Nicaragua

The republic's public history is unusually violent even by the standards of the region. Two colonial cities, León and Granada, founded within months of each other in 1524, organised themselves into two parties and fought for a century and a half over which of them would own the state. In 1855 that quarrel let a Tennessee adventurer, William Walker, take the presidency with a private army; he held it for ten months, burned Granada, annulled Central America's abolition of slavery, made English the official language and was driven out by a coalition of every other Central American state. Twice in the twentieth century the United States occupied the country or armed one side in it: marines held Managua and the customs houses from 1912 to 1933, and the counter-revolutionary war of the 1980s was fought with American money and, for a time, American mines.

The Somoza family ruled from 1936 to 1979 as though the state were a private estate, and the revolution that overthrew them — the Sandinista Front, the FSLN — became one of the defining causes of the late Cold War. The Sandinistas lost an election in 1990 and accepted the result; they returned to power in 2007 and, over the following fifteen years, dismantled the competition that had defeated them. In 2018 a pension decree set off the largest protests since the revolution, and the repression that followed killed more than 300 people. Since then Nicaragua has become a dynastic autocracy: a co-presidency of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, opponents stripped of citizenship, and, from 2026, a constitutional order that no longer pretends elections will change anything.

It matters beyond its size, which is modest — 130,373 square kilometres, about seven million people. Nicaragua is the clearest case in the Americas of a republic whose nineteenth-century party geography hardened into twentieth-century dictatorship and then into twenty-first-century personal rule, and it is one of the very few countries where a revolutionary government lost power at the ballot box and handed it over. Both facts are part of the same story: the institutions that made a peaceful transfer possible in 1990 were the ones later captured.

At a glance

How did Nicaragua become a state?

The Spanish conquest arrived from two directions at once and produced two towns that never forgave each other. Gil González Dávila came north from Panama in 1522 and found a densely farmed Pacific plain of Nahuatl-speaking Nicarao and Chorotega towns; Francisco Hernández de Córdoba came the following year with a commission from Pedrarias Dávila and founded Granada on Lake Nicaragua and León near the Pacific in 1524. Nicaragua was never a rich colony. Its indigenous population was shipped out to work the Peruvian mines — the sixteenth-century figure of some 200,000 deportees is usually repeated, though it rests on estimates rather than counts — and by 1600 the province consisted of little more than those two cities, a cattle economy, and a lake route that let goods from the Caribbean reach the Pacific without crossing the mountains.

That route was the colony's one strategic asset, and it shaped everything. Because the San Juan river and Lake Nicaragua offered a short passage between the seas, Granada's merchant families grew rich on transit and on the customs house, while León, closer to the Pacific port of Realejo, lived on administration, the bishopric and, after 1812, the university. The bishop sat in León. The great landowning families — Chamorro, Cuadra, Sacasa, Argüello — sat in Granada or in León and married across both. Two cities, two economies, two claims to be the capital.

Independence came as an administrative accident. On 15 September 1821 the Captaincy General of Guatemala declared independence from Spain, and Nicaragua, which had no say in the matter, found itself part of a Central American state. It was annexed to Agustín de Iturbide's Mexican Empire in 1822, escaped it in 1823 with the formation of the United Provinces of Central America, and spent the next fifteen years inside a federation whose capital, Guatemala City, was a fortnight's journey away and whose politics were run by other people. The federation's liberal experiment collapsed in civil war in the late 1820s and never recovered; a Constituent Assembly declared Nicaragua's separation on 30 April 1838.

The new state inherited the intendancy's boundaries, its two rival cities, and one enormous problem: the Caribbean coast was not part of it. From the seventeenth century the Miskito shore had been a British sphere, ruled indirectly through the Mosquito Kingdom and its resident superintendents, with the British occupying San Juan del Norte at the river mouth from 1848. Nicaragua's own map was, in the east, a claim rather than a territory, and the claim would not be made good for another fifty-six years.

Why were León and Granada enemies?

