'The Vexatious Frontier Question':
"The Vexatious Frontier Question":
Capital, Coercion, and Sovereignty
in the Western Nicaragua-Honduras Borderlands
1919-1936
A paper presented to the
Middle Atlantic Council on Latin American Studies (MACLAS)
The College of William & Mary
March 6-7, 2009
Michael J. Schroeder
Lebanon Valley College
mjsch313@ / schroede@lvc.edu
DRAFT: Please do not quote or cite without my permission; critical comment invited.
In August 1922, the New York Times reported an upcoming conference among three Central American presidents. "Using the borders of Nicaragua, Honduras, and Salvador as a base, bands of robbers, revolutionists and refugees have been harassing the three republics by robberies, depredations and attacks, keeping them in a constant state of turmoil and unrest." The conference was envisioned as a way to "do away with this menace and obviate the constant expenditure of public moneys in separate fights against the marauders," to resolve once and for all what the Times called "the vexatious frontier question."[1]
This unremarkable news story, echoing the language and categories of many others from this period, creates, by assuming, a sharp opposition: three modern republican governments, each pursuing the public interest through the public purse, versus their common enemies: bands of outlaws of various kinds who exploited the borders to commit their lawless deeds. Simplistic and misleading, the story also underscored key themes in postcolonial Central American history, including the relative autonomy of border regions from state power; the formation of alternative forms of borderlands sovereignties; and the high costs to states of exercising violence-making capacities in places adjacent to where their national territories ended.
In 1920s Central America, many border regions were places of endemic lawlessness, as national states defined the law. From a borderlands perspective, in contrast, what existed was in some sense the opposite of lawlessness. These were places brimming with laws, jurisdictions, and sovereignties, where lines of civil and military authority abounded, crisscrossed, overlapped, and often clashed. Relations of political and legal authority were multiple, fractured, fluid, and hotly contested – a far cry from the homogeneous, uniform liberal-capitalist law that national states, according to our news story, were trying to impose.
A decade ago Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel urged scholars to rethink the role of borderlands in shaping the dynamics of social and political change among and between peoples, nations, states, and empires: "Our point of departure is that we can properly understand the often unintended and unanticipated social consequences of national borders only by focusing on border regions and comparing them through time and space . . . Traditionally, border studies have adopted a view from the center; we argue for a view from the periphery."[2]
This essay examines the historic role of the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands, focusing on the fifteen or so years between the Honduran civil war of 1919 and the consolidation of stable dictatorial regimes in both countries in the early and mid 1930s. Events in this small border region can shed light on questions of interest to scholars of popular insurgency, state formation, borderlands sovereignties, and imperialist intervention in other contexts. With today's world awash in "border troubles" – from Kashmir to Kurdistan to Darfur and beyond – the case of the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands in the interwar years offers a telling instance of how elite faction fights can transform into sustained popular insurgencies that in turn can spawn a host of unpredictable consequences – a process in which borderlands can play a pivotal role. In this case, the borderlands' long history of local sovereignty and military mobilization combined with intensified elite faction fighting, foreign invasion and occupation, and popular-nationalist insurgency to generate ripple effects that no one could have foreseen at the time.
Building on Baud and Van Schendel's model, this paper considers struggles not between two states but among four: the Nicaraguan and Honduran national states; the Sandinista rebel state, based in Las Segovias and adjacent zones in Honduras; and the U.S. imperial state. Adopting a view from the periphery, it also looks beyond national states to local and regional actors, including criminals and bandits, revolutionaries and insurgents, traders and merchants, migrants and refugees, landowners and caudillos, border officials and office-seekers.
The paper probes several key ironies of this period, all shaped in some way by the warping of jurisdictional and political spaces, and the formation of local and regional sovereignties, created by the existence of an imaginary fixed line between nation-states. It begins by sketching the historical development of a cluster of social relations and military and cultural practices, deeply rooted in the borderlands, that were appropriated by Sandinista rebels in their struggle to create alternative forms of state power. Among these were smuggling (mainly of tobacco, liquor, firearms, livestock, and stolen goods); banditry, cattle rustling, and other forms of criminality; casual and seasonal migrant labor (in mining, coffee, and public works); dense transborder social and political networks; and short-term transborder migration.
The essay focuses more specifically on the political-military tools appropriated by the Sandinistas, and the costs entailed in using those weapons and tactics. These included, most prominently: military mobilization via local forms of caudillismo, and more broadly, culturally specific ways of producing public violence; using border zones to seek refuge from political enemies; issuance and revocation of guarantees (garantías); and levying forced contributions on propertied classes to acquire the material resources necessary to wage war.
In an earlier essay I described the gang political culture of the Western Segovias in the wake of the 1926-27 Civil War, emphasizing the local, homegrown nature of political gang violence, and how the mobilization and demobilization of such gangs was enmeshed in the fabric of the region's social life.[3] Here I extend these notions in space and time to encompass the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands in the century after independence. I show that these borderlands developed into a strategic military corridor between the two countries' national capitals, and suggest that this strategic corridor led to the formation, within the borderlands, of might be called a political culture of punctuated military mobilization. Frequent, sporadic, contingent, and cyclical, this process of gang-army mobilization-demobilization, carried out by networks of local, regional, and national caudillos in pursuit of political goals, became integral to borderlands political culture. Add to this the region's long history of smuggling and outlawry, ubiquitous poverty, entrenched inequalities of race, class, and gender, and the detrimental effects of the liberal and coffee revolutions, and by the mid-1920s the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands were primed for popular rebellion.
In response to the "second" US invasion and occupation of Nicaragua (1927-1933), rebel leader Augusto Sandino built on long antecedents of informal local sovereignty, in the borderlands and in the country's interior, to create a robust form of formal regional sovereignty. His Defending Army of Nicaraguan National Sovereignty (EDSN) was conceived and constituted as a parallel nation-state, or rebel republic, wholly sovereign and exercising exclusive civil and military authority within its domains.
Acting like a state, the Sandinista rebel republic waged war and levied taxes. In practice this meant systematically plundering the moveable property of propertied Segovianos – from money, livestock and bags of coffee to clothing, jewelry, and cash. Rebels seized these small lumps of accumulated capital, products of the commercial revolution that had transformed Las Segovias in the preceding half-century, and transported many of them to Honduras, where they sold or bartered them for guns, ammunition, medicines, and other supplies. The practice grew and intensified as the war did, such that by late 1932 the Sandinistas were siphoning a good portion of Segovian capital out of northern Nicaragua and into southwestern Honduras.
This process of patriotic plunder, an unintended consequence of the US invasion and occupation, generated its own ironies. Ideologically it provided the Sandinistas' enemies with a powerful weapon: to credibly denounce the entire movement as mere "organized banditry." It was a potent and credible charge because it rested squarely on the foundational principle of liberal-capitalist ideology – the sanctity of private property. Sandino has long been considered a skilled propagandist; even US Marines and officials expressed grudging admiration for his myth-making abilities. Yet the way his Defending Army acquired material resources to wage war provided his enemies with bountiful ideological resources to discredit, in the eyes of many, the whole of his popular-nationalist project. Thus the perennial question – "Sandino: patriot or bandit?" – resounds throughout the scholarly and popular literature, as it did throughout Nicaragua, Central America, and the Atlantic World at the time.[4]
At a national level, growing rebel power led to growing state power, especially its violence-making, intelligence, and surveillance capacities. The Guardia's strength grew dramatically during this period, both in the Segovian borderlands and in the country's main cities and towns, creating the preconditions for Anastasio Somoza's coup d'état of June 1936. The western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands were key to all of these processes. Indeed, absent the local and regional sovereignties that the existence of the border created, it is likely that Nicaraguan history would have taken a very different path. (This seems less true of Honduras, for reasons explored below.) If we can never know how different a path, we can say that the borderlands played a central role in determining the path that was followed.
At an epistemological level, the process of regional state formation made this investigation possible. The US invasion and occupation created a powerful imperial spotlight that offers latter-day scholars an unprecedented look into the complexities of Segovian and borderlands history. Evidence generated before 1927 provide at best fleeting glimpses into the region's social life. Newspapers and government documents, our main sources, mostly offer stock words and phrases: "robbers, revolutionists and refugees . . . depredations and attacks . . . turmoil and unrest." Then, starting in mid-1927, the evidentiary base explodes. The degree of detail can be astounding. For the first time in the region's history, ordinary people's lives come into clear focus. The question thus arises: to what extent do the social practices illuminated from mid-1927 apply to earlier periods, when the imperial spotlight shone weakly if at all? My operative assumption here is that while some things changed, much remained the same, and that everything that was new was built upon and embedded within something old.
Finally, the paper asks whether this case has any broader comparative implications. Given the brevity of this presentation, the most I can do here is outline the main arguments.
1. Defining the Borderlands
We begin with geography and demography. By the 1920s, the unevenly populated Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands divided into three main sections (see Map 2). Of primary interest here is the arc from Somotillo to Las Manos – a border 100 miles long as the crow flies and perhaps four times as far afoot. With elevations ranging from 100 to 1,500 meters above sea level, this rugged and undulating zone was marked by low mountain ranges, steep escarpments, and narrow twisting valleys. Populated by perhaps 100,000 people in more than two dozen towns and hundreds of villages and hamlets – stretching as far north as Danlí, as far west as Choluteca, and as far southeast as Estelí – the zone also included large haciendas and several viable indigenous communities (most notably Mosonte and San Lucas in the western Segovias). Bullcart paths, cattle trails, and military routes crisscrossed the border. Analysis of Guardia intelligence in the period 1927-1932 reveals at least ten well-trafficked transborder routes in this hundred-mile stretch.[5]
One such east-west route (between Somoto and San Marcos de Colón) passed through the border-straddling village of El Espino. In late 1927 a Marine lieutenant described the village and boundary line:
ESPINO lies on the edge of the top of a high mountain facing the Coco River. About twenty houses and sixty people comprise the pueblo. Two stone piles separated about forty yards apart are supposed to indicate the HONDURAN-NICAGUAGUAN boundary lines. This line runs through the center of the town. Only one house on the Nicaraguan side of the town is occupied and the majority of the inhabitants living on the Hondurian side are Nicaraguan Citizens. I was informed there that the town had no alcalde, that a Hondurian judge . . . residing near San Marcos occasionally visited the town to dispense justice (?), that a Honduran Guardia patrol came to Espino at long infrequent intervals, that the boundary line was established in 1915 by a Honduran Commission, and that a bandit leader [Medardo Vallejos] with about twenty followers was constantly making raids and depredations on Nicaraguans living near the border. There were several men in the town on the supposedly Honduran side who looked suspicious and hostile but made no hostile move. The only indication of the border line was that previously mentioned – the two stone piles – but there was no sign post or flag there.[6]
The lieutenant's vivid description evokes key features of this 100-mile stretch of the border during this period: the imprecision of the boundary line itself; the weakness of state power; the daily intermingling of citizens of both countries; and the continual threat of gang violence from both sides.[7]
The Honduran border town of Las Manos, north of Ocotal, capital of the Nicaraguan department of Nueva Segovia, lay on the main route north to El Paraíso, Yuscarán, Danlí, and Tegucigalpa. Just east of Las Manos began a second border segment, some fifty miles as the crow flies, riding the ridge of the Dipilto and Malacate mountain ranges to Cifuentes north of Jalapa. In the 1920s and 1930s this zone was barely inhabited, characterized by a physical and human geography very different from the 100-mile stretch preceding it. Bisected by high jagged peaks, the zone was given over to pine forests in the upcountry and dense tropical forests in the lowlands, interlaced with networks of thinly travelled footpaths through the many mountain passes – paths that became more thickly travelled after 1927. Following the border east and northeast from Las Manos, the next major corridor was Cifuentes-Teotecacinte.
