Once in Cuba Fonseca began to seriously study
Augusto César Sandino, whom
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara respected greatly; Guevara repeatedly cited Sandino as a revolutionary hero. Fonseca also began to host political meetings in a small apartment in the Miramar section of Havana that were frequented by a number of Nicaraguan exiles who would later become part of the FSLN. On his return to Nicaragua, after visits to Venezuela and Costa Rica, he was arrested again and extradited to Guatemala where he was confined in
El Petén and made friends with the future Commander of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR, Revolutionary Armed Forces) of Guatemala,
Luis Augusto Turcios Lima. Fonseca escaped from custody and fled to El Salvador, from which he returned to Nicaragua via Havana with the help of Tomás Borge and Julio Jérez.
Initial attempts at insurrection Between 1959 and 1963, Fonseca and those who would become the earliest members of the FSLN began to organise in the hopes of forming a true revolutionary organization. In 1961, together with other comrades, Fonseca founded the Movimiento Nueva Nicaragua (MNN, New Nicaragua Movement). The MNN had three cells, in Managua, León and
Estelí. He published "The Ideology of Sandino" at this time. The MNN then transformed itself into a group known as the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN, the National Liberation Front), which took its name from the movement fighting French colonialism in Algeria. At a meeting of the FLN held in Honduras in July, Fonseca proposed the name "Sandinista National Liberation Front" for the armed revolutionary organization. His suggestion met opposition from more orthodox Marxists within the organization who argued that Sandino fought against foreign occupation but not imperialism. It took several years for the organization to rename itself the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. Together with the veteran Sandinista Santos López, Fonseca studied the possibility of armed struggle on the ground reaching the banks of the Coco River. Inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution, and in particular Castro and Guevara's insistence on the primary role of an armed uprising, while giving less importance to political organizing among the peasantry and urban workers, Fonseca and Santos López tried to copy the Cuban movement's tactics, down to adopting a timetable modeled on the amount of time that passed from the outbreak of hostilities in Cuba's
Sierra Maestra mountains to the guerrillas's march into Havana. The results were disastrous. In mid-1963, a poorly-armed, largely inexperienced and disorganized guerrilla cadre entered the Rios Coco y Bocay area of Nicaragua. Largely unable to communicate with the
Sumo-speaking peasants of the region, and having done little advance work in the area, several guerrillas were killed by the Guardia Nacional in a confrontation in August, while Fonseca and others were able to make it across the Honduran border over the next month.
Turn away from guerrilla tactics The rout of the FSLN guerrillas in 1963 nearly eliminated the organization. As Jacinto Suárez, who joined the FSLN in 1963 in Managua, later said, the organization's membership at that time amounted to only ten guerrillas in the mountains and twenty or so youths in Managua and León. "Those were years in which we had nothing—we have to admit it—we had absolutely nothing! A wood frame for making silk-screen posters. One safe house. A box of colored markers. A few yards of cloth. Two pistols at the most. And plenty of desire to do something.". In June 1964, Fonseca and Víctor Tirado were arrested in Managua. The two (along with four others) were accused of plotting to assassinate
Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Rather than present a defense during his trial, Fonseca leveled charges against Somoza which were later detailed in his essay,
From Prison, I Accuse the Dictatorship. On January 6, 1965, Fonseca was deported to Guatemala, then deported to Mexico a few days later. He married María Haydée Terán, with whom he had fallen in love in prison, later that year. While Fonseca continued to hold the top leadership position in the FSLN during this period, he was out of the country for much of it, writing several pieces about the poet
Rubén Darío while working with colleagues within Nicaragua. In his speech to the court Fonseca had acknowledged the weakness of the FSLN and advocated instead seeking unity with other anti-Somocista and revolutionary forces. That translated in practice into educational work and
community organizing, creating indoctrination classes and campaigning to bring resources to working-class neighborhoods in Managua. These efforts were largely unsuccessful, as the FSLN lost ground among students while making little or no progress expanding its membership elsewhere. Fonseca later condemned this turn to legal work instead of armed struggle as a mistake that nearly led to the FSLN's disappearance as an independent revolutionary force.
Years of clandestine struggle, prison and exile By mid-1966, plans for a second FSLN guerrilla operation in the Pancasan region (near Matagalpa) were under way. The operation began in May 1967 with about forty guerrillas. This time, the guerrillas were better trained and armed and had women among their ranks. Fonseca, along with a few other FSLN leaders were committed to the inclusion of women, but some of the other fighters were not comfortable fighting alongside women. Like the earlier guerrilla incursion, the Pancasan operation ended with many of the FSLN guerrillas killed by the Guardia Nacional and the survivors retreating to Honduras. However, Fonseca and the others who survived considered the operation a political victory "because it showed the whole country that the FSLN still existed". The FSLN adopted an even more uncompromising attitude, criticizing other opposition groups as well as its own members for their lack of revolutionary commitment. The state responded to the Pancasan operation by increasing the repression of the peasantry, forcing the FSLN to redirect its efforts to organizing underground urban networks. The FSLN created a network of safe houses and developed a culture of pseudonyms, code words and other security measures, while assassinating one of the Somoza regime's torturers and robbing banks and businesses to raise money for the movement. Fonseca escaped capture by hiding in the homes of people not associated with the FSLN, most notably his stay, disguised as a priest, for a week in November 1967 in the second floor of the Managua home of Dame
Angelica Balladares de Arguello, who had been the former President of the Feminist League, "Woman of the Américas" in 1959, and since 1926 known as "The First Lady of Nicaraguan Liberalism". His efforts to escape detection gave rise to a body of legends about his supposed skill at disguising himself and slipping past the police and military. Fonseca left the underground life in Nicaragua for Costa Rica, where he reassessed the last few years of legal and guerrilla activity in an essay titled
Hora Cero, while writing the first draft of what became known as the
Programa Historico, which was then circulated among other members of the FSLN leadership. Those able to travel to Costa Rica adopted the program in July or August 1969. On August 31, 1969 he was captured in a house in Alajuela, Costa Rica. An operation to obtain his release ended in failure in December; his wife María Haydée Terán and
Humberto Ortega were captured in the effort. Supporters in France and El Salvador demanded that Costa Rica release Carlos Fonseca and his companions, but it was not until October 21, 1970 that they were released after FSLN militants seized two American executives of
United Fruit Company by highjacking a Costa Rican commercial flight on which they were passengers, then exchanging them for Fonseca, Ortega and the other prisoners involved in the failed prison break attempt. Fonseca left first for Mexico, then Cuba, where he remained until 1975. While in exile Fonseca undertook extensive research on Nicaragua's history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, producing five books and essays about Sandino and several short works about Rigoberto López Pérez, who assassinated Anastasio Somoza García in 1956.
