Robert Sierakowski
In this paper, I consider the central role of women’s testimonies and accounts of counterinsurgency and massacres in rural Nicaragua during the final months of the Somoza dictatorship. I argue that the long-lasting effects of state violence remain the central determinant of political identity and visions of community history in Nicaragua to this day. The role of women in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) as guerrilleras fighting the regime’s National Guard—given its novelty in comparison to earlier guerrilla movements—has received great attention from foreign observers. In my regional case study (the northern department of Estelí, a bastion of Sandinismo), however, women formed a tiny minority of combatants. Instead, women of all ages participated prominently as a base of support for the revolutionaries, providing food, shelter and information for the FSLN while facing tremendous military repression for their actions.
Women’s deeply-gendered survivor accounts of massacres are key in conceptualizing how these events were grafted onto local visions of community, motherhood, political identity and revolution. Comparing the trajectories of different towns/villages and diverse modalities of repression, I argue that some women’s experiences of violence were silenced or distorted within certain locale while elsewhere they were magnified into “foundational narratives” of community and family. Against a view of monolithic “victimhood,” I also focus upon the forms of agency these women strategically embed in their narratives, from their actual roles in sustaining the guerrilla army to accounts of feigned ignorance and outright denunciations when faced by their antagonists.
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