The third and longest segment of the border extended from Cifuentes-Teotecacinte and the headwaters of the Río Poteca, southeast to the confluence of the Ríos Poteca and Coco, and east along the Río Coco to Cabo Gracias a Dios on the Atlantic Coast – a border more than 350 river miles in length. A major theatre in Sandino's rebellion, the zone was vastly different from the western Segovias. Navigable from the northward jog at Santa Cruz (Vigía), the Río Coco's cultural orientation faced not west toward the Hispanized western Segovias but east toward the mostly indigenous Río Bocay and Atlantic Coast regions, giving the region a very different social, economic, political, and cultural character.[8]
These three sections of border played very distinct roles in Nicaraguan and Honduran history, in the political turmoil of 1919-1926, and in the campesino rebellion that followed, with the first and third being far and away the most important. Here I am concerned mainly with the Somotillo-Las Manos borderlands, where there developed in century after independence a heavily traveled "military corridor" that from mid-1927 formed the heart of Sandino country.
|[pic] |[pic] |
|Map 1 |Map 2 |
|Political Centers of Honduras and Nicaragua |Three Sections of Nicaragua-Honduras Borderlands |
|[pic] |[pic] |
|Map 3 |Map 4 |
|Western Nicaragua-Honduras Borderlands |Some Major Routes from Tegucigalpa to León and Managua |
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|[pic] |
|Map 5 |
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|Tilted Google Earth image looking south from Tegucigalpa toward the Nicaraguan Segovias and Pacific Coast region, with principal border |
|crossing points in the 1920s, and approximate location of borderlands "military corridor" between Somotillo and Las Manos (sketched in red). |
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2. Formation of a Borderlands Military Corridor
This borderlands military corridor, one of the key geopolitical features of postcolonial Central America, lay midway between the national capitals and major population centers of Honduras and Nicaragua (see Maps 1-5). Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a comparable case anywhere in the world in the modern era: two small republics, their dominant populations sharing the same language, religion, and cultural heritage, their capital cities separated by a mere 150 miles, equidistant from an ill-defined national border traversing a rugged and long-settled terrain – a border region in which there formed a frequently traveled route that political factions on both sides exploited to their geopolitical advantage, as a safe haven in which to mobilize troops and launch assaults against their enemies. Perhaps similar military corridors developed in other Central American borderlands (Guatemala-Honduras-El Salvador), or in the Balkans or Central or Eastern Europe during the long nineteenth century, though none appear to have developed to the same degree. To my knowledge the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands were unique in modern Latin American history (and even in modern world history) in this singular combination of attributes.[9]
Before the Spanish invasions of the 1520s, what became the western borderlands were densely populated by Chorotega and Lenca speaking peoples whose cities and towns were based on sedentary agriculture, patriarchal caciquismo, and closely knit kin and community structures. With the Spanish incursions, slaving quickly emerged as the region's chief economic activity. By the 1550s some half a million natives of western Nicaragua and southwestern Honduras had been enslaved and exported to Panamá, Perú, and beyond. Small quantities of gold were discovered in the region's riverbeds, and placer mining soon became the region's second most important export activity. By the 1560s the slave trade had largely disappeared because so too had most of the region's inhabitants: population losses through disease, slaving, and forced labor were as high as 90 percent during the first half-century of colonial rule. Survivors either eluded Spanish tribute-gatherers or were forcibly incorporated into encomiendas or reducciones. In the context of ongoing civil wars among factions of Spaniards, the region came under the administrative orbit of the city and province of León. The rudiments of the political jurisdictions that would become the republics of Honduras and Nicaragua were apparent by the late 1540s, though not until the administrative reforms of 1785 were Honduras and Nicaragua designated intendancies in the Kingdom of Guatemala in the Viceroyalty of New Spain.[10]
From the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, the region's surviving tributary Indians extracted and hauled pine lumber and pitch for shipbuilding in the Pacific port of Realejo (Corinto); worked the region's many small silver and gold mines; and produced staple goods. The mining economy sparked the rise of cattle ranching and expansion of regional commerce, both remaining central to the region's political economy well after independence. A small class of Spanish landowners, merchants, and officials dominated the upper tiers of a caste-like race-class hierarchy that imposed deep and enduring divisions on the region's social fabric.
As elsewhere in Spanish America, Indian communities retained collective rights in land and political autonomy, with political authority vested in caciques and councils of male elites. Relations of power and privilege among indigenous elites resembled those of colonial patriarchs, and of regional caudillos of later centuries – political strongmen who ruled by virtue of birth status, leadership skills, and patronage networks.[11] Social relations in gender and sexuality synthesized patriarchies of Spaniards and Indians, leading to the formation of a male-dominated social world, based on the patriarchal family and the sovereignty of the patriarch, and infused with indigenous and Hispanic discourses and practices of honor, shame, and sexuality.[12] Languages of rights and justice among subaltern groups were expressed through robust idioms of patronage-clientage, folk Catholicism, honor-shame, and masculinity.
The reach of the colonial state was manifest mainly in the spread of Spanish law, institutions, and property relations, and facilitated by the growth of silver and gold mining, stock-raising, and regional commerce. Twin military threats also extended the state's reach: repeated raids and incursions by English and Dutch pirates, and by a sizeable population of unreduced Indians (indios bravos). Colonial officials responded by establishing militias in the largest towns, including Nueva Segovia (later Ocotal), Condega, El Jícaro, and Choluteca, as locally produced violence became densely woven into the region's political culture and fabric of everyday life.[13]
After the breakup of the Central American Federation in 1838, the region's history was shaped especially by the existence of a fixed international border – an imaginary line often contested, rarely apparent on the ground, stretching across a mountainous, fairly well populated, strategically important territory. In the civil wars of the nineteenth century, the region's geographic location midway between the urban clusters of Tegucigalpa-Comayagua in Honduras and León-Managua-Granada in Nicaragua prompted dissident elites of both countries to exploit the border zones to mobilize armies, seek refuge, and marshal troops and supplies. Movements of caudillo armies across the border occurred thousands of times in the century from the 1820s to 1920s, as factions in both nation-states used two main corridors to wage battles against their rivals. One such corridor stretched from Somotillo north and west to El Triunfo, Choluteca, and Tegucigalpa; another extended north from Estelí, Somoto, and Ocotal to El Paraíso, Yuscarán, Danlí, and Tegucigalpa.[14]
The liberal and coffee revolutions came to Nicaragua in the 1880s and 1890s, and to Honduras in the 1900s and 1910s, later than in the rest of Central America. In the Segovias-Choluteca borderlands, as elsewhere, the liberal assault on the land and labor of campesinos and Indians took the form of partial and uneven land privatization, coercive labor regimes, and the rapid expansion of coffee cultivation in select sub-regions. In the borderlands, these included the zones around Jalapa, Dipilto, and San Juan de Telpaneca in Nicaragua, and around Choluteca, San Marcos de Colón, and Danlí in Honduras.[15]
The expansion of coffee production and liberal land and labor relations was accompanied by a marked expansion of regional commerce. The commercial revolution from the 1880s to the 1920s transformed the borderlands in important ways, as substantial lumps of capital began to be traded and accumulated across the region. By the 1920s, local-regional commerce linked to the expanding global capitalist system had become integral to the borderlands' political economy, a development that proved crucial to the popular mobilizations that mushroomed after 1926.[16]
In the aftermath of Europe's Great War, these western borderlands were highly militarized and in nearly continuous armed ferment. The 1919 civil war in Honduras, in which some 1,000 people were killed, sparked armed movements throughout the western borderlands by regional and national caudillos of diverse factions. The instability of the Honduran state during these years, culminating in the civil war of 1924 – "the most macabre battle of this century" with upwards of 5,000 dead – made the borderlands a place of frequent armed conflict and political-military mobilization.[17]
So too did the instability of the Nicaraguan state. In August 1921, dissident Liberals launched a series of raids into Nicaragua from bases in Honduras, briefly taking Limay, Somoto, and other Segovian towns and prompting President Diego Chamorro to declare martial law and dispatch 3,000 troops to the border zones to quell the uprising. The president's nephew and de facto head of state, ex-president General Emiliano Chamorro, wrote to the US State Department requesting arms "owing to an invasion of Nicaraguan territory across the frontier with the Republic of Honduras, composed principally of Hondurans and some Nicaraguans." He asked for 5,000 rifles and three million cartridges; 25 machine guns with 250,000 cartridges; and two airplanes. In November 1921, as the cross-border raids continued, the State Department approved the deal.[18] As New York Times correspondent Harold Denny later recounted,
By one of those ironies so frequent in the story of American activities in Nicaragua, some of those very guns, long hidden in the mountains of the border, eventually came into the hands of the Sandinistas . . . The munitions were entrusted to the generals for distribution to their men. Many of the officers, ready to turn an honest penny, sold them to whoever would buy, and they have circulated among the outlaw gentry ever since.[19]
This "outlaw gentry" was in fact comprised of the most prominent Conservative caudillos on both sides of the border. As one US official observed in 1927, surveying the patterns of the past years, "the authorities along the frontier" routinely assisted
bandits who nominally owe allegiance to the Conservative Party [and who] have in the past formed a part of the extensive organization of smugglers and cattle thieves who have always operated, more or less under the protection of local officials . . . Honduran officials at Choluteca and in many of the towns near the frontier have sheltered and otherwise assisted the bandit groups operating on Nicaraguan territory.[20]
In short, in the eight years from January 1919 to December 1926, the western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands were in more or less continuous armed ferment. During these eight years, newspapers and other sources reveal at least 11 distinct periods, each at least several weeks in duration, that saw the mobilization of caudillo-led armies in the western borderlands (see Chart 1).[21] Twenty-seven of these 96 months saw substantial military activity in the borderlands – of troops mobilizing, maneuvering, fighting, and dying – an average of roughly one day in four.
