Republic of Nicaragua

  

Republic of Nicaragua República de Nicaragua (es)
1838–1985
Flag Coat of arms
Motto: En Dios confiamos
Anthem: Salve a ti, Nicaragua
Capital	Managua
Common languages	Spanish English (de facto)
Religion	Roman Catholicism
Government	Unitary presidential republic
President
• 1838–1839	José Núñez (first)
• 1979–1985	Trinidad Salazar (last)
Vice President
• 1893–1894	Anastasio Ortiz (first)
• 1979–1985	Sergio Zeledón (last)
Legislature	National Assembly
Historical era	Modern
• Independence from Spain	1821
• Independence from FRCA	May 31 1838
• Treaty of Sonsonate	October 5 1985
Currency	Córdoba (NIS)
ISO 3166 code	NI
Preceded by Succeeded by Federal Republic of Central America Federation of Central America

The Republic of Nicaragua (Spanish: República de Nicaragua) was the largest country in Central America, bordered by Honduras to the north, Costa Rica to the south, the Caribbean to the west and the Pacific Ocean to the east, which existed as an independent state from 1838 until it joined the new Federation of Central America in 1985. Nicaragua remained a small agrarian nation in the 19th and much of the early 20th century, developing a "banana republic" economy geared towards the production of a single agricultural product (coffee), until the opening of the Nicaragua Canal in 1919 made it a center for the passage of shipping between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. From then until Nicaragua became part of the FCA canal transit fees have provided nearly half of government revenue.

Originally inhabited by various indigenous cultures since ancient times, the territory of Nicaragua became part of the Spanish Empire from the 16th century until the early 1800s. Nicaragua became a part of the First Mexican Empire in 1821, was a part of the United Provinces of Central America in 1823, and then became an independent republic in its own right in 1838. The Mosquito Coast region along Nicaragua's Caribbean coast was autonomous from the central government for decades, until 1894, and has different cultures and ethnic groups. The country's government was heavily divided between Liberal and Conservative factions, with multiple coups, rebellions, and counter-coups during the period from the 1840s until the early 1860s. Several decades of Conservative leadership followed until the election of José Santos Zelaya in 1893 of the National Liberal Party. He implemented several reforms, including compulsory public education, improved national railways and steamboat lines, created a professional army in the form of the Guardia Nacional (National Guard), and constitutional reforms. He also acquired the Mosquito Coast for Nicaragua from the British Empire in 1894, which had been a quasi-British protectorate. However, his attempts to assert Nicaraguan sovereignty brought him at odds with foreign powers, namely Sierra. From 1907 the Sierran government began viewing Zelaya's Nicaragua a threat to Sierran hegemony in the region, and to stability in Central America as Zelaya supported restoring a federal united states of Central America. Since the 1840s Central American nations had been divided with constant fighting between pro-unification Liberal and pro-independence Conservative factions, with governments providing support to their respective allies in other countries. Sierra and the conservative government in Honduras also began financing Zelaya's opposition.

President Zelaya had allowed France to begin preparatory work on a possible Nicaragua Canal between the Pacific and the Caribbean, and this was also seen a direct threat to Sierran interests, which rivaled the European powers for ports in Latin America. In October 1908, after Nicaragua supported a failed uprising in Honduras, Sierra used it as a pretext for an intervention and had the Sierran Royal Marines take over several port towns. The Nicaraguan National Assembly removed Zelaya from office, placing the conservative Luis Filipe Estrada as president while Zelaya fled to exile in Mexico. President Estrada formally requested Sierran Prime Minister Henry Gage to provide military support to his government, leading to a larger force of Marines being deployed to Nicaragua in the summer of 1910. During the next decade, Sierra would increase its influence in the Central American nation and completed the construction of the Nicaragua Canal in 1919. Sierran officers trained Nicaragua's National Guard and created a new gendarmerie police force, the Guardia Civil (based on the Spanish Civil Guard). The military and police were given the task of maintaining order and eradicating banditry. Estrada's conservative-liberal coalition lasted until 1924, when a combination of the Sierran military occupation and an attempt by Estrada to extend his presidential term led to a rebellion. A group of liberal rebels funded by Mexico and the United Commonwealth took over many cities, with conservative and liberal forces fighting in urban warfare. The war was indecisive, and the Sierran Minister of Foreign Affairs negotiated a ceasefire and created a new power-sharing agreement in 1926. A guerrilla war by a renegade general named Augusto Sandino would continue into the 1930s, and he received Continental funding and support as part of Secretariat Seamus Callahan's goal spreading of Landonism to Latin America.