The rivalry is usually described as ideological — Liberal León against Conservative Granada — and it was, but only after it had been something more basic. Granada sat at the north-west corner of Lake Nicaragua, controlling the lake passage and the road to the San Juan; its leading families lived from transit, from cattle, and from the tithe. León, thirty leagues west, was the seat of the bishop and the intellectual capital, and its merchants wanted a Pacific port and freer trade. When the federal republic broke up, the question was which city's elite would inherit the state's customs revenue, its offices and its army. Patronage, not philosophy, decided allegiances; the parties took their names later.

The quarrel was fought out through the 1840s in a series of armed pronouncingments, each of which installed a government that immediately exiled the previous one. It was also a quarrel about foreign patrons. Both sides looked abroad for money and arms — to Britain, to the United States, to whichever neighbouring republic would supply a battalion — and the arrival of steamship traffic after the California gold rush of 1849 made Nicaragua suddenly valuable to outsiders. Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company won a contract in 1849 to move passengers up the San Juan, across the lake and down to San Juan del Sur, and the transit route became the most contested piece of infrastructure in Central America. The Clayton–Bulwer treaty of 1850 was signed by Britain and the United States without Nicaragua in the room.

In 1853 the Conservative general Fruto Chamorro took the government, promulgated a centralist constitution and exiled the leading Liberals. A rival Liberal government was set up in León under Francisco Castellón, and in 1854 a Liberal exile army invaded from Honduras. The war that followed was savage: Chamorro announced that armed rebels would be shot, and the Liberal commander Máximo Jerez answered that government supporters were traitors to the nation. When Chamorro died in March 1855, the Liberals, penned into León with no money and no allies, did what both parties had been doing for a decade. They looked abroad for a mercenary.

How did an American adventurer become president?

William Walker was a Nashville-born physician, lawyer and journalist who had already tried to conquer Sonora and Baja California with a private army in 1853–54. In October 1854 the León government's agent in San Francisco offered him money and land grants to bring 300 colonists to Nicaragua. He sailed in May 1855 with a much smaller command — his own memoir counts fifty-five Americans and 110 Nicaraguan exiles — and landed on the Pacific coast in June; the Library of Congress country study's landing date of 4 May appears to be the sailing date, and most accounts put him ashore near Realejo on 16 June.

Walker's first campaign made his reputation. Reinforced by recruits from California, he beat a Conservative force at La Virgen in September 1855 and took Granada in October. The Conservative government capitulated; Patricio Rivas was installed as provisional president in October, and Walker, as commander of the army, was the power behind him. In 1856 he broke with Rivas, who had begun negotiating with the other Central American states, and had himself elected in a staged vote. He took the presidency on 12 July 1856.

His government was a colonisation scheme wearing a state. On 22 September 1856 he issued a decree annulling the acts of the federal constituent assembly, among them Central America's abolition of slavery, and made English the official language, both aimed at attracting settlers from the slave states. Walker admitted in his own memoir that the repeal "clearly prepared the way for the introduction of slavery" and that the intention was apparent, though he doubted whether it had strictly re-established the institution. He revoked the Transit Company's charter and handed its ships and route to two of Vanderbilt's rivals, Cornelius Garrison and Charles Morgan, who had financed him. Washington recognised his government in 1856, and the nickname by which he is remembered, "the grey-eyed man of destiny", was coined by his critics rather than his admirers.

What he never had was a country. Walker controlled the transit corridor, Granada, Managua and the lake, and almost nothing else. His decrees antagonised the Nicaraguan elite who had hired him, his alliance with the American South alarmed the British, who saw a rival client in the isthmus, and his seizure of Vanderbilt's property made an enemy of the richest American in the hemisphere. By the autumn of 1856 he was at war with Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, with his own Liberal allies, and with the United States government, which had decided that a filibuster state in Central America was not worth a sectional crisis at home.

How was Walker defeated?

