He was run over by the train um there was a big protest a couple of days later that that i was at i still have um one of the i i didn't participate in actually i was actually pregnant at the time i kind of stood on the sidelines but um people were tearing literally tearing up the railroad lines and somebody gave me a nail um that i still hold is one of my most surprised possessions wow that and then that's something that really shocked me when i i went to the marines and then i went out and went to humboldt state afterwards in the late 90s early 2000s and learning about all this activism that was going on in the 1980s in the u.s against u.s foreign policy in central america,
It was something it wasn't the same scale maybe as the anti-vietnam war protests but it was a lot of um that in some cases there were that level of activism too right and in some ways i feel like it was um deeper than the um anti-vietnam war activism in the sense that so many ordinary people from the united states traveled to central america were connected through sister city programs heard talks by central american refugees so many churches were like congregations were involved in solidarity work um in in some ways of course the anti-vietnam war movement in terms of its mobilizing capacity perhaps was greater but in terms of the depths of solidarity,
I think the proximity of central america the um the ability to actually connect with the revolutionary movements there and the level of sympathy that is a lot of people opposed the us involvement in vietnam without having any strong ties or even political sympathy necessarily with um with oppa you know with the movements we were fighting in vietnam and i think that was stronger in central america yeah that makes a lot of sense i've often times wondered about why it was it's like you say deeper because the people were they could actually travel down there too and did you travel down there in the 80s in 90s yes um i um only well i uh i spent time in nicaragua during the revolution,
Again i am like the cautious person and i did not go to el salvador or or guatemala during those years and in fact when i was getting ready to write my dissertation i felt like the really brave and committed people in my program were working on el salvador in guatemala and planning to go down there and spend time and and i chose the easier way out by going to nicaragua and costa rica but you know i worked with a lot of guatemalans and salvadorans and still do um because now in the area where i live north of boston there's very large immigrant populations from central america too so a lot of my students are immigrants and um there's huge guatemalan and salvadoran communities and hunter and now also oh sure hondurans right,
So that well but still being in nicaragua during the contra war must have been intense yeah i mean i was primarily in managua not in the areas where the war was actually going on but but living in a revolutionary country was very intense anyway um even without being directly exposed to the war certainly the effects of the war in terms of its effects on the economy and on everybody really and and the politics so yeah it was it was a really um a really life-changing experience can you tell our listeners who maybe aren't in the know about the significance of the sandinista revolution what its role was in in central america and even u.s and world history,
Well so the united states has considered central america and the caribbean its backyard really since the end of the 19th century since the united states occupied the territory that it currently occupies um it started immediately continued its expansion from the continent to overseas um so in 1898 of course the united states takes cuba puerto rico the philippines um and then quickly begins long-term military occupations in haiti in the dominican republic and in nicaragua and um if not long-term military occupations economic intervention and control and periodic shorter interventions in places like honduras guatemala el salvador so nicaragua,
All of central america nicaragua underwent the longest u.s occupation from 1912 until 1933 um so the two full decades at the beginning of the 20th century um and that really shaped nicaragua's development and nicaragua's politics obviously and as in other countries with that the united states occupied for long periods of time one of the things that the united states wanted to do was to reform politics and in particular the military to promote u.s economic goals in the region and u.s economic control so this meant creating a new national guard which they did in the dominican republic in haiti and in nicaragua and promoting loyal clients who would run the country in the case of nicaragua it was anastasio somosa who was head of the national guard,
And whose dynasty there were three of them two long term and one short term um then ruled nicaragua basically at u.s behest until the successful revolution of 1979. so um what does it mean to run the country at the us behest it means that land it becomes more and more concentrated and exit land and access to land for the poor peasants indigenous people has been a key issue um in all of central america's history uh so the concentration of land in the hands of a few and um the reliance on u.s investment and an export economy where where nicaragua's main products are exported to the united states and u.s companies control large sectors of of the economy so um [Music] the san diego revolution which started in the started coming together resistance movements,
I mean there was resistance to the us occupation during the occupation um by augusta augusto who who the sandinista movement of the 1960s was named after guerrilla resistance that eventually was one of the main reasons that the united states was forced to leave nicaragua was the armed resistance ongoing to u.s occupation um so the sandinista movement of the 1960s 1970s mobilized large sectors of the population uh against the dictatorship of the second anastasiosomosa the son of the original anastasiosomosa um who became more and more corrupt and violent as his rule was threatened and that succeeded in in turning even larger sectors of the population against him,
But the sandinistas had a truly revolutionary project to transform the country and to mobilize the people in the interests of this transformation and that was what was so amazing and dramatic about it and like i always think about it when i give political talks here and people say well what can we do there's nothing we can do it's you know the system is too too big to entrench too strong i feel that way sometimes too but i've just had so much experience where some of the poorest and most dispossessed people with the fewest resources on the planet have mobilized to bring about really dramatic social change,
And they didn't stop and say oh well it's too hard we can't do it we don't have the resources they just did it and continue to do it because where i work in colombia now too i see the same thing happening so the idea was to completely transform the economy by basically taking from the rich and giving to the poor um turning the interests the the resources of the state over to creating a social welfare state building an education system building a health care system and a major land reform taking uh land from the large landowners and turning it over to state farms,
And peasant production so you know that's kind of what i witnessed and experienced in the time that i was there was this huge mobilization of the population with the belief that they could really remake their society into one based on social justice um so this also of course really inspired the revolutionary movements that were also ongoing in guatemala and el salvador um the you remember the slogans in nicaragua el salvador since since nicaragua won their struggle um el salvador will also win um but movements that have the same kind of vision transformative and mobilizing vision for for radical social change and of course the united states um did not want to allow this to happen especially because they were afraid it would spread.
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