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Every July 19, the same debate returns. The Ortega-Murillo dictatorship insists on presenting itself as the heir to the Sandinista Popular Revolution. At the same time, part of the opposition accepts that narrative and ends up reinforcing it by claiming that the current regime is nothing more than the logical consequence of the 1979 revolution.
Both versions are profoundly mistaken.
The dictatorship that oppresses Nicaragua today was not born from the Revolution. It was born of the progressive concentration of power, the abandonment of democratic principles, and the ethical degradation of a segment of the leadership that ultimately betrayed the ideals it claimed to represent. The Revolution did not give birth to this dictatorship. It was spawned by the seven deadly sins of politics.
Memory, too, can be hijacked.
The insurrection that culminated on July 19, 1979, was not the exclusive work of a vanguard, much less of a small group of leaders. It was a national rebellion against a regime that had exhausted all legitimacy. Peasants, students, workers, businesspeople, religious figures, intellectuals, and citizens with no political affiliation all took part. Thousands of young people even gave their lives to make it possible. As with great historical events, the Revolution became possible only when it became inevitable.
Reducing that historic struggle to the figure of Daniel Ortega constitutes one of the greatest falsifications of Nicaragua’s recent history. One need only look at who actually led the Revolution and where they are today. Many of its historic leaders broke with Ortega long before April 2018. They were persecuted, imprisoned, stripped of their nationality, or forced into exile. Others died in prison under persecution by the very regime that now seeks to appropriate their legacy.
Rosario Murillo understood years ago that memory is also a sphere of power. That is why she systematically pushed aside the historic protagonists and built a political apparatus made up, in many cases, of people who never participated in the struggle against Somoza, and even former collaborators of the regime that was overthrown. The irony is devastating; those who fought one dictatorship ended up being persecuted by another that speaks in their name.
Revolutions can defeat a dictatorship without having yet built a democracy.
The 1979 Revolution grew out of a broad national consensus and extraordinary popular participation, expressed through the National Literacy Crusade, community health programs, agrarian reform, and an exceptional flourishing of culture, education, music, and poetry. It also fostered a much more active citizenry that, after the 1990 electoral defeat, would find new forms of expression in feminist, environmental, municipal, and citizens’ rights movements.
None of this means portraying the Revolution as a perfect process. That would be just as false as the official narrative. Every revolution has its light and shadows. Nicaragua’s was no exception.
Its history cannot be analyzed while ignoring the war promoted by the Reagan administration, the armed aggression of the Contra forces, or the enormous pressures faced by the new government. But neither can its own mistakes be concealed: human rights violations, repression against Indigenous and peasant communities, restrictions on civil liberties, and, above all, the growing concentration of power in the hands of a small group of commanders. Perhaps it was there that one of history’s most important unresolved lessons began to take shape.
Responsibility, however, does not end there either.
After the 1990 electoral defeat, Nicaragua had the opportunity to build a solid democracy. But economic policies that deepened inequality, the inability to heal the wounds of war, and the absence of genuine national reconciliation fueled the resurgence of strongman politics under the populist figures of Arnoldo Aleman and Daniel Ortega. At the same time, the democratic commitment of governments such as those of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and Enrique Bolaños must be acknowledged; they never imprisoned or persecuted their opponents for political reasons.
History shows that authoritarian populisms, whether of the right or the left, thrive when democracies fail to respond to the needs of the population. It was on this fertile ground that Ortega reemerged. And once that process began, too many actors chose to accommodate themselves to it.
Sixteen years later, he returned to the presidency. But the regime he built no longer represented the continuation of a revolution. Instead, it represented the triumph of the real sins that made the new dictatorship possible: strongman rule, corruption, the arrogance of absolute power, the greed to remain in government indefinitely, the cult of personality, lies transformed into state policy, and impunity as a system.
None of these evils was born in 1979. They grew over decades until they culminated in the regime that oppresses Nicaragua today.
Liberals and sectors of the Social Christians, Conservatives, and Contras made pacts. Big business prioritized the stability of its commercial interests. Important sectors of the religious hierarchies legitimized the new strongman. International organizations downplayed the signs of institutional deterioration, and even parts of the international community came to present the Nicaraguan model as an example of good governance.
Meanwhile, Ortega dismantled democratic safeguards one by one, captured the electoral system, subordinated the other branches of government, and prepared the establishment of a family-run regime.
That is why it is intellectually insufficient to claim that the current dictatorship is simply a consequence of the Revolution.
No.
It is also a consequence of the pact with Arnoldo Aleman; institutionalized fraud; the silence of the business community; religious complicity; international indifference; the mistakes of democratic Sandinismo itself; and the collective failure to defend the republic’s institutions before it was too late.
Acknowledging this shared responsibility does not diminish Ortega’s responsibility. It explains it. It allows us to understand how a society can gradually lose its freedoms until, one day, it discovers that almost all of them have disappeared.
The April 2018 Rebellion demonstrated, however, that democratic memory remained alive. The barricades, the marches, grassroots organizing, and even old slogans reappeared as expressions of a citizenry that once again said, “Enough.” Young people who had not yet been born in 1979 took part alongside former Sandinistas who once again found themselves confronting a dictatorship. The struggle ceased to belong to an ideology and once again belonged to the nation.
That may be the greatest lesson of our recent history.
Dictatorships do not always arrive through a coup d’état. Many are built slowly: they concentrate power, destroy institutional checks and balances, normalize corruption, and feed on complicity and silence. This is an uncomfortable truth, but an essential one if we want to offer new generations an honest explanation of our history.
The 1979 Revolution may be remembered, as poet Ernesto Cardenal said, as a lost revolution. Others regard it as a betrayed revolution. Perhaps both statements contain part of the truth. What history cannot accept is that the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship be presented as its inevitable outcome.
Revolutions do not inevitably produce dictatorships. Dictatorships are produced by the absence of limits on power; by institutions abandoning their role; by fear turned into a form of government; and by the decision of too many people to accommodate themselves rather than resist.
That was the true seed of Ortega’s authoritarianism.
The lesson for new generations is not to abandon the ideals of social justice and freedom that mobilized thousands of Nicaraguans in 1979. It is to understand that no cause, however noble, justifies concentrating power in the hands of one man or one family.
Because democracy rarely disappears overnight. It is lost slowly, every time a society tolerates someone placing himself above the law.
And it is also recovered slowly, when a people decides that fear will no longer govern its destiny.
Exile, July 2026.