The war against him — Nicaraguans call it the National War — was fought by a coalition in which Nicaraguan Liberals and Conservatives, Costa Ricans, Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans all took part for their own reasons. Costa Rica declared war in March 1856; its troops beat a filibuster column at Santa Rosa on 20 March, and at Rivas on 11 April a Costa Rican drummer boy named Juan Santamaría is said to have fired the torch that burned the building holding Walker's men. Cholera did more damage to the allied armies than Walker's rifles did, and the campaign stalled for months.

The decisive small battle came on 14 September 1856 at the San Jacinto hacienda, north of Granada, where a Nicaraguan force of about 160 under Colonel José Dolores Estrada stopped some 300 filibusters under Byron Cole. The casualty returns are a warning about this war's numbers: Estrada's own report gives 27 filibusters killed, a Nicaraguan lieutenant present gives 37, and Nicaraguan losses are recorded as anything between 15 and 55. The stone that a soldier named Andrés Castro is said to have thrown at a filibuster became the founding image of the national schoolroom.

Granada was destroyed at the end of 1856. Walker's men held the city through a long siege and burned it as they abandoned it, over the three weeks between 22 November and 12 December; the story that they left a placard reading "Aquí fue Granada" — here was Granada — is repeated in every Nicaraguan account, though no contemporary text of it has been produced. Costa Rican and Nicaraguan forces cut the transit route, Vanderbilt's agents financed free passages home for deserters, and by April 1857 Walker was besieged in Rivas with fewer than a thousand men. Commander Charles H. Davis of the United States Navy arranged a truce, and on 1 May 1857 Walker surrendered his command to him and left the country under American protection.

He did not stop. He returned in 1858, was arrested in New Orleans, wrote a memoir, and in 1860 landed at Trujillo in Honduras with a small force. The British naval officer commanding HMS Icarus took him prisoner and handed him over to the Honduran authorities, who shot him on 12 September 1860. He was thirty-six. The Walker episode cost Nicaragua thousands of lives and a burned city, and it fixed two ideas in Central American politics for a century: that the isthmus was a target, and that the only defence against filibusters was union.

What did the Managua settlement of 1858 create?

The war ended with no party able to govern alone. Jerez, the Liberal general, and Tomás Martínez, the Conservative commander, formed a dual presidency on 24 June 1857 — an arrangement Nicaraguans remember as the Managua compromise — and Martínez then took sole office on 15 November 1857, holding it until 1867. What the settlement actually produced was not a balance of parties but a Conservative hegemony that lasted, with one interruption, until 1893. The label "compromise" flatters it: the Liberals were bought off with offices, not with power.

Two decisions of those years outlasted the settlement itself. The first was the capital. Managua had been designated in 1852, sitting between the rival cities on the southern shore of Lake Xolotlán, and the postwar order confirmed it; the constitution of 1858 then gave the country a framework — a strong presidency, a restricted franchise, a Catholic establishment — that survived, with amendments, for thirty-five years, longer than any other in Nicaraguan history. The second was coffee. From the 1870s the government sold and privatised communal lands in the highlands of Matagalpa, Jinotega and Carazo to planters, built the railway to the Pacific port of Corinto, and turned a cattle province into an export economy. By 1890 coffee was the country's principal export.

The social cost was borne by the indigenous communities of the interior, whose ejidos were surveyed, declared vacant and sold, and by the peasants who became seasonal labourers on the new fincas. The political cost was a Liberal party excluded from the presidency for a generation and increasingly convinced that the Conservative order was both corrupt and antiquated. By the 1890s a new generation of Liberal intellectuals — lawyers, journalists, coffee growers outside the Granada families — had concluded that progress required secular education, a professional army, foreign investment on Nicaraguan terms, and a state that controlled its own customs.

How did Zelaya's nationalism bring in the marines?

José Santos Zelaya took power in the Liberal revolt of 1893 and held it for sixteen years. His constitution was anticlerical — civil marriage, secular schooling, cemeteries removed from church control — and abolished the death penalty; his government built roads, schools, telegraphs and a professional army, promoted coffee and bananas, and encouraged foreign investment while trying to tax and regulate it. He was also a caudillo who rigged elections, jailed opponents and nursed ambitions of a Central American union under his own leadership, and his reputation abroad was made worse by both.

