¡a La Huelga!: Student Struggles to Improve Nicaragua’s Secondary Schools during the Dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle

In late 1976, secondary students at the Escuela Nacional de Comercio in Granada, Nicaragua walked off their campus to protest the administration’s mishandling of a sexual harassment case. Several young women had accused a popular teacher of making unwanted sexual advances, but the school’s director had refused to take action unless the teenagers could provide proof of misconduct. The protest galvanized students and families. While their children doubled down on their demands, adding to their list of grievances the school’s ineffective teaching staff, dictatorial director, and outdated equipment, parents formed a commission to meet with the Minister of Education. Within days, ministry-appointed mediators had agreed to many of the students’ requests and the strike was called off.

            The protest of the young Granadinos was one of many that took place in 1976. Throughout June, July and August, students at secondary schools across the country walked off their campuses to protest dismal conditions. Their strikes added to the nation’s political turmoil: Sandinistas had recently orchestrated several dramatic actions against the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family had governed the country since the 1930s. Strikingly, the teenage protestors did not reference that political situation in their communiqués and declarations, instead focusing on the quotidian difficulties associated with being a student in 1970s Nicaragua: poor funding, inept teachers and authoritarian directors. This paper analyzes the 1976 student protests to explore experiences of youth under the dictatorship and the ways in which they sought to shape their education and by extension their communities. I argue that amidst a decades-long dictatorship, student demands for more democratic schools opened up a relatively safe pathway for cross-generational activism that could force concessions from the Somoza regime. In so doing, students promoted an engaged civil society that would be essential to the success of the future revolution.