35/19

In Nicaragua, anything can be turned into a political message – a telephone pole, a water tank, the side of a house. All you really need is a flat surface and a few cans of spray paint (red and black are the current style). Lately, the chosen media here in San Nicolas have been the boulders that line the only paved road into town. And the chosen message? “35/19. Buen Gobierno.”

It took us a little while to decode what this pair of numbers meant. But when we did the math, we figured out that 2014 marks the 35^th year since July 19, 1979, the day that the Sandinista revolutionaries overthrew the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.

Before the revolution of 1979, three different members of the Somoza family had been in power in Nicaragua since 1936. For years, this single family wielded a huge percentage of the wealth in Nicaragua, controlling whole industries and investing their money in things like drug smuggling and prostitution. When the 1972 earthquake struck, devastating much of Nicaragua, the Somozas channeled most of the emergency aid donated by other countries into their personal coffers. According to Stephen Kinzer, author of the book Blood of Brothers, while most Nicaraguans during the mid-1970s were struggling in extreme poverty to rebuild their houses and feed their families, the Somozas had amassed a billion dollars in wealth. Interestingly, the US government supported the Somoza dictatorship throughout this entire time.

The revolution that finally toppled Somoza in 1979 was led by the Sandinistas, a guerrilla group named for the Nicaraguan anti-imperialist legend Augusto Sandino. In the midst of a lot of violence, mounting public criticism of Somoza eventually forced him to flee Nicaragua. And when Somoza fled, the National Guard also fled, leaving the Sandinistas, to their surprise, in power.

This was not, unfortunately, the happy end to the story. The years that followed were ones of bloody war, with the Sandinistas eventually losing power when the war ended in 1990. Fast forward to 2006, when the Sandinistas were reelected under the political party Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN). This party, under the governance of President Daniel Ortega (a commander of the Sandinista movement in the 1980s), is now in their second term in office in Nicaragua.

So all of this is what we were celebrating with those numbers, 35/19. Out of all this, July 19 has become a national holiday, on which millions of people descend upon the plaza in Managua every year to hear the president speak. This year, four buses of enthusiastic patriots left San Nicolas to join the parade to Managua, tooting their horns and waving red and black FSLN flags. Apparently they didn't even make it anywhere near the plaza because there were so many people gathered around that single spot.

Here in San Nicolas, there was a 35/19 celebration earlier in the week. The mayor's office brought in a live band from Esteli and all of the little girls in town flocked to the stage to do traditional Nicaraguan dances.

The FSLN-governed mayor's office in San Nicolas does lots of good things like this for the people of San Nicolas. A couple of months ago, they handed out free roofs to anyone who needed one. They fund and host mother's day parties, give out bags of treats in December, and build much-needed structures like parks and roads. But there is also always a certain amount of pomp accompanying these charities. The FSLN never lets you forget which political party to thank.

To us, it seems a little strange that the FSLN political party paints their red and black flag on telephone poles even along the remotest campo roads. (Can you imagine if Obama spent government money to draw Democrat donkeys on telephone poles all over the country?) It seems a little strange that as you drive into Esteli, you are greeted by a gigantic billboard of Daniel Ortega's face. It seems a little strange that the government of a country where so much poverty still exists would spend the money on spray paint to paint, “Good Government!” on every rock along the Pan-American highway. “What happens to all of this if a different political party wins the next election?” we wonder.

But we also have to remember that Nicaragua is still finding its way into democracy. After so many years of brutal mistreatment under Somoza, Nicaragua under the FSLN is a little like a traumatized kid – it needs to know that everything is okay and that someone is taking care of it. And perhaps the kind of patriotism that the FSLN is creating in so many Nicaraguans is exactly what they need to assume a new, confident identity on the world stage.