His most popular achievement was territorial. The Caribbean coast had been a British protectorate in all but name since the seventeenth century, and the 1860 Treaty of Managua had made it a reserve under Nicaraguan suzerainty with a hereditary Miskito chief. In 1894 Zelaya sent troops under Rigoberto Cabezas to occupy Bluefields, and in November the reserve was incorporated by force. Britain protested and then acquiesced. Nicaragua was, on paper, whole for the first time; in practice the coast remained a separate society, English-speaking, Protestant, and administered from Managua by garrison.

Zelaya's fall came from the canal. After the United States chose Panama over Nicaragua in 1902, he began offering the canal route to Germany and Japan as a counterweight, and Washington concluded that he had to go. In 1909 the Conservative governor of the eastern department, Juan Estrada, revolted with American sympathy; two Americans who had served with the rebels, Leonard Groce and Lee Roy Cannon, were captured and executed by a Nicaraguan firing squad on 16 November 1909. The United States broke relations, Secretary of State Philander Knox denounced Zelaya's government as a blot on the civilisation of the age, and 400 marines landed on the coast. Zelaya resigned on 17 December 1909 and handed over to José Madriz four days later.

The settlement that followed made Nicaragua a protectorate in fact. In 1912, when the war minister Luis Mena revolted against President Adolfo Díaz, 2,700 marines landed at Corinto and Bluefields; the rebel general Benjamín Zeledón was killed, and a marine legation guard settled into Managua. It stayed, with one gap, for twenty-one years. A constituent assembly, a series of client presidents, and then the Bryan–Chamorro treaty, signed on 5 August 1914 and ratified two years later, gave the United States the exclusive right to build a canal across Nicaragua in perpetuity, a 99-year lease on the Corn Islands and a naval base site in the Gulf of Fonseca, in exchange for $3 million.

Why did the marines stay for twenty-one years?

The marines were there to protect a treaty and a customs receivership, and they discovered that the country could not be governed without them. The legation guard propped up Conservative presidents through the 1910s and early 1920s, supervised an election in 1928, and trained a constabulary — the Guardia Nacional — as the instrument of a withdrawal that would not leave the Liberals in charge. In 1925 the marines left; within months the Conservative general Emiliano Chamorro had ousted the coalition government, and in 1926 they came back.

The crisis produced the arrangement that shaped the next half-century. In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge sent Henry L. Stimson to mediate, and on 20 May 1927 the Liberal commander José María Moncada accepted the Pact of Espino Negro: both sides would disarm, a non-partisan Guardia would keep order under American officers, and the United States would supervise the 1928 election. One Liberal general refused. Augusto César Sandino, the illegitimate son of a landowner and a servant, took a few dozen men into the mountains of Las Segovias and fought the marines and the Guardia for six years.

Sandino's war was small, cruel and remarkably effective as politics. He never held a city; he made the occupation expensive, made the Guardia look like a foreign legion, and made himself the one Nicaraguan leader of his generation known outside the country. His programme was nationalist rather than Marxist — agrarian cooperatives, national sovereignty, Latin American unity, a hostility to the United States that he shared with much of the region's intelligentsia — and he corresponded with the anti-imperialist left from Mexico to Argentina while fighting a war of ambushes in the coffee highlands. The marines lost 136 dead in the second occupation, only 32 of them killed in action; no trustworthy count exists for the dead on Sandino's side, but the villages of Las Segovias were emptied and the Guardia's reprisals were remembered for generations.

