A bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America.

Robert J. Sierakowski’s Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a new vantage point of the Sandinista movement beyond geopolitics and ideologies in 1979 Nicaragua. Using unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, Sierakowski shows the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power.

Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. Sierakowski unearths long buried stories of military repression and violence, including widespread civilian massacres, that pushed thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s.