Until late1926 (and with the exception of the events of August-November 1921), most of this unrest was rooted in conflicts among factions of Honduran elites. The mobilizations cost the Honduran treasury dearly. According to data cited by the New York Times for the year 1921, "only two of the twenty-one American nations are spending more than 40 per cent. of their budgets for military and naval purposes": Mexico (40.8 percent) and Honduras (44.5 percent). [22] That is, in 1921 Honduras devoted a larger percentage of its national budget to the military than any other nation-state in the Western Hemisphere. Much of this was evidently spent keeping its military forces in its three borderlands (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua) in a state of continual preparedness. In 1919, the year of the Honduran civil war, the military spent an even higher proportion of federal expenditures: 57 percent.[23] By law, all able-bodied men were required to muster in the principal towns on the first Sunday of each month, an important mechanism of borderlands mobilization in the 1920s and perhaps long before.[24]
The political tumult spilled north from Nicaragua after Emiliano Chamorro's coup d'état of October 1925, which sparked both widespread Chamorrista violence and a powerful Liberal backlash. By October 1926, open civil war had broken out across Nicaragua's northern departments, accompanied by widespread sacking, burning, looting, raping, and killing.[25] The war also sparked a brisk arms trade in the Gulf of Fonseca between La Unión in El Salvador and Nicaragua's Cosegüina peninsula.[26] Cozy relationships between adjacent Conservative regimes also facilitated state-directed mobilization of arms and military resources. In July 1926, the US State Department reported that "General [Emiliano] Chamorro is in very close relations with General Martinez Funes, Minister of War in Honduras [under President Paz Barahona] and is receiving arms and ammunition through him from the Government of Honduras."[27] Extensive political networks also linked Conservative caudillos in Nueva Segovia (Nicaragua) and Choluteca (Honduras), as US officials discovered to their frustration and chagrin.[28]
By October 1926, popular mobilizations against the Chamorro regime were springing up across the western Segovias – described by the US Minister in Managua as "small groups on the west side of the country not under command of Moncada or any other important liberal chief."[29] Newspapers, consular and military reports, and oral testimonies produced by the Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo (IES) in the early 1980s provide ample evidence for these popular mobilizations.[30] In late April 1927, the US Minister reported that "Armed marauding bands of deserters from both armies live off the country as bandits and commit acts of violence. Liberals from northern Nicaragua reenforced by Honduraneans who seem to have brought arms via Rio Negro and Rio Coco are reported well organized in widely separated parts of the country."[31]
By 1927, in short, the borderlands were primed for popular insurgency.
3. Forced Contributions
In his study of war-making and state-making over the past thousand years of European history, Charles Tilly observes that, "Roughly speaking, rulers had three main ways of acquiring concentrated means of coercion: they could seize them, make them, or buy them."[32] Caudillo armies in the borderlands historically relied on the first method: seizing them. Evidence for the practice abounds. Nineteenth-century travelers' accounts brim with references to forced loans and contributions levied by dissident armies and factions, as do newspapers and the records of the US State Department (see Illustration 1).[33]
[pic]
Illustration 1
Forced loan demand issued to Gonzalo Ocón, Granada, by Jefe Político, Granada, 25 May 1926, US Minister Eberhardt, Managua, to Sec. State Kellogg, Washington, 1 June 1926, USDS 817.00/3642.
The practice was also common in the 1926-27 Civil War. In April 1927, for instance, a local Liberal chieftain issued the following two notes to a small landowner near San Juan de Telpaneca on the southern edge of the Segovian borderlands:
13 April 1927. To Alancia Iglesias, widow of Acuña, Cerro Blanco. Esteemed Madam: For the second time I order you within 24 hours after receiving this order to pay your quota of C$50 for the contribution that was detailed. Don't neglect to do this, because if you do you will lose your guarantees and I shall send a commission to take over all your property and sell it to the public to obtain this sum. This money is for the subsistence of the Constitutional Army that is operating in the face of the Enemy, and you will have to confirm to the instructions of the General and Chief of Operations. Awaiting your exact compliance, I remain, the Local Commandant /s/ Leopoldo Quiñónez, Local Commandant.
14 April 1927. Received from Alanacia Iglesias $40 forty dollars which was necessary for the subsistence of the Constitutional Army that operates in this zone. Quilalí. /s/ Leopoldo Quiñónez, Local Commandant.[34]
It is notable that the widow Iglesias was able to bargain down her obligation by C$10, despite Commandant Quiñónez's insistence on her "exact compliance" with the demand. Clearly, Segovianos had long grown accustomed to such practices.
Also notable is Commandant Quiñónez's use of the term "guarantees" (garantías) – essentially a promise issued by gang patrons and leaders not to loot or destroy the property of those who complied with their demands. Elsewhere I have explored the ubiquity of the guarantee system in Las Segovias during these years, suggesting that a map of who guaranteed whom would be a map of contending networks of power. One early Marine report defined the practice: "The guarantee gives the holder immunity from molestation by the conservative bandits."[35] In fact the issuance and revocation of guarantees was practiced by all gangs – Liberal and Conservative – and saturated both sides of the border. The guarantee system, like forced contributions, was a timeworn mechanism of gang violence in the borderlands directly appropriated by the Sandinista rebels in their struggle for state power.
4. Patriotic Plunder and the Borderlands
Like the mountains and valleys it snaked through, the Honduran border made the Sandino rebellion possible. Without the mountains, without the valleys, and without the border, a sustained armed insurrection against the Marines and Guardia would not have been possible. In many ways, the rebellion lived on the border. Sandino's Defending Army straddled the border, exploited the border, was sustained by the border, existed and survived because of the border.
The border's semi-porosity was the key to its seemingly magical powers: while rebels and civilians could cross "the line" routinely and at will, the Marines and Guardia could not. This simple fact comprised an endless source of irritation and frustration for the latter. Public opinion, diplomatic pressures, and international law forbade the preferred response of most Marine and Guardia field commanders. On the rare occasion that they did enter Honduran territory, the repercussions could be felt all the way to Washington.[36] The combination of pressures meant that Marine-Guardia cross-border incursions were sporadic and of minor significance overall. Of much greater moment, indeed of strategic importance, was that the Marines-Guardia could not cross the border that the rebels essentially lived on.
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|Illustration 2 |
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|Relief Rendering of the Department of Nueva Segovia, conveying the Marine-Guardia perception that Nicaraguan territory did indeed end at the |
|Honduran border. Monograph of Nicaragua, USDS 817.00/7294½. |
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Information-gathering capacities, second only to violence-making capacities in the resources needed to wage war, were another matter. Spies, agents, and informants allied with both sides saturated the borderlands. By war's end both Sandinistas and Guardia had developed highly sophisticated intelligence-gathering apparatuses. But if the Guardia's agents and spies could readily cross the border, their roving combat patrols could not. And therein lies a major difference between the two sides that shaped their struggle in fundamental ways.
Just as rebels routinely crossed the border, so too did stories about Marine-Guardia violence against Nicaraguan civilians. That such stories were legion is evidenced in part by the Marine and Guardia's own reports. Combat patrols in northern Nicaragua routinely burnt houses and stocks of food, shot at fleeing natives, seized and impressed guides, and violently interrogated civilians. As the US Military Attaché in Tegucigalpa Fred Cruse observed in mid-1928, "Feeling appears to be very bitter against the Americans among the lower class in Honduras."[37] Rebel border chieftains spent much of their time and resources eluding their aggressive, relentless, heavily-armed pursuers, using the Honduran side of the border as a safe haven. The 11-day cat-and-mouse game played by Guardia Captains Stockes and Hakala and Sandinista Generals Salgado and Ortez in the borderlands in spring 1929 is emblematic of these broader trends.[38] Movements of rebels back and forth across the border and the circulation of stories about Marine-Guardia violence generated deep anti-Yankee sentiment throughout the borderlands.
In addition to serving as refuge, the Honduran border zones offered ready markets for plundered property. Waging war, one of the most resource-intensive activities that states undertake, demands steady and sustained flows of capital. Despite his best efforts, Sandino did not garner any material support from any government, and raised paltry sums from private sources. Throughout the war the ragtag Sandinista bands, more than 100 in all, required a steady stream of supplies to remain active in the field – especially firearms and ammunition. From early on emerged two main types of rebel bands: bands of the borderlands, and bands of the deep interior. The former looked north and west to Honduras and depended on the border for refuge and markets. The latter looked north and east to the vast frontier regions of the Ríos Bocay and Coco and the Atlantic Coast, and were more self-sufficient, feeding off Jinotega and Matagalpa's merchants and coffee growers to procure arms smuggled into the region.
One can visualize this process of popular-nationalist plunder as a kind of vacuum or drain sucking small lumps of capital out of Nicaragua through a thousand arteries stretching across the border – and, at the other end, funneled down the Río Coco to the Atlantic Coast – sold or bartered for supplies needed to wage war. The net capital drain from the Nicaraguan Segovias was sustained and substantial through nearly six years of war. As Nicaragua's northern departments were drained of capital, the Honduran borderlands were engorged with capital inflows.
Thus, in keeping with a timeworn practice, when the rebellion erupted in June 1927 Sandino assigned a contribution of C$5,000 to the merchant house of Francisco Sierke & Brother, with outlets in Telpaneca, Somoto, San Marcos de Colón, and other towns on both sides of the border.[39] The practice proliferated over the next six years, undertaken by scores of rebel jefes.[40] From early on it became institutionalized, as Sandino and his lieutenants routinely issued notices to property-holders across the northern departments demanding monetary contributions in exchange for "guarantees."[41] In light of the lack of external funding and the region's deep poverty and social divisions of race and class, "robbery," as defined by the national state, was integral to Sandino's campesino insurgency. [42]
From the outset the Marines and Guardia lamented that many of the goods "stolen" by the "bandits" were transported to Honduras and bartered or sold to leading merchants. By war's end intelligence reports described the practice in stock, shopworn language, in the requisite section titled "Enemy Supply and Equipment": "Reports still indicate that the majority of the arms and ammunition used by the bandits comes from Honduras. This is undoubtedly true. The old bandit game of trading animals and stock, stolen in Nicaragua, for arms and ammunition in Honduras, is still in vogue."[43]
One anonymous report submitted to the Guardia in early 1929 by a bitter enemy of the Sandinistas, probably an Ocotal Conservative, captured the perspective of many property-holders:
Sandinismo is a modern Latin American School for Banditry, it was founded in Nicaragua in 1927 by Augusto C. Sandino and supported by the false Latin American Patriotic Feeling exploiting the idea that the Americans have not come to Nicaragua with a friendly feeling but with the only purpose to oppress the small Caribbean Republic. . . . There are two classes of Sandinismo: Intellectual Sandinismo and Material Sandinismo. . . .
Material Sandinismo: The so-called General Sandino followed by a bunch of bandits most of them being Hondurans and half-wits whose actions have been to protect with their arms the profits of their banditry and carry it safely to a friendly market on the other side of the Honduran border.
