Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Campaign in Support of the Sandino Movement in Nicaragua, 1927–34

The history of transnational social and political movements is not well developed in spite of the growing appeal of the now fashionable transnational framework and of the growth of interest by historians in the network concept. My paper is part of an atempt to reconstruct the history of the transnational solidarity movement created around the figure of Augusto C. Sandino between 1927 and 1934. The larger frame in which the paper is embedded deals with the history of transnational networks of radicals, revolutionaries, exiles and vanguard intellectuals in the Greater Circum-Caribbean in the period between the two great world wars.
The major focus of Pan-American solidarity action in Latin America and the US in the second half of the 1920s was the defense of the military-political movement captained by Augusto C Sandino in Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933. The Sandino-solidarity movement was genuinely continental in scope - with significant centers of support in Western and Central Europe as well, but Mexico was its nerve centre the nerve center with the Hands off Nicaragua (MAFUENIC) group founded in Mexico City, an offshoot of the much broader Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas (LADLA), as its most important agitational centre. The paper examines the multiple forms that solidarity took- including: the issuing and circulation of printed material, political lobbying and the actions of a group of Latin American volunteers who went to Nicaragua to fight or assist in the political projection of the guerilla campaign. It also considers the ways in which the epic quality of the Sandino struggle engaged with the emergence of new forms of anti-imperialist and indo-latino discourse throughout the Americas.