A Nicaraguan revolutionary and freedom fighter, Augusto Sandino was born the illegitimate child of a wealthy landowner and his indigenous servant. When Sandino was 17, the United States invaded and occupied Nicaragua, and Sandino would go on to become a leading figure in the resistance to the occupation, embracing the ideology of indigenismo. He led a guerilla campaign against American forces, who never managed to capture him, and received support from the Soviet Union and the international anti-imperialist movement, including the Communist Party of the United States. The US would leave Nicaragua in 1933, but American officers remained in key positions within the National Guard, and Sandino continued to oppose that organization, and its leader Anastasio Somoza García. In 1934, Sandino was assassinated on Somoza’s orders. Sandino’s legacy lives on, however, as he has become a national hero in Nicaragua, giving his name to the socialist Sandinista National Liberation Front.
“I am a mechanic, but my idealism is based upon a broad horizon of internationalism, which represents the right to be free and to establish justice, even though to achieve this it may be necessary to establish it upon a foundation of blood.”