The presidency of Bartolomé Montojo from 1926 saw the negotiations for the end of Sierra's military occupation of Nicaragua, but as one of the conditions the Sierran government made Montojo appoint Oscar Valderrama as the Secretary of Interior in 1931. A Civil Guard officer trained at Sierra's Military College of San Fransisco, he became the Chief of the Civil Guard in 1927 and oversaw an effective campaign that almost entirely eradicated banditry in the countryside and reduced Sandino's insurgency to a minor force. He was very ambitious and ruthless; in 1932 he invited General Sandino to peace talks where he had him murdered, and in 1933 he pressured Montojo to resign and call a new election. The election resulted in an overwhelming victory for one of his subordinates as the candidate from Valderrama's National Republican Party, and he was the power behind the throne as both the Secretary of Interior and War. In 1937 Valderrama himself was elected president and would remain in power until 1964, when he was succeeded by his relatives. The his successors would rule Nicaragua as a military dictatorship until the outbreak of the Central American crisis in 1979, using the Civil Guard as its secret police, with support from the government of Sierra. A Landonist uprising in 1979 led to a civil war that toppled the Valderrama government, and together with a similar conflict in El Salvador, these events to a peace agreement that recreated a united Federation of Central America in 1985 – the agreement being mediated by the Conference of American States (CAS) and the OMEAD.

History

From colony to nation state

Map of Central America in the 1860s

After centuries as part of the Spanish Empire, Nicaragua became part of the Mexican Empire at its independence from Spain, and later was part of the Federal Republic of Central America from 1823, the first attempt to created a unified independent country in the region. The union project was supported by Liberal movements in the Central American states of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica, but it was opposed by many local factions. As a result by 1838 the federal union broke down, and the former constituent states of the Federal Republic became independent countries in their own right. The Republic of Nicaragua considered May 31, 1838, its independence day.

Since the collapse of the Federal Republic of Central America the small agrarian nations of the region remained politically divided between Liberal and Conservative factions, with the former supporting unionism while the latter advocated for independence of their individual countries. The Conservatives saw integration as a threat to their own power, and were backed by the wealthy land-owning elite and traditional Roman Catholics, while Liberals advocated for a democratic and united Central America with religious pluralism. Nicaragua's economy came to be dominated by a single product, coffee, with the land-owning elites monopolizing most of the profit while the majority of the population had a rural existence. Those elites as well as the two major political factions employed their own private armies. Nicaragua's early history was defined by this conflict, with the 1840s and 1850s seeing presidents from Liberal and Conservative parties rise and fall in quick succession. The Liberal elite were established in León while the Conservative elite had its power base in Granada. The conflict was not resolved until 1857, when an attempt by the American William Walker to set himself up as the president of Nicaragua was prevented by a coalition of Central American countries. This solidified the Conservative control over the state and began over 30 years of relatively stable Conservative rule in Nicaragua which did not break down until 1893. Rivalry inside the Conservative Party between the factions of Roberto Sacasa and Joaquín Zavala led to a victory for the National Liberal Party for the first time in decades, bringing to power José Santos Zelaya in July 1893.

President José Zelaya led the country from 1893 to 1909

The election of President Zelaya in 1893 put into motion events that would end this cycle in Nicaragua. Because the other Central American countries had a similar Liberal-Conservative divide, and each of them used its time being in power to also assist its allies in neighboring countries to help bring them to power, there were frequently conflicts among them. This was mostly confined to the region, but from the 1880s the Anglo-American powers of Sierra, the United Commonwealth, and Brazoria began taking interest in Central America because their companies had economic projects there involving fruit production, and lobbied their governments to back their interests. European powers like Germany and the United Kingdom also sought to gain strategically important ports in the region. The Kingdom of Sierra in particular had a strong interest in connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans with a canal through the isthmus of Central America, to allow a direct connection to its territory of Cancún, and began negotiating with President Zelaya for rights to build the Nicaragua Canal though his country (Panama and Nicaragua were seen as the two best sites for a canal). As a result of these factors from the early 1890s the external involvement in Central America would increase.