Market for Sandino's Merchandise: This market is really formed by a few merchants: Casa Siercke in El Paraiso and Alauca and Danli; Casa Rossner, located in El Paraiso and Danli; Jose Calazan Vallardes [Ballardes], located also in El Paraiso and Danli; Hipolito Agasse in San Marcos de Colon, who buy from Sandino at very low prices, gold, cattle, mules, horses, dry hides, coffee, soap, and everything that the bandits under Sandino rob from the poor people in the Northern Departments of Nicaragua. The money Sandino gets from these merchants is [used to buy] ammunition, arms, clothes, and supplies, and everything they need. This is the reason why Sandino and his followers can live in a mountain where now it cannot even be found a single place where to buy any kind of food.
The anonymous author concluded by suggesting "How Sandinismo Could Be Destroyed." The analysis zeroed in on regaining control of the border:
The very first thing that must be done is to establish good authorities on the other side of the Honduran Border in order to block Sandino's trade with Honduras. Also to enforce the need of passports to everyone that needs to cross the border. If the new Honduran Government is decided to help to finish with Sandino, it would be a good measure to order the concentration of all Nicaraguans living temporarily in the zone infested with Sandinistas, in Honduran Territory. . . . It must be understood that all the people that live on the border, both Nicaraguan and Honduran, are Sandinistas due to the fact that they profit with his trade through the border.
Subsequent Marine-Guardia investigations confirmed the writer's allegations regarding leading borderlands merchants, and the complicity of Honduran border officials, who profited handsomely from the practice. As a typical report of early 1929 noted:
To begin with, Honduras has not suffered from banditry as in Nicaragua. Her citizens along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border are prosperous and undisturbed, whereas, the Nicaraguan side of the line has been desolated by bandit ravages. A large percentage of these outlaws are Hondurans who rustle cattle and horses, rob coffee, etc. in Nicaragua and sell them in their own country. (Four fifths of Salgado's forces which disbanded on Apr. 1st is said by natives to have been composed of Hondurans.) Certain Honduran officials and their agents do a lucrative business by purchasing stolen property from the bandits, selling them arms, ammunition, etc.[44]
Archival evidence paints a fine-grained portrait of this process of popular plunder. Material necessities and stark social divisions made Sandino's rebellion as much a civil and class war against the rich and propertied as a nationalist anti-Yankee crusade. Absent the political and jurisdictional "warping" effects of the Honduran border, and the local forms of sovereignty thus fostered, the insurgency would have sputtered and died.
A fascinating report offering additional insights into this process, and into popular sympathies for Sandino in the Honduran borderlands, was produced in early 1932 by Guardia Second Lieutenant Guillermo Cuadra, the brother of renowned Nicaraguan writers Manolo and Abelardo Cuadra. After describing in loving detail his two-week journey through the Honduran border zones posing as a traveling salesman, Cuadra concluded:
The common run of Honduran is a lover of the things and prowess achieved by Sandino. Whoever comes from Nicaragua is not looked well upon if they do not arrive speaking of having killed so many Americans and made fly the heads of so many Guardia. In all the parts [of Honduras] I passed through till today, I was told that if one is travelling to Nicaragua one should not fear the Sandinista forces, but those of the Guardia Nacional."[45]
Cuadra's report, along with much other evidence, shows that Hondurans of all social classes tended to fear and disparage the Marines and Guardia and sympathize with the rebel movement – a movement devoted, in principle, to defending Nicaraguan national sovereignty. In many ways it was the structural ambiguities and local sovereignties of the borderlands made such elastic affiliations, and thus the Sandinista insurgency, possible.
On the Nicaraguan side, in contrast, Segovian society grew increasingly polarized. Anti-Sandinista sentiments flourished among the propertied classes, exemplified in the anonymous letter cited above. Several distinct currents of anti-Sandinista discourse emerged: locally, among Segovian property-holders and their clients and allies; nationally, in the major newspapers of the Pacific Coast; institutionally, in the reports and everyday language used by the Marines and Guardia; and internationally, in the rhetoric of the State Department and the mainstream press. The most vitriolic of these currents were synthesized and given authoritative weight in Anastasio Somoza's landmark 1936 book, El verdadero Sandino. Denunciations of Sandino's campesino insurgency rested on two pillars: crimes against person, and crimes against property. Both practices intensified as the war did. Sandinista violence against Segovianos, undertaken in a context of a violent foreign invasion and occupation, rested on long Segovian antecedents, as I have explored elsewhere. The roots of Sandinista "crimes" against property – a practice institutionalized as the principal fiscal strategy of an insurgent government, and made possible by the existence of the borderlands – ran just as deep.[46]
5. Migrants and Refugees
Adding to the tumult and confusion of the borderlands in these years were the flows of migrants and political refugees from both sides during periods of political unrest. During the Honduran civil war of 1919, "thousands" of Honduran refugees reportedly streamed across the border into Nicaragua. "Many of the fugitives . . . have had encounters with the Honduras authorities, and when they reach Nicaraguan territory they are immediately gathered into concentration [refugee] camps."[47] The Honduran civil war of 1924 prompted a similar movement, while the Nicaraguan civil war of 1926-27 reversed the flow, with thousands of Nicaraguans seeking refuge in adjacent areas of Honduras. A Guardia report of August 1928 on the "repatriation of destitute Nicaraguans in Honduras" – only six weeks before Nicaragua's long-awaited November 1928 elections – estimated that "there are as many as five thousand Nicaraguans [now in the Honduras border zones] whose homes were formerly at or in the vicinity of Quilali, Jicaro, Murra, Jalapa, Dipilto, Macuelizo, Ococono, and Santa Maria" in the Nicaraguan Segovias. The report also alluded to an important mechanism of political-military mobilization in the borderlands, one that doubtless had deep roots in the region: the practice of mustering all able-bodied men on the first Sunday of each month:
Sunday, August 5th, 1928, being the first Sunday of the month was general muster day for all men of the first class under the universal enrollment law for the military jurisdiction of Danli. The town was crowded with men from all the rural sections. Many Nicaraguans were present.
Political affiliations reportedly played a crucial role in such cross-border movements, and in determining where refugees relocated and with whom they associated. "A careful study was made of the sections of Honduras in which Nicaraguans seem to have drifted from one cause or another . . . Nicaraguans seem to have grouped themselves as much because of membership in the same political party as because of sections of Nicaragua from which immigrated."[48]
Reports of Nicaraguan refugees in Honduras continued for the next four years. By late in the war thousands of Nicaraguans, including many former rebels, had fled across the border where they formed large exile communities in Choluteca, El Paraíso, Danlí, Tegucigalpa, and other major towns. One report of June 1932 estimated "that there are about 1800 Nicaraguan emigrants in Honduras, and that the majority of them are Sandinistas."[49]
Danlí emerged as an important locus of Sandinista organizing, recruiting, and market for plundered goods. Prominent Sandinista agents in Danlí included Ramón Raudales (who later became one of two living links between Sandino's Defending Army and the Sandinista National Liberation Front of the 1960s and after), José Idiáquez, Manuel Guillén, Juan Colindres, José C. Ballardes, Carlos Bellorin, Alfonso Irías, and the wife of Sandinista General Juan Gregorio Colindres ("Reported [that] Colindres' wife has lived in DANLI, Honduras for the past four years and is a very active bandit agent"), and others. One report noted that "many houses in Danli and neighboring territory have large photographs of Sandino hanging on the walls."[50] Sandinista exiles in Danlí and other border towns even held public commemorations to honor their fallen comrades. "Bandits recently held a celebration in Danli and Escuapa, Honduras, during which time the bandit flags were half-masted. The celebration ended with mourning for their dead and wounded, casualties inflicted by Guardia" in recent combats.[51]
As the war intensified, the swirl of rumors and conflicting reports on the movements of bands of rebels and refugees makes it difficult to determine what was happening in the borderlands at any given moment. Two brief reports on events near Jalapa in early June 1932 capture this sense of confusion and chaos. The first reads:
Reliable citizen of Ocotal who owns property [near Jalapa] reported to CO Jalapa that all natives in vicinity of [Jalapa] suddenly deserted their homes yesterday, beginning at 1700 [5:00 p.m.] and clearing during the night. Informant states that all houses in vicinity mentioned are deserted. Natives invited him to accompany them to Honduras, but did not state reasons for deserting their homes. Crops and livestock were abandoned.
A second bit of intelligence, buried amid a blizzard of such snippets, suggested the reason behind Jalapa's "natives'" sudden abandonment of their homes and livestock and movement to Honduras: "Information received [that] three hundred men came from Honduras and passed through Los Encinos [near Jalapa] in the direction of Chipote."[52] It thus appears that in this tiny instance, some of Jalapa's more "reliable" rural proprietors temporarily abandoned their properties and fled to Honduras upon learning that hundreds of rebels would soon be streaming in from Honduras. The overall image conveyed in the documentary record is of a whirlwind of movement back and forth across the border, of people seeking to escape the rising tide of violence and bloodshed, to gain material advantage from it, or to hurl themselves into the fight to expel the Marines from Nicaragua.
6. Borderland Jefes: The Case of Porfirio Sánchez
The chequered military career of Honduras-born General Porfirio Sánchez, a prominent Sandinista jefe early in the war, illustrates larger patterns of military, political, and cultural dynamics in the wartime borderlands. A colonel in the 1926-27 Constitutionalist War under then-Liberal General Sandino, Sánchez was described in early Marine reports:
Heavy, dark, 28 years, brave, Hondurian, small mustache and beard, deep voiced, very heavy shoulders, had a troop in the revolution [the Civil War]. . . . Credited with all murders and outrages in country south of Jicaro. Easily Sandino's right bower; well mounted and well armed troop. . . . He is Sandino's chief of artillery and a Honduranian. . . . very thin and tall, clean-shaven and with straight smooth black hair. He wears glasses but not continually. . . . His face is round and dark and he has two gold teeth in front. . . . His head would look well on a pole.[53]
When Sandino's rebellion erupted in May 1927, according to a biography of Sandinista General José León Díaz by the politically savvy Marine Captain William Stockes, "Porfirio Sánchez visited Somoto and invited [José León] Díaz to join Sandino" – making Sánchez a key early recruiter and link between Sandino and independent Liberal bands in the region.[54] According to a native captured by the Marines during their assault on El Chipote in late 1927, Sánchez headed an army of 600 Hondurans – an inflated figure, to be sure, but suggestive of both his stature and the large numbers of Honduran Sandinistas, at the time and for the next five years.[55]
In a February 1928 interview with the North American journalist Carleton Beals, Sandino castigated Porfirio Sánchez for levying "forced contributions on a number of private citizens" around Yalí, declaring: "[I]f I lay my hands on him, he will be shot."[56] It was an absurd charge, meant for external consumption, and contradicted by Sandino's later letters and manifestos justifying the practice.[57] Sánchez remained affiliated with the Defending Army for the next three years.
