simon and Schuster, 1987)

Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire, vol 3, (Pantheon, 1988) pps. 19, 62, 68-71

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