At first President Zelaya was amenable to Sierran interests, and agreed to allow the government of Sierra to work on the Canal. However a crisis in 1894–1895 quickly changed the situation. The Miskito Coast region along Nicaragua's Caribbean coastline was de facto autonomous and was a British protectorate since 1860, although in theory Nicaragua had full sovereignty over it. In February 1894, the president took advantage of the death of the autonomous tribal chieftan to occupy the region and take direct control of it for the Nicaraguan government. In response, the British landed a small force of troops at the port town of Corinto in July 1894 and occupied part of the region, only for a stronger Nicaraguan invasion to detain and arrest them. Sierra provided diplomatic backing for British interests, but by November 1894 Britain agreed to let Nicaragua take full control over the Mosquito Coast as that part of the world was not as strategically important to the British Empire and was not worth fighting a war. The success boosted Zelaya's popularity among the people but put him on a negative course against the Western powers. At the same time as this happened, in late 1893 and early 1894, Nicaraguan troops intervened in Honduras to put the Liberal Policarpo Bonilla into the presidency of Honduras.

End of the Zelaya administration

Sierran Royal Marines preparing to depart Porciúncula for deployment to Nicaragua in 1908

The Nicaraguan dictator's toppling of the Conservative and pro-Sierran Honduran regime of General Ponciano Leiva led to the Sierran Foreign Ministry's Division of Latin American Affairs describing Zelaya's Nicaragua in an August 1894 report to the House of Commons of Sierra as a threat to Sierran hegemony in the region and to "peace and stability in Central America". Zelaya hoped to create a Federal Central America with himself as the new nation's president, and this threatened a Central American war that would severely disrupt Anglo-American economic interests. Sierra's direct military invention in the region remained limited at the time, however. With recent revolutions, Liberals now controlled Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador by the autumn of 1894. Negotiations between the three states began and in June 1895 they prepared the Treaty of Amapala, which sought to create a Greater Republic of Central America. Sierra, Brazoria, Acadiana, Florida, and the United Commonwealth recognized the new nation in December 1896. Integration projects continued until another uprising toppled the Liberal government of El Salvador, and its new leader pulled his country out of the union. The "Greater Republic" project was officially dissolved in November 1898 and largely ended Zelaya's aspirations for hegemony over Central America. Still, as time went on the Sierran Government increasingly wanted to overthrow the Zelaya administration.

Zelaya also changed Nicaragua domestically during his term. He implemented administrative and civil reforms to improve governance, created a more professional army by establishing the Guardia Nacional (National Guard) and hired European officers to train it, built railways and lines of communication, among other reforms. Since the growth in the popularity of coffee in North America and Europe during the 19th century, from the 1870s coffee production in Nicaragua expanded massively, becoming the main export of the country. Looking to further increase revenue and facing more hostility and suspicion from Sierra, Zelaya granted French investors more rights to the building of the potential Nicaragua Canal in early 1897 and sought loans from France. The Sierran government increasingly considered Nicaragua to be strategically important, especially as its rival, the United Commonwealth, began serious efforts to construct the Panama Canal. He was reelected in 1902 and 1906 despite Sierran assistance to his Conservative and Liberal opposition during those elections. With the election of a Conservative candidate in Honduras in early 1903, tensions began to rise between Nicaragua and Honduras. The failure of his Greater Republic of Central America in the 1890s and the signing of a Honduran friendship treaty with Guatemala and El Salvador in 1906 was seen by President Zelaya as an anti-Nicaraguan alliance. There was also the unresolved Nicaraguan-Honduran border dispute on their northwestern frontier. In response he allowed Honduran Liberal exiles to live in Nicaragua and provided them with support.