In February 1929 he was reported captured and held prisoner by the commandant of the Honduran Border Patrol at Cifuentes.[58] The report was mistaken. In fact the commandant of the Honduran Border Patrol at Cifuentes was Porfirio Sánchez's cousin, José Antonio Sánchez, who was allied with several important Sandinista jefes, including his cousin Porfirio.[59] The highest-ranking army official charged with enforcing Honduran law on the Honduran side of the border, José Antonio Sánchez worked with the Sandinistas, not against them. The string of terse reports he sent to Marine-Guardia intelligence agents were consistently vague and often untimely, giving the appearance of cooperation but of little practical use. One analyst denounced him as a Sandinista agent: "Jose Antonio Sanchez, the Honduran border jefe and his soldiers make all Sandino's propaganda possible and tell the people what the bandits are going to do to Santa Maria Guardia . . . Talk of [Marine-Guardia] patrols crossing the border caused by [Honduran] border patrols to embarrass us."[60]
José Antonio Sánchez served as an army commander in the borderlands at least as far back as the Honduran Civil War of 1924, when he commanded the Danlí district under the regime of President Rafael López Gutiérrez. In February 1924, when upwards of 2,000 Cariísta revolutionists (under defeated presidential candidate Carías Andino) mobilized in the Nicaraguan Segovias and launched a revolution into Honduras, José Antonio Sánchez was among the commanders who routed them. Among the "cariísta" rebel leaders who attacked the Honduran "lopezgutierristas" in early 1924 was Juan B. Paguaga. As I have explored elsewhere, the Paguagas of Ocotal were the leading Chamorrista family of Nueva Segovia. In the late 1920s José Antonio Sánchez was still a border commander, only now under a different president, and sympathetic to the Sandinistas – among whose leading generals was his cousin Porfirio.[61]
The case of the cousins Sánchez illuminates several broader patterns. For one, it shows some of the ways in which the Sandinista struggle flowed out of longstanding political struggles in the region. The civil wars of 1924 and 1926-27 merged into the Sandinista insurgency at many levels, as lines of alliance and conflict were reconfigured under new circumstances. Further, like José Antonio Sánchez most Honduran border officials colluded with the rebels, profiting handsomely from their activities. The case also illustrates some of the ways that kin networks spanning the border comprised a cornerstone of rebel support.
Porfirio Sánchez was not detained by the Honduran Border Guard in February 1929. Instead, by May 1929 he was reportedly "in Tegucigalpa . . . waiting for a job that was promised him by the Honduran Government."[62] During Sandino's sojourn to Mexico (May 1929-May 1930), many rebels and rebel jefes in exile sought and received Honduran government jobs. Sandinista Colonel Victor Lagos reportedly relocated to Perspire, Honduras, "where he has been made the local Comandante."[63] Sandinista General José León Díaz was reported employed as a "sub-jefe on road gang near Moresli [Moroselí, Honduras]."[64] "About 40 Nicaraguan ex-bandits" were said to be "working on the new road between Tegucigalpa and Danlí."[65] Road work in Honduras permitted the Defending Army to maintain cohesion and accumulate resources while their supreme chief was abroad. It also provided gunpowder for hundreds of homemade bombs the rebels later used in combat against the Marines and Guardia.
Porfirio Sánchez eventually got his government job. By October 1929 he was reportedly a police inspector in Tegucigalpa.[66] A few months later, in February 1930, he was said to be "employed by the Hondurian Government as a road construction chief, [and] is trying to organize a band for operations near Las Manos and is furnishing arms and ammunition to bandits in Segovia."[67] Other rebels got similar jobs, building roads, on haciendas, and in Honduran silver and gold mines. In October 1929, Ramón Raudales, Sandinista agent in Danlí, reportedly stated that "Sandino ordered all [his] men to work on fincas and gain information on troop supplies, etc. and bandits would reorganize with better equipment . . ."[68] Another report noted that "300 former bandits [are] working for the Agua Fria Mining Company" in Honduras.[69] The seasonal coffee harvest also provided jobs for rebels on both sides of the border. As one intelligence analyst noted in late 1929,
The number of active armed bandits has increased, and it is believed that their number has been augmented by many from Honduras who have been more or less waiting for the coffee season. Those who have been inactive since last May and June have again joined their respective leaders either through compulsion or voluntarily. … a tremendous increase in bandit activities has been noted.[70]
After May 1930, when Sandino returned from Mexico, both the insurgency and counterinsurgency intensified sharply. Where was Porfirio Sánchez? A report described his movements from early 1929: he "left Nicaragua and was employed as an officer in the Honduranian Army. He was in actual service when he deserted from Honduras with ten soldiers and ten policemen about April 24, 1930."[71] Seven months later, in January 1931, in an intriguing report, he was "now living at the house of Abraham Gutiérrez in Ocotal and leaves town frequently."[72] Abraham Gutiérrez, an ally of Gustavo Paguaga, was one of Nueva Segovia's leading Conservatives and a key patron of Chamorrista gang violence after the Civil War.[73] The report might suggest continuing links between ousted regional Conservative caudillos and the Sandinista rebels. More likely, it meant that Porfirio Sánchez had abandoned the rebel cause. January 1931 is the last time his name appears in rebel or Marine-Guardia documents – a silence indicating his decisive withdrawal from the movement.[74]
7. Other Borderlands Jefes and Honduran Sandinistas
From early on, Hondurans comprised a large percentage of the EDSN's rank-and-file troops in the western Segovias. At least five Hondurans were among the "original twenty-nine" who followed Sandino in May 1927 at San Rafael del Norte.[75] Many other early reports noted large numbers of Hondurans among Sandino's troops. "General Sandino is the only remaining revolutionary leader of consequence," wrote US Minister Eberhardt in late May 1926. "He is headed for the Honduranean boundary with about 200 followers including sixty Honduraneans."[76] After Sandino sacked El Jícaro and seized the San Albino Mine in June 1927, large numbers of Hondurans reportedly streamed into the area. One North American eyewitness, L. J. Matteson, manager of San Albino, observed in August 1927 the arrival of 200 unarmed men from Honduras, and a week later, fifty more.[77] Similar reports continued throughout the nearly six years of rebellion.[78] In May 1929, the Marine Commander in Nicaragua, General McDougal, adjudged that "a large proportion of the rebels, perhaps one half, are Hondurans and that the rebel chiefs have their headquarters in and direct their operations from Honduran territory."[79] Early in the war, in a letter to General José León Díaz, Sandino emphasized the close bonds between rebels in Nicaragua and Honduras: "They [the Marines and Guardia] say that the Honduran Government assists us; but in any case, you know that the Hondurans are our brothers."[80]
Most Honduran borderland campesinos supported the rebels by providing food, information, shelter, and other necessities. The highest ranking border jefes – Carlos Salgado, Miguel Angel Ortez, Juan Pablo Umanzor, Simón González, and others – routinely sought refuge and recruits among Honduran borderland campesinos. Several factors impelled Honduran campesinos to join or support the Sandinistas. Kin and community relations linked people on both sides, making Marine-Guardia violence against Nicaraguans very much a Honduran problem and Honduran reality. Further, most borderlands jefes worked diligently to cultivate patronage networks among Honduran campesinos, distributing loot and paying for food and supplies.
Sandinista General Carlos Salgado, for example, evidently had hundreds of friends and allies thickly scattered across the Honduran side of the borderlands. "All Ortez and Salgado travel performed in Honduran territory," noted one intelligence analyst in April 1929. "Salgado['s] men get very little to eat. All purchases made in Honduras are paid for in money."[81] Captain Stockes, aggressively chasing the elusive Salgado through the mountains, noted that "the Comandante [at Oropolí, Honduras] claims Salgado paid for all supplies in Honduras. . . . Salgado is obtaining his food, etc. from Honduras. Inhabitants of Pedregalito and Suyatal [Honduras] are well known supporters of Ortez and Salgado."[82]
Many Honduran campesinos supported the rebellion in part because it offered diverse opportunities for material gain. For many, the flows of capital north from Nicaragua comprised an important material interest to be protected and defended. The sensibility, excitement, and novelty of belonging to a wholly new imagined political community probably also motivated at least some Honduran borderlanders to support Sandino, as did the hatred sparked by Marine and Guardia violence in Nicaragua. Whatever the combination of factors, the observation of one Marine analyst applies to the whole period: "Most of the people of Honduras are sympathizers to Sandino's cause."[83]
By 1931, as the devastating impact of the Great Depression began to be felt across Central America, and after dissident Liberals were crushed in an abortive revolt against Honduran President Mejía Colindres, popular sympathies in Honduras for Sandino were only magnified. As one report noted, "With the present economic conditions, lack of work, the apparent food shortage and the sudden collapse of the revolution in Honduras which turned loose a considerable number of lawless elements, it is believed the bandit groups have been able to add to their numbers."[84] A few months later another reported noted that
Reported economic conditions in Honduras continue bad. Telegraphic operators and school teachers have not been paid for some months. No money is available to pay their soldiers and many of those who have enlisted recently have done so only to obtain a rifle and ammunition and join the bandits.[85]
Still, joining the rebel ranks in Nicaragua entailed many dangers. As one analyst noted,
Evidence indicates that quite a few former member of Nicaraguan bandit groups are living in Honduras saying they are tired of playing a losing game and have quit; also that these ex-bandits plus many Honduranians have a very wholesome respect for the fighting qualities and general efficiency of the Guardia Nacional.[86]
This was an accurate assessment: joining rebel raids and combats carried enormous risks that only a fraction of able-bodied Honduran men were willing to take.
A small but significant number of wealthy Hondurans, and wealthy Nicaraguans with property in Honduras, actively patronized rebel jefes and their followers, while many Honduran Sandinista commercial agents, spies, informants, and couriers played vital roles in the movement. Competing political parties and factions in Honduras each had their own reasons for supporting Sandino. A report on the period before the November 1928 elections (in both Honduras and Nicaragua) suggests some of convoluted ways that the intricacies of Honduran politics played themselves out with respect to Sandino's rebellion:
Last year before the Presidential Elections took place in Nicaragua and Honduras, Sandino was backed up by both parties from Honduras. The Carisismo (Conservatives) sent arms and supplies in order to have him starting trouble in Nicaragua and so help indirectly the Nicaraguan Conservative Party. On the other hand the Honduranian Liberal Party was supporting Sandino with the purpose of using him and his forces in case the Liberal Party would be defeated. Ferrera's plan was to have Sandino invade Honduras through Nicaragua and him (Ferrera) was to invade Honduras through Guatemala where he was ready to do so. General Mondragon and General Avelino Diaz have had their secret agent in El Ocotal, General Lopez and Frederico Nolazco who manage to send them reports of what is happening in Ocotal regarding the National Guard and Marine Corps activities.[87]
The collusion of Honduran government and border officials with Sandino rebels from 1928 to 1932 is particularly ironic in light of Sandino's venomous denunciations of the Mejía Colindres regime (1928-1932). "Nuestro Ejército reconoce como enemigo, tanto al renegado gobierno de Nicaragua, como al actual Gobierno de Honduras," declared Sandino in August 1931, "porque los dos son agentes de los banqueros yankees, y nuestros dos pueblos (Honduras y Nicaragua), no esperan nada de semejantes piltrafas humanas."[88] Yet the active support of Honduran governmental officials continued. In May 1932 a reliable informant reported to the Guardia that "[Sandinista General Juan Gregorio] Colindres is buying arms and ammunition from officials of the Honduran Army and that these purchases are made through his brother Francisco Colindres, an employee on the Tegucigalpa-Jacaleapa road."[89] A month later it was reported that "Colindres also purchases arms and ammunition from Conservatives of Honduras, some of them Jefes de Armas under the Honduranian government."[90] Such collusion became an enduring feature of the rebellion. In the borderlands it was local sovereignties, not the political will of the central state, that ultimately mattered.