The United States withdrew on 2 January 1933, under Hoover, as part of the Good Neighbor policy, having created the instrument of its own irrelevance. Sandino came down from the mountains, was given an amnesty, and dined at the presidential palace with Juan Bautista Sacasa. On 21 February 1934 he was stopped at a roadblock leaving the palace, taken to a field at Larreynaga and shot with his brother and two aides by officers of the Guardia Nacional. The order is universally attributed to the Guardia's director, Anastasio Somoza García. No one was tried. Somoza had removed the only man who could have united the Liberals against him, and the Guardia — the constabulary the marines had built — had become the arbiter of Nicaraguan politics.

How did the Somozas rule for forty-three years?

Somoza took the presidency on 1 January 1937, after forcing Sacasa out in June 1936 and winning a December election in which the opposition was not a serious factor. His power rested on three things that reinforced one another: the Guardia Nacional, which he commanded through his family and which branched out into the customs, the railways, the post office, the telegraph and the national radio; the support of the United States, which valued him as an anticommunist and a reliable vote in the Organization of American States; and an enormous private business empire built on confiscated German properties after 1941, on coffee and cattle land, on sugar mills, a dairy, an airline and the merchant marine.

The system was personal, not institutional, and it was adjusted whenever it was threatened. Somoza stepped down in 1947, let a puppet be elected, then deposed him within weeks when the puppet tried to govern; Washington refused to recognise the result, and it took a year and a Latin American chorus to restore relations. In 1950 he bought Conservative support with a third of the seats in Congress and a new constitution, and was elected president again. In 1955 the constitution was amended to let him run once more. On 21 September 1956, at a party rally in León, the poet Rigoberto López Pérez shot him five times. Somoza was flown to the Panama Canal Zone and died there on 29 September, aged sixty.

His eldest son, Luis Somoza Debayle, finished the term and won the presidency in his own right in 1957, governing with a lighter touch: press censorship eased, the ban on presidential re-election was restored, and Nicaragua joined the Central American Common Market in 1960. Under the surface the family's grip tightened. Luis's brother Anastasio, known as Tachito, a West Point graduate, ran the Guardia; a puppet, René Schick, held the presidency from 1963, and when Tachito took the office himself in 1967 he commanded both the state and the army.

The earthquake destroyed the regime's legitimacy as much as the capital. On 23 December 1972 three shocks wrecked central Managua; the death toll is usually given as about 10,000, though later estimates ran much higher, and 50,000 families lost their homes. The Guardia looted the ruins, the Somoza family and its friends took control of the reconstruction contracts and the foreign aid, and the president's personal fortune was estimated at $400 million two years later. A business class that had tolerated the dynasty discovered that it was not a partner but a competitor.

Opposition had been building since 1961, when Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga and Tomás Borge founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front — named for Sandino — with a few dozen student members. Its early guerrilla campaigns were destroyed; it split in 1975 into three factions, of which the "Third Way" of the Ortega brothers, arguing for a broad insurrection rather than a prolonged peasant war, eventually prevailed. On 27 December 1974 a Sandinista commando took the house of a former minister and held Somoza's relatives hostage for a ransom and the release of prisoners, a humiliation that made the FSLN famous. In January 1978 the newspaper publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the most respected opposition figure in the country, was assassinated on his way to work; the evidence pointed to the Guardia and to the president's son. A general strike followed, then an insurrection in Matagalpa, then the seizure of the National Palace in August 1978 by Edén Pastora with 2,000 hostages inside.

By then the regime had lost the Church, the private sector and the United States. The Nicaraguan bishops denounced it; the Carter administration cut military aid in 1978; the coalition of the Broad Opposition Front negotiated while the FSLN fought. The three factions united in March 1979, and a final offensive took the cities one by one. Somoza fled to Miami on 17 July; the Sandinistas entered Managua on 19 July 1979. The insurrection had killed tens of thousands — estimates for the whole 1978–79 period run from 30,000 to 50,000 — and left 600,000 homeless.

What did the 1979 revolution attempt?

