A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism? Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution

204 Pages·2020·4.661 MB·English

by  Hilary Francis (ed.)

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Publication details:
A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism? Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista
Revolution
Edited by Hilary Francis
http://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/a-nicaraguan-
exceptionalism
DOI: 10.14296/220.9781908857774
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This edition published 2020 by
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDY
INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, United Kingdom
ISBN 978-1-908857-77-4 (PDF edition)

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. More
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INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism?
Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution
edited by Hilary Francis
INSTITUTE OF LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

A Nicaraguan Exceptionalism?
Debating the Legacy of the Sandinista Revolution
edited by Hilary Francis
Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study,
University of London, 2020
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. More information
regarding CC licenses is available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.
This book is also available online at http://humanities-digital-library.org.
ISBN:
978-1-908857-57-6 (paperback edition)
978-1-908857-78-1 (.epub edition)
978-1-908857-79-8 (.mobi edition)
978-1-908857-77-4 (PDF edition)
DOI: 10.14296/220.9781908857774 (PDF edition)
Institute of Latin American Studies
School of Advanced Study
University of London
Senate House
London WC1E 7HU
Telephone: [phone]
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://ilas.sas.ac.uk
Typesetting by Thomas Bohm, User Design, Illustration and Typesetting.
Cover image © Franklin Villavicencio.
Contents
List of illustrations v
Notes on contributors vii
Introduction: exceptionalism and agency in Nicaragua’s
revolutionary heritage 1
Hilary Francis
1. ‘We didn’t want to be like Somoza’s Guardia’: policing,
crime and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 21
Robert Sierakowski
2. ‘The revolution was so many things’ 45
Fernanda Soto
3. Nicaraguan food policy: between self-sufficiency and dependency 61
Christiane Berth
4. On Sandinista ideas of past connections to the Soviet Union
and Nicaraguan exceptionalism 87
Johannes Wilm
5. Agrarian reform in Nicaragua in the 1980s: lights and shadows
of its legacy 103
José Luis Rocha
6. The difference the revolution made: decision-making in Liberal
and Sandinista communities 127
Hilary Francis
7. Grassroots verticalism? A Comunidad Eclesial de Base in rural
Nicaragua 145
David Cooper
8. Nicaraguan legacies: advances and setbacks in feminist
and LGBTQ activism 165
Florence E. Babb
9. Conclusion: exceptionalism and Nicaragua’s many revolutions 179
Justin Wolfe
Index 185
iii

List of illustrations
Figure
1.1 ‘Courtesy and respect for the law are inseparable’. ‘A man who
does not respect a woman is a coward. A man who does not
respect a young female police officer (una muchacha policía) and
does not follow her instructions is twice as cowardly and also an
enemy of the law.’ (Tomás Borge). 29
3.1 Basic grain production, 1977–90 (in t). 67
5.1 Evolution in the size of farms by range (in percentages of land
used for agriculture). 120
v