In short, the evidence reveals broad-based, cross-class support for Sandino across the Honduran borderlands throughout this period. Yet this was no cross-class alliance – far from it. Instead, individuals and groups supported the struggle for a diversity of often divergent personal and political reasons. Whatever the constellation of motives in specific instances, the big picture is clear: large numbers of Honduran borderlanders, of all social strata, used the rebellion to advance their political and economic interests.
8. Growth of the Guardia in the Segovian Borderlands
For the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, the strategic disadvantages conferred by the Honduran border led to more muscular development of its intelligence, surveillance, and violence-making capacities than would have been necessary had the border not existed. Because of the structural limitations on state power induced by the border's semi-porosity, and the Guardia's inability to pursue the rebels beyond the imaginary line marking the end of Nicaraguan national territory, there developed on the Nicaraguan side of the border a more robust and rapid expansion of state power than would have otherwise been the case. The archival record paints a fine-grained portrait of this expansion.
[ Wherein the author surveys the growth in Guardia violence-making capacities, especially evident in its roving combat patrols and garrisoned towns, and in its growing intelligence and surveillance capacities; compilation of lists upon lists of "bandit suspects" in the final year of the Marine intervention; accumulation of coded information on "bandits"; institutionalization of Guardia power throughout the social fabric of the region; transformation of jueces de mesta and jueces de canton into agents of the state . . . section in progress ]
9. Consolidation of the Carías and Somoza Regimes
In the bigger picture of the interwar years, of course, events in these two small Central American nation-states followed a broader Latin American pattern: upsurges in labor and political unrest in the immediate aftermath of the Great War and the Russian and Mexican revolutions – upsurges linked in some fashion to larger processes of capitalist transformation and US empire formation – followed in the 1920s by political instability rooted largely in populist efforts to tame mounting pressures by working and middle classes and urban dwellers demanding greater economic and political rights; followed after 1930 by the economic sledgehammer of the Great Depression, mounting popular unrest, and the formation of military dictatorships. Yet these broader patterns can obscure as much as they reveal. Nicaragua and Honduras followed distinctive trajectories, based on the logics of their own histories, to culminate in both cases in the consolidation of stable dictatorial regimes in the 1930s.
In Honduras, Conservative strongman Tiburcio Carías Andino seized power in 1932, ruling until 1948. Notably, the country's southern borderlands played a marginal role in the jockeying for state power that led to the Carías dictatorship. By the 1920s the center of political and economic gravity in Honduras had shifted decisively to the port cities and banana plantations of the North Coast. By this time the southern border departments of Choluteca and El Paraíso had become marginal to the country's economic lifeblood, and thus to its political economy of organized violence. As Darío Euraque argues, the 1920s and 1930s did not constitute a "critical conjuncture" in the formation of the Honduran state, a conjuncture that came in the 1950s.[91]
In Nicaragua, in contrast, the northern borderlands played a crucial role in the consolidation of the national state that accompanied the formation of the National Guard and its post-1932 monopoly on violence-making, culminating in the 1936 seizure of power by Anastasio Somoza García. . . . [in progress] [92]
10. Conclusion
If the first decades of the twentieth century saw frequent eruptions of "border troubles" across the Isthmus, the period from mid-1927 to early 1933 in the Western Nicaragua-Honduras borderlands stands out as unique. Here, border dynamics assumed a life and momentum of their own, largely in consequence of events set in motion by the US invasion and occupation of northern Nicaragua. The presence of several thousand US troops, a campesino insurgency, and the newly created Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua – in the context of the region's crushing poverty and stark inequalities – injected radical new elements into the mix, "democratizing" the use of violence and permitting lower-class men to wage class warfare under a nationalist rubric. Property-holders on the Nicaraguan side tended to ally with the US Marines and Guardia Nacional, facilitating the regional consolidation of a fractured Nicaraguan state. On the Honduran side merchants, state officials, landowners, local elites, criminals, and ordinary people tended to ally with the Sandinistas, feeding into the relative incoherence of the Honduran state in the years before the Carías dictatorship, but in the end not playing a central role in the regime's consolidation of power.
By the early 1930s the borderlands mobilizations had largely ended, as both the Carias regime in Honduras and the Sacasa and Somoza regimes in Nicaragua consolidated their respective power bases. By this time a kind of war-weariness appears to have descended across much of the borderlands, which from this point largely ceased to be a significant locus of political-military mobilization. As a result of the consolidation and stabilization of these two neighboring states, this dynamic of borderlands mobilization did not reemerge until the Contra War of the 1980s, when it fluoresced once again.
Are there other regions of the world whose borderlands have played, or are playing, roles similar to the ones examined here? Historically, the practice of patriotic plunder among insurgent groups is relatively common.[93] So too is the process by which historically developed local and regional sovereignties in borderlands act as crucibles in which anti-national-state and anti-imperialist rebellions are forged and sustained.[94] One can identify many cases that are similar, in various specifics, to the case examined here. At the same time, the combination of longer-term historical antecedents and short-term triggers would appear to mark this case as sui generis. Yet despite its many unique features, the case offers a compelling illustration of processes common to many small wars and insurgencies in border regions. Most broadly it shows the complex and unpredictable ways that "peripheral" borderland sovereignties can effectively challenge and thwart the wills and projects of dominant groups and national states, and thus play a central role in shaping wider patterns of social and historical change.
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[1] "Confer on Border Raids," The New York Times, 19 Aug. 1922, p. 19. Held aboard the cruiser USS Tacoma in the Gulf of Fonseca, the August meeting was prelude to the Washington or Central American Conference, held in Washington D.C. from Dec. 1922 to Feb. 1923, which resulted in the General Treaty of Peace and Amity; see "Central Americans Adopt Arms Limits," The New York Times, 8 Feb. 1923.
[2] Michiel Baud and Willem Van Schendel, "Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands," Journal of World History 8 (2), 1997, p. 212. For a stimulating review of the literature on borderlands and frontiers in the North American context, see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review 104 (3), 1999, pp. 814-41, and the "Forum" responses in AHR 104 (4), 1999.
[3] Michael J. Schroeder, "Horse Thieves to Rebels to Dogs: Political Gang Violence and the State in the Western Segovias, Nicaragua, in the Time of Sandino," Journal of Latin American Studies, Oct. 1996, p. 431.
[4] For one of the first scholarly treatments of this question, see Joseph O. Baylen, "Sandino: Patriot or Bandit?" Hispanic American Historical Review, August 1951, pp. 394-419.
[5] These were: Somotillo-El Triunfo, Santo Tómas, San Pedro, Mojón, El Espino, Oyote, Santa Emilia, Bado Grande, Pedregalito,and Las Manos. For an especially evocative description of the zone around Somotillo, see Complete Report of Somotillo Area Gathered From Patrols From 10 July to 19 September [1927] Inclusive, H. N. Kenyon, US National Archives, Record Group 127, Entry 43A, Box 20 (hereafter NA[Record Group]/[Entry]/[Box]).
[6] Patrol, Lt. G. H. Bellinger, Somoto, 7 Nov. 1927, RG127/43A/20.
[7] In the mid-1850s the German traveler Dr. Carl Scherzer described the international border north of Ocotal, near what became Las Manos: "As we were not able to reach even the few lonely huts on the Cerro Colorado, which form the boundary line between Nicaragua and Honduras, we had to make up our minds to pass the night in the forest. . . . we crossed the Cerro Colorado, the natural north-western frontier of the states of Honduras and Nicaragua; but not the smallest sign by human hand indicates the commencement of a new territory; . . ." Carl Scherzer, Travels in the Free States of Central America: Nicaragua, Honduras, and San Salvador, vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857), pp. 228, 231.
[8] For an effort to map out the major culture zones of the region, see David C. Brooks, "Rebellion from Without: Culture and Politics along Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast in the Time of the Sandino Revolt, 1926-1934," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut at Storrs, 1997, pp. 215-219 ff.
[9] Cf. Baud and Van Schendel, "Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands," whose otherwise comprehensive survey does not address the formation of such military corridors.
[10]. David R. Radell, "Historical Geography of Western Nicaragua: The Spheres of Influence of León, Granada, and Managua, 1519-1965," Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1969; Linda Newson, Indian Survival in Colonial Nicaragua (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1987); William L. Sherman, Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth Century Central America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Francisco Moscoso, Los cacicazgos de Nicaragua antigua (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Instituto de Estudios del Caribe, 1991); Hector Pérez-Brignoli, A Brief History of Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 62.
[11] Salvador Mendieta, Cuentos caciquistas centroamericanos (Managua: Tipografía Moderna, 1911).
[12] Murdo J. MacLeod, Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520-1720 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), esp. chap. 13; Sherman, Forced Native Labor; Germán Romero Vargas, Las estructuras sociales de Nicaragua en el siglo XVIII (Managua: Vanguardia, 1987); José Dolores Gámez, Historia de Nicaragua desde los tiempos prehistóricos hasta 1860 (Managua: El País, 1889), pp. 136, 245, 272 ff.; Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Central America, 1821-1871: Liberalism before Liberal Reform (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), pp. 53-65; Moscoso, Los cacicazgos de Nicaragua antigua. See also Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Rocío Tábora, Masculinidad y violencia en la cultura política hondureña (Tegucigalpa: Centro de Documentación de Honduras, 1995).