The new government was a five-member junta of National Reconstruction, dominated by the FSLN but including Violeta Chamorro, widow of the assassinated editor of La Prensa, and the businessman Alfonso Robelo, and it inherited a country in ruins: a $1.6 billion foreign debt, a wrecked capital, and an economy that had been shrinking for two years. Its programme was ambitious and, in its first two years, popular. A literacy campaign in 1980 sent 60,000 young volunteers into the countryside and, on the government's own figures, cut illiteracy from about half the population to around one in eight; a national health service was created; the Somoza family's estates, some 2,000 farms covering a fifth of the arable land, were expropriated and turned into state farms and cooperatives.

Political power was reorganised at the same time. The Fundamental Statute of August 1979 abolished the old constitution, the presidency and the Congress; a Council of State, appointed rather than elected, was established in 1980 with an FSLN majority. When Chamorro and Robelo resigned that year, the pluralist fiction ended. From 1981 the government was openly a party-state with a Cuban-trained army and a mass organisation for every sector, and its opponents — the Miskito communities of the coast, the private sector, the Catholic hierarchy, and the remnants of the Guardia — began to organise against it.

The counter-revolution was American policy almost from the start. In January 1981 the Reagan administration suspended aid, alleging that Nicaragua was arming the guerrillas in El Salvador; by the end of the year the CIA was financing and directing the Contras, initially former Guardsmen operating from camps in Honduras. At their peak the Contras numbered perhaps 10,000 to 15,000 — the Sandinista army, with conscription from 1983, reached about 80,000 — and they never took a town. They did force the government to spend half its budget on defence, to impose emergency laws and censorship, and to relocate Miskito villages wholesale, which drove more of the coast into the opposition.

The coast was the war's other front, and its settlement was one of the revolution's few durable achievements. After the forced relocations of 1981–82 the government negotiated with the Miskito organisations and in 1987 passed an Autonomy Statute creating two Atlantic regions with elected assemblies and recognising Miskito, Creole, Sumo, Rama and Garifuna as community languages alongside Spanish. The statute survived the Sandinistas' defeat at the polls, and the east of the country has been administered under it ever since — which is part of why the coast still keeps its own churches, its own radio stations and its own idea of what Managua is for.

The war's legality was tested at The Hague. Nicaragua sued the United States in 1984; on 27 June 1986 the International Court of Justice found that Washington had violated international law by supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaraguan harbours, and that Nicaragua's own support for Salvadoran insurgents did not justify it. The United States refused to accept the jurisdiction and ignored the judgment. Congress fought a running battle over funding, and when it released $100 million in 1986 the administration was already supplementing the war from arms sales to Iran — the Iran–Contra affair — which nearly ended Reagan's presidency.

Domestically the revolution kept its electoral promises. In November 1984 Nicaraguans elected a president and a National Assembly; the FSLN won about two-thirds of the vote on a turnout of around three-quarters, with the main opposition coalition abstaining on the grounds that the contest was unfair. The constitution of 1987 wrote the revolution's gains into law — a mixed economy, social rights, an army under party control — and confirmed the institutions, including a Supreme Electoral Council, that would later be used against it.

How did the contra war end, and who won the peace?

The war ended through a regional process, not a military decision. The Esquipulas agreement of August 1987, brokered by the Costa Rican president Óscar Arias, committed the Central American states to democratisation, amnesty and the closure of foreign bases; it gave the Sandinistas a framework in which to negotiate with the Contras and a reason to hold elections early. Direct talks produced a ceasefire at Sapoá in 1988, and in 1989 the government accepted that the 1990 election would be observed and that it would abide by the result — a concession it did not have to make and could have avoided.

The economy made the election unwinnable anyway. Output per head had fallen through the 1980s and in 1990 stood well below its 1977 level; prices rose by more than 30,000 per cent in 1988, and the American embargo of 1985 had closed Nicaragua's main market. The piñata — the scramble for state property that gave the departing Sandinistas their fortunes — came after the vote, in the ten weeks before Chamorro took office. Conscription, rationing and the death notices in La Prensa had exhausted the patience of the same families who had cheered the revolution in 1979.

