Augusto Sandino’s Political Manifesto (document 6.1) is a text with which I can really empathize. It’s strange for me to think of the Chamorro family as a malign one, as Sandino did, because I know their descendants. They’re people I have known for a couple of years now (I actually met some of them at a democracy conference in Panama) and while I did always wonder how it was that their family was so wealthy, I didn’t think it was because they were anti-patriots. However, I can see Sandino’s point of view in his manifesto, mainly because Nicaragua is notorious in Central America, even nowadays, for being a country in which wealth is spread out incredibly unfairly. People from El Salvador still go to Nicaragua to get wealthier because it’s stupidly easy to make money by taking advantage of family ties. The bad thing about this, and here’s how I can understand Sandino’s anger, is that Nicaragua is a country which, when you see it as an outsider, looks poor and dirty and not really developed. You have to really go into the few wealthy neighborhoods to see where most of their money has gone.

It’s interesting to think about oligarchs as traitors though because in some aspects they are; they are those who have little to no regard for the greater good of the community and mostly care about exploiting their social status to get even wealthier and more powerful. It’s a sad reality for Nicaragua because even though the Sandinista movement was/is very strong, and even got some oligarchs to support it (Chamorro family members included), it’s a country which is still run by oligarchs and hasn’t really developed much in terms of its power gap.

I don’t think Sandino’s manifesto is Bolivarian in principle because it doesn’t want to unite all of Central America to fight against the oligarchy; I believe he just wants the chance for the people in Nicaragua to fight against the oligarchy and doesn’t want foreigners getting involved. I believe that there is still going to be more revolutionary movements in Nicaragua because wealth hasn’t really been spread out in a fair way yet and the rich are still getting richer and it’s really sad to see Managua nowadays and how it looks like such a badly kept city.