[13]. MacLeod, Spanish Central America, chap. 20; Romero Vargas, Las estructuras sociales, pp. 209-211, 324-338; Mendieta, La enfermedad, vol. 2, pp. 27-217; Pedro Agustín Morel de Santa Cruz, "Visita apostólica, topográfica, histárica y estadística de todos los pueblos de Nicaragua y Costa Rica," 1752 (reprinted in Revista Conservadora del Pensamiento Centroamericano, vol. 17, no. 82), pp. 22-30; e.g., here is Morel de Santa Cruz's description of the town of Segovia's defenses in 1751: "La pieza del lado de arriba sirve de sala de armas en que hay ciento sesenta y tres fusiles, cincuenta cañones organizados de mosquetes y arcabusques, cien garnieles y cartucheras, cincuenta portafusiles, cincuenta bayonetas, doscientos lanzas y lunetas, quinientas libras de pólvora y dos mil balas, tambores y otros pertechos. Todos estas provisiones están a cargo del Sargento Mayor de la misma ciudad, que no solo manda en lo militar de ella sino también en la villa de Estelí y pueblo de Condega, Jícaro y Jalapa. Hay así mismo tres compañías, dos con doscientos dos hombres . . ." (pp. 25-26). This was a frontier town and society clearly well prepared for war. See also E. Bradford Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence of Nicaragua, 1798-1858 (London: Harvard University Press, 1991); Julie A. Charlip, Cultivating Coffee: The Farmers of Carazo, Nicaragua, 1880-1930 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003); Robert H. Holden, Armies without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Justin Wolfe, The Everyday Nation-State: Community and Ethnicity in Nineteenth Century Nicaragua (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Salvador Mendieta, La enfermedad de Centro-América, 3 vols. (Barcelona, 1934), and Alrededor del problema unionista de Centro-América, 2 vols. (Barcelona, 1934); Enrique Guzman, Diario Intimo; José Coronel Urtecho, Reflexiones sobre la historia de Nicaragua (de Gainza a Somoza), vol. II, La guerra civil de 1824.
[14] On the civil wars of the nineteenth century and military mobilization in the borderlands see José Dolores Gámez, La historia de Nicaragua (Managua, 1889); Francisco Ortega Arancibia, Cuarenta años de historia de Nicaragua, 1838-1878, 3rd ed., reprint (Managua: Banco de América, 1975); Jerónimo Pérez, Obras históricas completas, 2nd ed., reprint (Managua: Banco de América, 1993); Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Zelaya, Fruto Chamorro (orig. 1960), reprinted in Revista Conservadora del Pensamiento Centroamericano, no. 91, April 1968; Pedro Francisco de la Rocha, "Revista política sobre la historia de la revolución de Nicaragua" (orig. Granada: Imprenta de la Concepción, 1847), reprinted in Revista Conservadora del Pensamiento Centroamericano, no. 180 (July-Sept. 1983); José N. Rodríguez, Estudios de historia militar de Centro-América (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1930); Dana G. Munro, The Five Republics of Central America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918).
[15]. Williams, States and Social Evolution, pp. 83-91, 95-97; CIERA-MIDINRA, Nicaragua . . . y pore so defendemos la frontera (Managua: CIERA-MIDINRA, 1984). US Marine and Guardia Nacional patrol, combat, and intelligence reports (which extend from May 1927 to December 1932) permit one to identify the major zones of coffee cultivation in Las Segovias; see Michael J. Schroeder, "'To Defend Our Nation's Honor': Toward a Social and Cultural History of the Sandino Rebellion in Nicaragua, 1927-1934," Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1993, pp. 105-111.
[16] The literature on the liberal, coffee, and commercial revolutions in Las Segovias and adjacent areas of Honduras in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is slim; in addition to Gould, "¡Vana ilusion!" and "El trabajo forzoso," and Williams, States and Social Evolution, see Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de la Reforma Agraria (CIERA), Nicaragua: …y por eso defendemos la frontera (Managua: CIERA-MIDINRA, 1984), chaps. 3-4.
[17] Darío A. Euraque, Reinterpreting the Banana Republic: Region and State in Honduras, 1870-1972 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 45 ff; Senate Foreign Relations Committee, United States Daily, 16 March 1927, United States Department of State, Records Relating to Internal Affairs of Nicaragua, 1919-1929 (hereafter USDS), 817.00/4899.
[18] "Bands Invade Nicaragua," Aug. 27, 1921; "Quell Nicaraguan Rising," 8 Sept. 1921; "State of War in Nicaragua," 24 Oct. 1921; "Attack Nicaraguan Town," 13 Nov. 1921, all in the New York Times; Emiliano Chamorro, Managua, to C. E. Hughes, Washington, 24 Aug. 1921, USDS 817.24/8; D. G. Munro, Managua, to White, Washington, 21 March 1923, USDS 817.24/14. See also the telegrams and other correspondence in Record Group 80, General Records of the Navy, Secretary of the Navy General Correspondence, 1916-1926, US National Archives.
[19] Harold Denny, Dollars for Bullets (New York: 1928), p. 183.
[20] D. G. Munro, Managua, to Sec. State, Washington, 19 Dec. 1927, 817.00/5229.
[21] These 26 months were July-Sept. 1919; Jan.-Feb. and Aug.-Sept. 1920; Oct.-Nov. 1921; April and Aug.-Sept. 1922; Dec. 1923; Feb.-March and Aug.-Sept. 1924; April and June-Aug. 1925; and Aug.-Dec. 1926. For further references see the author's website, HomePages/hond-1919-26.htm.
[22] "Pan Americans Not Arming, Only Two Nations Spend Nearly Half of Budget in Military," The New York Times, 3 Feb. 1923; this figure of 44.5% is consistent with the figures cited in Euraque, Banana Republic, p. 49, for the period 1901-1905, when the percentage ranged between 36 and 42 percent.
[23] Tim Merrill, ed., Honduras: A Country Study (Washington: GPO, 1995), online at , "The Threat of Renewed Instability, 1919-1924" at (accessed 18 Jan. 2007).
[24] The practice is described for Danlí and suggested for Honduras a whole in Repatriation of Destitute Nicaraguans in Honduras, Lt. Col. J. A. Rossell, Ocotal, 18 Aug. 1928, RG127/220/2; see p. 22, below.
[25] F. Flores, Constitutionalist Encampment, Amescaltepa, Nicaragua, 24 Feb. 1927, to the Chief of the Invading Forces of the United States, León, USDS 817.00/4652, e.g.: "The hordes of the unruly Diaz, supported by the troops under your command, continue committing all classes of crimes in the above-mentioned towns, in your sight and with your tolerance and with your tacit approbation. They continue sacking, assassinating, horsewhipping, imprisoning, and abusing the peaceful and defenseless people sheltered in the towns and cities. . . . [They] steal property and animals, kill the peasants, violate the women, sack the farms and plantations and later burn them . . . [They are] bands of sackers, robbers, killers, rapists, and incendiaries . . ." For graphic depictions of Conservative violence during this period, see the collection of letters to US Special Envoy Henry Stimson, USDS 817.00/4954.
[26] US Minister Caffery, San Salvador, to Sec. State, 2 Sept. 1926, USDS 817.00/3747. On Sept. 6, 1926, the Nicaraguan Government informed the US Minister that "an important battle took place at Somotillo, Department of Chinandega, yesterday [5 Sept. 1926], large number of casualties, 32 killed and complete route of Liberals with total loss of arms." Dennis, Managua, to Sec. State, 6 Sept. 1926, USDS 817.00/3759.
[27] General Conditions Prevailing in Nicaragua, 1 July 1926, p. 7, USDS 817.00/3690.
[28] D. G. Munro, Managua, to Sec. State, Washington, 19 Dec. 1927, USDS 817.00/5229.
[29] Eberhardt, Managua, to Sec. State, 9 Oct. 1926, USDS 817.00/3905.
[30] Schroeder, "To Defend Our Nation's Honor," chap. 4.
[31] Eberhardt, Managua, to Sec. State, 23 April 1927, USDS 817.00/4719.
[32] Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (London: Blackwell, 1992), p. 84.
[33] For example, Robert Glasgow Dunlop, Travels in Central America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), pp. 24-25, 61, 104-105, ff.; on forced contributions in Guatemala in the 19th century see e.g. Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr., Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821-1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), pp. 176-77 ff.
[34] B-2 Report, 15 April 1928, p. 9, NA127/209/1.
[35] Propaganda in Nicaragua Against American Forces, R. H. Dunlap, 13 Feb. 1928, NA127/204/5.
[36] One notable instance early on sparked a diplomatic incident: during the first phase of the Marine invasion of the western Segovias, as the region was being convulsed by waves of Conservative violence, a patrol of at least 14 Marines and Guardia and as many as 40 Nicaraguan Liberals crossed over into Honduras in pursuit of Conservative gang leader Medardo Vallejos, patronized by the Jefe Político of the Honduran Department of Choluteca, Felix Pedro Piñel, who in was a close ally of the Ocotal-based Chamorrista Conservative caudillos Gustavo Paguaga, Abraham Gutiérrez Lobo, and Pedro Lobo. According to the complaint lodged by the Honduran Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marine-Guardia-Liberal patrol (or gang) reportedly firebombed and destroyed Piñel's house in Santa Rita, Honduras and killed a local sub-commandant, Gilberto Sánchez. Cf. Patrol Report, Lt. H. S. Keimling, Pataste, 10 Nov. 1927, NA127/43A/3, to G. T. Summerlin, Tegucigalpa, to Sec. State, Washington, 17 Nov. 1927, with enclosures from Honduran Foreign Ministry detailing the allegations, USDS 817.00/5170; see also D. G. Munro, Managua, to Sec. State, 31 Dec. 1927, 817.00/5214, and 30 Dec. 1927, USDS 817.00/5271. Other significant cross-border incidents included Marine-piloted planes violating Honduran airspace and bombing Honduran villages (B-2 Report, Managua, 31 March 1929; R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929), and officially-sanctioned Volunteer (Voluntario) columns (whose leaders and men were in fact paid), which operated in the borderlands from late 1928 to mid-1929, sparking several complaints by the Honduran Foreign Ministry to the State Department which, along with other factors, led to the Voluntarios disbandment; B-2 Report, Managua, 18 July 1929.
[37] Intelligence Memorandum, Lt. A. C. Larsen, Managua, 27 June 1928, NA127/206/1.
[38] For a transcription of Stockes's reports, with critical introduction, see .
[39] For this and subsequent episodes see S-Docs/s-docs3.htm#7_June_1927.__Sandino_to_Francisco_Sierke_&_Brother.__.
[40] See 100pgs/top100-p3.htm#25_August_1928.__Narrative_of_Camilo_Castellón.
[41] Many such letters can be found in USNA/RG127/38/30; see the inventory at HomePages/s-docs-home.htm; see also Anastasio Somoza García, El verdadero Sandino, o el calvario de Las Segovias (Managua, 1936).
[42] See e.g. List of Articles stolen from Mr. Trewin's finca La Constancia on Sunday, June 2, 1929 by troops under Sandinista General Pedro Altamirano, E. Trewin, Matagalpa, to British Chargé d'Affaires, Managua, 10 June 1929, in M. E. Hanna, Managua, to Sec. State, 24 June 1929, USDS 817.00/6361; documents reproduced at 100pgs/top100-p8.htm#10_June_1929.__Pedrons_Group_Sacks_the_Hacienda_of_Enrique_Trewin_in_Jinotega.