On 25 February 1990 the opposition coalition, the National Opposition Union, won the presidency with 54.74 per cent to the FSLN's 40.82 per cent on a turnout of 86 per cent. Violeta Chamorro, the newspaper publisher's widow, defeated Daniel Ortega, and the Sandinistas accepted the result before the count was complete. It was the first time in Nicaraguan history that a government had handed power to its opponents, and it was made possible by a civil servant: Mariano Fiallos, the Sandinista-appointed head of the electoral council, read out the real returns on election night when his party expected him to announce a fabrication.

Chamorro governed with the FSLN rather than against it. Humberto Ortega remained chief of the army, which was renamed and reduced but not dismantled; the Sandinistas kept the properties distributed in 1990 and the union structure they had built; and a series of constitutional reforms in 1995 cut the president's powers and strengthened the National Assembly. The compromise avoided a return to war and preserved the FSLN as an institution, at the cost of leaving the old elite, in both parties, in charge of the transition.

The next sixteen years were centre-right and corrupt. Arnoldo Alemán of the Liberal Constitutionalist Party won in 1996 with 51 per cent and governed as a patronage machine; Hurricane Mitch in 1998 killed thousands and wrecked a large part of the country's infrastructure. In 1999 Alemán and Ortega, now the leaders of the two largest parties, concluded a pact that divided the institutions between them — the courts, the electoral council, the comptroller's office — and in 2000 they rewrote the electoral law so that a candidate could win in the first round with 35 per cent of the vote and a five-point lead. Alemán was convicted of corruption in 2003 and sentenced to twenty years; the pact survived his imprisonment, because both parties had come to depend on it.

Why did Ortega come back, and what broke in 2018?

Ortega's return was the pact's logical outcome. In 2006 he won with 38.07 per cent — enough under the rule he had helped to write — while the Liberal vote split between Eduardo Montealegre (28 per cent) and José Rizo (26 per cent). He took office on 10 January 2007 with a programme of social spending, municipal power and reconciliation, and for several years it worked: free school meals, cash transfers, a booming economy financed by Venezuelan oil money and by remittances, and approval ratings that most governments in the region envied.

The authoritarian core was visible early. Municipal elections in 2008 were widely judged fraudulent; the 2011 presidential election, in which Ortega took 62.46 per cent, was won against a divided opposition with the state media, the police and the electoral council in his hands; a constitutional reform in 2014 removed the limit on presidential terms, and another in 2016 made Rosario Murillo vice-president. The government also granted a Chinese consortium a canal concession in 2013 that cut a swathe through the south-east of the country, and met the peasant protests against it with arrests. The Sandinista rank and file was kept loyal by patronage; the opposition was kept divided by the pact and by the courts.

The crisis began with a technical decree. On 16 April 2018 the government published a reform of the social security institute raising employee contributions from 6.25 to 7 per cent and employer contributions from 19 to 21 per cent, rising to 22.5, and taxing pensions at 5 per cent. Students in Managua and León demonstrated on 18 April; the police and armed Sandinista Youth groups shot at them; within five days nearly thirty people were dead and the government had withdrawn the reform. By then the protests had become a demand for the president's resignation, and the response had become a campaign.

Between April and July 2018 the police, backed by paramilitaries, cleared barricades in Masaya, Estelí, León and Managua; the death toll recorded by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reached 325 by the following April, including 21 police officers and 24 children and adolescents, with more than 2,000 injured. The universities were occupied, independent outlets were shut or raided, and more than 70 journalists went into exile. By the Commission's count 777 people had been arrested and prosecuted, at least 500 of them still held a year later, 300 health workers had been dismissed and 144 students expelled from the national university; about 62,000 Nicaraguans had fled, 55,000 of them to Costa Rica. The government refused to allow the independent expert group the Commission had proposed, and in September 2018 it declared unauthorised protest illegal. The bishops' mediation collapsed in 2019 and the Church, once the revolution's ally, became its most credible opponent.

What is Nicaragua now?