The brewing crisis in Central America would lead to the end of Zelaya's administration. In February 1907, a force of Liberal exiles invaded Honduras, with support from the Nicaraguan National Guard, to overthrow the Conservative government of Manuel Bonilla, who had effectively become a dictator. Although the Honduran Army received support from Salvadoran forces, with Nicaraguan support by March 1907 the capital had fallen to the invaders and a provisional government was formed. Sierran Prime Minister Robert Landon disapproved of Nicaraguan involvement in the internal affairs of Honduras, seeing it as Zelaya's attempt to conquer the entire region, and deployed Royal Marines to Amapala as well as sending the Sierran Royal Navy's Flying Squadron to the Gulf of Fonseca. They were soon joined by the United Commonwealth Navy, which sent elements of its South Atlantic Squadron to the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua, where Continental Army and Marine troops landed. This stopped their advance against the last of Bonilla's forces and allowed the Honduran president to take shelter aboard a Sierran cruiser, while the K.S. minister to Central America, William L. Merry, negotiated a ceasefire. To protect Anglo-American and Sierran business interests in Honduras and the region, Prime Minister Landon invited the region's leaders to Porciúncula for a "Central American Peace Conference" where he mediated negotiations. The resulting Porciúncula Treaty of 1907 forced the five countries to not provide support to exiles, to not recognize revolutionary governments that seized power illegally, and to recognize the neutrality of Honduras. The Central American Court of Justice was also established to mediate future disputes. It was signed by the five nations and by Sierra and the United Commonwealth as guarantors.

Despite the Porciúncula Treaty, Nicaragua would covertly support another failed uprising in Honduras in the spring of 1908. In response to this the administration of Prime Minister Robert Landon in Sierra decided to intervene directly in Nicaragua. At the request of Zelaya, the French Navy sent several cruisers to Nicaraguan ports to support his government, given France's interest in building the Nicaragua Canal. But France was not willing to go to war with Sierra over it. Honduras functioned as a Sierran staging ground, with two battalions of Royal Marines being deployed there and sent to the Nicaraguan border. In July 1908 President Zelaya was given an ultimatum from the Sierran government to accept Sierran control over the Nicaragua Canal Zone, and after his refusal the Marines crossed into northwestern Nicaragua. Another unit of Marines landed at the port of Corinto. A Nicaraguan National Guard unit was defeated in a battle outside of Corinto and there were rumors that the Sierrans would occupy Managua. Amidst the threat of a Sierran advance on the capital, the National Assembly voted to remove Zelaya from office and he stepped down on October 23, 1908. At the suggestion of the Sierran minister William Merry, the conservative Luis Felipe Estrada was appointed as president of Nicaragua by the parliament and was recognized by the Kingdom of Sierra.

Sierran military occupation

The new Estrada government immediately signed the Treaty of Managua, by which the Republic of Nicaragua granted the Kingdom of Sierra the right to develop the Nicaragua Canal and also granted it a lease on a naval base in the Gulf of Fonseca. A permanent deployment of Sierran Royal Marines to help maintain order in the country was also authorized by President Estrada. Domestically, Anglo-American companies had their investments there protected. The treaty made Nicaragua a quasi-protectorate of Sierra. With all of these concessions the fragile government of Luis Felipe Estrada lost popularity among the Nicaraguan population, and there was a rise of nationalism in response. But his administration was defended by the presence of about 1,200 Sierran Marines, mostly in Bluefields and in the capital. The troops present there also undertook efforts to train a Nicaraguan National Guard force that would be capable of protecting the Sierran-backed government. After the new Royalist administration of Prime Minister Henry Gage was elected in October 1909, he authorized "Dollar diplomacy," the lending of loans to the Nicaraguan government to keep it afloat financially. This meant that Sierran business interests also took control of the country's finances. The liberal opposition called Estrada a "sellout to the Porciúncula bankers" and rallied more support ahead of National Assembly elections. The Sierran legation in Managua reported in February 1910 that the country was becoming divided between the two factions, and believed that the conservatives were losing popularity because of their close association with Sierra. In response to this

Politics and government

Administrative divisions

Map of Nicaraguan departments

Nicaragua was divided into six departments.