Divisions within the Sandinista movement During his years in Havana disagreements over fundamental issues of political direction surfaced between the exiles and those still working in Nicaragua and among the exiles: how much to emphasize military tactics rather than political organizing, whether to focus on urban rather than rural warfare, the role that different social classes should play in the struggle, the timing and pace of revolutionary action, vanguardism, and alliances with other parties and groups. These differences eventually produced three distinct factions within the FSLN: (1) the Prolonged Popular War (GPP) faction, led by Fonseca, Borge, and Henry Ruíz, that emphasized guerrilla war, (2) the Proletarian Tendency, led by
Jaime Wheelock Román, Luis Carrión, and Carlos Nuñez, which focused on organizing factory workers and barrio dwellers, and (3) the Tercerista faction of Humberto Ortega Saavedra,
Daniel Ortega Saavedra, and Víctor Tirado, which worked to establish tactical alliances with businessmen, religious leaders, and professionals. These ideological conflicts were deepened by the personal animosities between some leaders: as an example, Borge and Wheelock not only disagreed on ideological issues but loathed each other. Fonseca attempted to address these divisions by urging each tendency to avoid ideological rigidity, but failed; while the FSLN did not split, factional rivalries persisted. Factionalism reached its height in 1975, when the National Directorate expelled the principal leaders of the Proletarian Tendency, dealing a serious blow to the FSLN's urban support base. Those differences were not resolved until 1979, on the eve of victory over Somoza and several years after Fonseca's death.
Return to Nicaragua and death Fonseca had been planning to resume his work within Nicaragua since 1970. The crisis within the movement finally moved him in 1975 to return to Nicaragua, where he met with those activists in charge of the FSLN's urban networks at a safe house outside Managua to discuss their political disagreements and to create the support needed for a military assault on the regime. Fonseca died on November 8, 1976, in the area known as Boca de Piedra located at the foot of Cerro Zinica in the region of the same name in the municipality of Waslala, between Waslala and Siuna, in the department of Zelaya in the Autonomous Region of the North Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. Eyewitnesses indicate that Carlos Fonseca was killed after being captured.
Legacy While Tomás Borge was in prison in Matagalpa a colonel in the National Guard told him that Fonseca had died, to which Borge replied "You are mistaken, Colonel, Carlos Fonseca is among the dead who never die." That remark set the tone for the FSLN's subsequent treatment of Fonseca, particularly after the revolution that finally drove the last Somoza out of Nicaragua. In the mid 1980s, musician
Paul Kantner traveled to Nicaragua out of concern for the Sandinista situation. While in the country, he was given a song called "Comandante Carlos Fonseca", written by composer
Carlos Mejía Godoy and revolutionary
Tomás Borge. After reforming
Jefferson Starship in the 1990s, he added the song to his repertoire, eventually recording the song for the 2008 album ''
Jefferson's Tree of Liberty''. Yet while the FSLN continued to pay tribute to the memory of "a safely dead and saintly Carlos", it departed from many of the policies he argued for in his years in exile, giving less priority to land reform and elevating military necessity over popular mobilization in fighting the
contras.
Personal life Fonseca married María Haydée Terán in exile in Mexico in 1965. María Haydée was two years younger than Carlos, from a well-known family of liberal dissidents in León; her father and brother were members of the Independent Liberal Party (PLI). Her family owned a publishing house, Editorial Antorcha, and a bookstore near the University. She maintained contacts with student activists and participated in different protests against the dictatorship. María Haydée met Carlos Fonseca at a clandestine meeting but did not know who he was until her boyfriend at that time, Octavio Robleto, heard the description of the meeting and told her. On November 24, 1966, their son Carlos was born. Their daughter Tania was born on January 29, 1969.
Allegations of KGB links In his book
The World Was Going Our Way,
Vasily Mitrokhin relates that, as part of the KGB's
Aleksandr Shelepin's strategy of using national liberation movements to advance the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the Third World, Shelepin organized funding and training in Moscow for twelve individuals handpicked by Fonseca, who were the core of the new Sandinista organization. However, Russia historian
J. Arch Getty, writing in the
American Historical Review, raised questions about the trustworthiness and verifiability of Mitrokhin's material about the Soviet Union, doubting whether this "self-described loner with increasingly anti-Soviet views" would have had the opportunity to "transcribe thousands of documents, smuggle them out of KGB premises", etc. Former Indian counter-terrorism chief
Bahukutumbi Raman also questions both the validity of the material and the conclusions drawn from them. ==Writings==