What followed was not a return to the old hybrid regime but a straightforward dictatorship. In the run-up to the November 2021 election the police arrested seven likely opposition candidates, including Cristiana Chamorro, the publisher's daughter, and disqualified the party that might have beaten them; Ortega was returned with 75.87 per cent on a turnout of 65 per cent, in a vote the European Union, the Organization of American States and the Carter Center refused to recognise. Nicaragua withdrew from the OAS, recognised Beijing instead of Taipei, and closed or confiscated thousands of NGOs, media outlets, seminaries and, in 2023, the Central American University.

Citizenship became a weapon. In February 2023 the government put 222 political prisoners on a plane to the United States and stripped them of their nationality; 94 more opponents lost theirs a week later, and in September 2024 another 135 were released to Guatemala and expatriated. Their property was confiscated.

The constitutional order was then rewritten. In November 2024 the National Assembly approved a package of amendments to the 1987 constitution; it was ratified in January 2025 and came into force on 18 February as Law 1234. It created a co-presidency of a man and a woman — Ortega and Murillo, until then president and vice-president — extended the presidential term from five years to six, declared the state "revolutionary" and founded on "Christianity and socialism", and gave the presidency formal power to coordinate the congress, the courts, the electoral council and the supervisory bodies. Formally the two are now equal heads of state; in practice the office has been fused into a marriage.

Then the elections went too. On 19 July 2026, the forty-seventh anniversary of the revolution, Ortega declared that there would be "never, never, never" another election and that the opposition would be barred from any contest. On 1 September the National Assembly gave a first reading to a constitutional amendment that extends the co-presidents' term from six years to seven, cancels the vote due in November, pushes the next to 2028 and writes into the constitution the exclusion of anyone the government judges linked to "coup attempts" or foreign financing — a discretionary test of the kind it has used against opponents since 2018. Under Nicaraguan law the amendment needs a second vote in a separate legislative session, due in January 2027. Washington called on allies to end "business as usual" with Managua. The forms of a republic survive; the substance does not.

The literature has changed its mind about all this, and the change is itself evidence. The first wave of writing on the revolution — John A. Booth, Thomas W. Walker, Walter LaFeber — was produced while the war was on and argued about the United States: whether Washington could tolerate a second Cuba, whether the FSLN was Marxist by conviction or by alliance. The writing of the past fifteen years, with the Sandinista archives open and the record of 2007–26 in view, treats 1979 as a story about institutions: which bodies the revolution built, which it captured, and how the electoral council that certified the transfer of 1990 became the instrument that certified the farce of 2021. Neither reading is wrong. The revolution was both a genuine insurrection against a kleptocracy and the beginning of a party that learned to keep power.

The country that this system governs is not the one of 1979. Remittances, not coffee, are now the largest source of foreign exchange; hundreds of thousands have left since 2018, most of them to Costa Rica, Spain and the United States; and the economy has been kept afloat by gold exports, textiles in the free zones, cattle, and money sent home by exiles. Managua remains a low, hot, sprawling city that never rebuilt its centre after 1972. Granada's colonial streets have been restored for tourists, and the lake is still there, and the volcano above it, and the two coasts that have never quite been one country.

Common myths about Nicaragua

Timeline of Nicaragua

What the map shows next

At 1856 on the map the republic is drawn in the year Walker governed: the Pacific core, the lake and the transit route, and a Caribbean coast still formally the Mosquito Reserve. The dataset starts in 1836, two years before the separation from the Central American federation, because it traces the territory rather than the sovereignty; the lines it draws for the 1840s are the ones the Spanish intendancy left behind.

At 1900 on the map the coast has been incorporated, the coffee economy is at its height, and the railway runs from Managua to Corinto. At 1979 on the map the map shows a country whose capital has just been destroyed and whose government is about to fall; at 1990 on the map it shows the same borders with a different regime, the one that made the transfer of power possible and then spent the next three decades being dismantled. The drawn series ends in 2024, so the co-presidency of 2025 and the cancelled election of 2026 fall outside it.