[43] GN-2 Report, 1 Jan. 1932, p. 13, NA127/43A/29.
[44] R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929.
[45] Guillermo E. Cuadra G., Sub-teniente, G.N., “Viaje a la república de Honduras, C.A.” Informe que presente el suscrito al Jefe Director de la Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, 10 March 1932, p. 17, NA127/201/file 38, “General Misc. Data.”
[46] Michael J. Schroeder, "The Sandino Rebellion Revisited: Civil War, Imperialism, Popular Nationalism, and State Formation Muddied Up Together in the Segovias of Nicaragua, 1926-1934," in Gilbert Joseph,
Catherine LeGrand and Ricardo Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.- Latin American Relations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), and Schroeder, "Bandits and Blanket Thieves, Communists and Terrorists: The Politics of Naming Sandinistas in Nicaragua, 1927-1936 and 1979-90," Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 67-86.
[47] "Fighting Reported in Honduras Revolt," New York Times, 31 July 1919, p. 15.
[48] "Repatriation of Destitute Nicaraguans in Honduras," USMC Lt. Col. J. A. Rossell, Ocotal, 18 Aug. 1928; see also Rossell, "Conditions in Honduras," 19 Aug. 1928, RG127/220/2.
[49] GN-2 Report, 1 June 1932, p. 28, NA127/43A/29.
[50] M. E. Hanna, Managua, to Sec. State, 21 Oct. 1929, encl. 1, General D. C. McDougal, Managua, to M. E. Hanna, US Legation, Managua, 21 Oct. 1929, USDS 817.00/6460.
[51] GN-2 Report, 1 July 1932, p. 20. Another Nicaraguan in self-exile in Honduras who worked to advance the Sandinista cause was the prominent Conservative Toribio Tijerino, a fascinating and enigmatic character whose biography remains unwritten; see e.g. the State Dept. Tijerino file, USDS 817.44T44.
[52] First item cited in GN-2 Report, 1 June 1932, p. 30; second item, p. 7.
[53] This last comment can be taken as emblematic of the racism and brutality of the Marine invasion and occupation of the region; untitled list describing leading "bandits," c. 27 Nov. 1927, NA127/43A/3; Patrol Report, W. Brown, 11 Nov. 1927, NA127/212/1, and B-2 Report, Managua, 18 July 1929. Another report updated and added to these portraits: "Normal height, well built, very dark, heavy beard, very long scar along right side of face, heavy black hair, 33 years old, small mustache, black eyes, small sharp pointed nose, round face, thick lipped, small mouth, round chin, normal forehead." Data sheet on Porfirio Sánchez, 9 April 1930, NA127/209/10. No known photograph of him survives.
[54] Schroeder, "To Defend Our Nation's Honor," chap. 7. General Porfirio Sánchez earned a reputation early on as a brave fighter and expert in the art of ambush, leading his troops against the Marines in the battle of San Fernando (25 July 1927) and in several other key engagements; Anastasio Somoza García, Sandino o el Calvario de las Segovias (Managua: Tipografía Robelo, 1936), p. 57; Robert E. Conrad, Sandino: Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 58, 88-89. "He is a man of much more courage than the majority of the bandit leaders," reads one report. "He is also more daring and fights whenever he has the opportunity." Data sheet on Porfirio Sánchez, 9 April 1930, NA127/209/10.
[55] Statement of Manuel Viques Molina, in Report re Chipote, R. W. Peard, Ocotal, 18 Nov. 1927, NA127/220/2.
[56] Conrad, Sandino, p. 178; cf. Somoza, Sandino, pp. 80-81.
[57] Sandino's first public official sanctioning of the practice came in his "Manifesto a los capitalistas notificados por nuestro ejército, en Jinotega, Matagalpa, Estelí y Ocotal" of 15 Nov. 1931, though his forces had levied forced contributions from the beginning; Somoza, El verdadero Sandino, pp. 280-82.
[58] B-2 Report, Managua, 11 March 1929; another report from the same period noted "unconfirmed reports . . . that about sixty bandits crossed the border near Cifuentes last week with the announced intention of quitting," a group that included General Porfirio Sánchez; R-2 Report, Managua, 12 March 1929. A few weeks later another intelligence analyst observed that "The whereabouts of [Porfirio] Sánchez is not known . . . lack of any report on him for nearly six weeks" [B-2 Report, Managua, 31 March 1929]; a week later reports placed Sánchez in Tegucigalpa, Honduras [R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929]. In mid-May 1929 one Juan García, "a Nicaraguan who has been living in Cifuentes for the past two years," claimed that some 40 men under Porfirio Sánchez and other Sandinistas crossed the border at Cifuentes on Feb. 25. In early June it was reported that "Porfirio Sánchez is in Honduras waiting around for a job" [B-2 Report, Managua, 4 June 1929].
[59] One of Jose A. Sánchez's soldiers, Alejandro Vallardez, was reportedly in the ranks of Sandinista General Miguel Angel Ortez; R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929.
[60] Bn-2 Report, Managua, 22 June 1930.
[61] El Centroamericano, León, 22, 28 Feb. 1924, reproduced at HomePages/hond-1919-26.htm.
[62] R-2 Report, Ocotal, 31 May 1929; see also "Unsatisfactory conditions on Nicaraguan-Honduran border," J. A. Rossell, 12 April 1929, NA127/43A/3.
[63] B-2 Report, Managua, 4 June 1929.
[64] B-2 Report, Managua, 13 Oct. 1929.
[65] R-2 Report, Ocotal, 30 June 1929; see also Major H. Schmidt, Memo for Chief of Staff, on Honduran Sandinistas in exile in various locales in southwestern Honduras, 23 May 1929, encl. 1 in M. E. Hanna, Managua, to Sec. State, Washington, 23 May 1929, USDS 817.00/6334.
[66] B-2 Report, Managua, 13 Oct. 1929.
[67] R-2 Report, Managua, 20 Feb. 1930. According to an earlier report (R-2 Report, Managua, 18 Jan. 1930), in January 1930 Sánchez had returned to Nicaragua and integrated into the forces of Pedro Altamirano in Jinotega; however, in light of subsequent reports on Sánchez, and the unlikelihood of his joining a band organically disconnected from the border region, the report is very likely mistaken.
[68] B-2 Report, Managua, 13 Oct. 1929.
[69] B-2 Report, Managua, 13 Oct. 1929.
[70] R-2 Report, Managua, 17 Dec. 1929.
[71] In mid-May 1930, Sánchez, along with rebel Generals Ortez and Umanzor, was reported in Las Dificultades, Honduras, with some 70 men; around the same time he was reported "in the Teotecacinte area awaiting Sandino, along with Ortez and Salgado." In June he was reported in Nicaragua with Sandino and his Chief of Staff Francisco Estrada; Bn-2 Report, Managua, 22 June 1929; Area Intelligence Report, Ocotal, 18 May 1930; Bn-2 Report, Managua, 21 May 1930.
[72] Northern Area Intelligence Report, 18 Jan. 1931.
[73] Schroeder, "Horse Thieves," pp. 395-98 ff.
[74] Sánchez was essentially written out of the Sandinista pantheon of heroes; e.g., his name does not appear in Sandino's extensive remembrances of the most important Sandinistas in José Román, Maldito país (Managua, 1983), pp. 119-142, though his name does appear in another context, p. 71.
[75] Santos López, Memorias de un soldado (León, 1976); Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, vol. 2, p. 412.
[76] Eberhardt to Sec. State, 26 May 1927, USDS 817.00/4867. His report a week later was more encouraging: "[No] serious movement of Sandino against Honduras need be feared. Of the 200 men . . . as accompanying him towards Honduranean boundary, more than half are reported to have left him and to have lain down their arms. Last authentic reports located Sandino at Yali with less than 50 armed men about a week ago." 3 June 1927, 817.00/4884.
[77] Mr. L. J. Matteson, interview with, E. S. Tuttle to Brigade Commander, León, 6 Dec. 1927, Personal Papers Collection, Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington D.C., box "Sandino."
[78]. Examples of reports showing a large percentage of Hondurans among Sandinista troops in the borderlands include R-2 Report, Managua, 18 Jan. 1930: "In this locality Salgado probably had a great deal of influence in obtaining a few recruits which brought their total strength up to around 70, a greater percentage of whom are Honduranians." R-2 Report, Managua, 20 Feb. 1930: "All men with Salgado are believed to be Hondurans." GN-2 Report, 1 Feb. 1931: "The Ortez-Diaz groups . . . include many Hondurans." GN-2 Report, 1 March 1931: "Salgado was again reported between Somoto and the Honduranean border waiting for more recruits and supplies from Honduras."
[79] Hanna, Managua, to Sec. State, 13 May 1929, USDS 817.00/6306.
[80] Sandino, El pensamiento vivo, vol. 1, p. 195.
[81] R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929.
[82] R-2 Report, Ocotal, 8 April 1929.
[83] Northern Area Intelligence Report, Ocotal, 15 March 1931.
[84] GN-2 Report, 1 Aug. 1931.
[85] GN-2 Report, 1 Jan. 1932.
[86] GN-2 Report, 1 Aug. 1931.
[87] R-2 Report, Managua, 12 Feb. 1929.
[88] A.C. Sandino, Pensamiento Vivo, Sergio Ramírez, ed., vol. 2 (Managua: Nueva Nicaragua), 192.
[89] Weekly Summary of Intelligence, Week Ending 2 May 1932, Col. L. P. Hunt, in GN-2 Report, 1 June 1932, NA127/43A/29.
[90] GN-2 Report, 1 July 1932, p. 27, NA127/43A/29.
[91] Euraque, Banana Republic, p. 52.
[92] Knut Walter, The Regime of Anastasio Somoza, 1936-1956 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), chap. 2.
[93] Mao Zedong, considered by many the twentieth century's premier theorist of nationalist guerrilla war, warned against alienating the local populace through plunder and atrocity, though in fact the practice has been common in guerrilla insurgencies at least as far back the US Revolutionary War; see for example Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980); William Marina, "The Dutch-American Guerrillas of the American Revolution," in Christianity & Civilization, vol.2, The Theology of Christian Resistance (Tyler, TX: Geneva Divinity School Press, 1983); Anthony James Joes, "Gamecock and Swamp Fox: Partisan Warfare in the American Revolution," in Guerrilla Conflict before the Cold War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996). In the post-WWII anti-colonial insurgencies in Asia and Africa – from Algeria to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe – the practice fluoresced; for a compelling recent memoir see Lauren St. John, Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War, and an African Farm (New York: Scribner, 2007).
[94] See Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); René de la Pedraja Tomán, Wars of Latin America, 1899-1941 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006).
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