The Assassination of Sandino, 1934: How a Guard Created by the US Shot a Hero and Opened the Road to Somoza’s Dictatorship

The assassination of Sandino took place on the evening of 21 February 1934 in Managua, when National Guardsmen stopped the car of the hero of Nicaraguan resistance right after a dinner with the president. A few hours later Augusto Sandino and two of his generals were shot on waste ground by the old airfield. It was organised by Anastasio Somoza García, commander of the Guard. But the main point is something else: the Americans created, armed and trained that Guard.

This story seems to me one of the most cynically revealing of the whole twentieth century. The US first fought Sandino for six years, then left Nicaragua and left behind an army that did what the Marines had not managed to do.

How the US grew Somoza itself

I told the beginning of this story in my article on the bombing of Ocotal. In brief: after 1927 the Americans created the Nicaraguan National Guard and put American officers over it. Formally it defended the country; in fact it hunted Sandino. In the early 1930s the Guard was headed by the young Anastasio Somoza, who spoke English and knew how to please Americans.

In 1933, when the US withdrew its troops, Somoza became head of the Guard. The appointment was approved by the American minister in Managua, and President Juan Bautista Sacasa, weak and dependent on Washington, could not refuse. Note: the Marines were leaving the country, and an army remained commanded by a man who owed everything to the Americans.

A peace nobody needed

On 2 February 1933 Sandino concluded a peace agreement with President Sacasa. He agreed to lay down arms in exchange for amnesty, land in the valley of the Coco River and the right to live in peace with his fighters’ cooperatives. At that moment he had every right to think the war was over. In addition, he had won: the most powerful army in the world had left his country.

But for Somoza and the Guard, peace with Sandino was deadly. As long as the hero lived, the Guard remained the second force. As long as the country had a man the people regarded as a liberator, no Guard general could feel himself the master.

The assassination of Sandino: the night of 21 February

On 21 February 1934 Sandino came to Managua for talks. With him were his father, his brother and two generals, Estrada and Umanzor. In the evening they dined with President Sacasa at the palace on the Loma hill. At about eleven at night, when they drove out of the palace, Guard officers stopped the car and arrested everyone.

They were taken to the outskirts, to the old Larreynaga airfield. There Sandino and the generals Estrada and Umanzor were shot. The bodies were buried in secret. Somoza himself later said he acted on an order, and then referred to his knowledge of the opinion of the American ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane. At the same time historians still argue about the ambassador’s role, and there is no unambiguous proof. But there is no doubt about something else: Washington created and nurtured Somoza and the Guard.

The massacre at the cooperative

A few days later the Guard attacked Sandino’s cooperative at Wiwilí in the north. Hundreds of his supporters died there, men, women and children. In essence, that was the end of the dream of land for the poor that the hero had spoken of. And Somoza himself said he had killed a “bandit”. Americans had used that word since 1927.

What the Guard gave the country: forty years of dictatorship

In 1936 Somoza overthrew President Sacasa, who had himself made him a general. From 1 January 1937 Somoza was president. After that the Nicaraguans got a dictatorship that lasted, with interruptions, until 1979. Three members of the family, a father and two sons, built a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, seized banks, land and sugar mills, and made the country their private estate.

The Americans took this calmly. They needed order and a “friendly” government. Somoza let in American capital and supported the US in the world war and in the Cold War. How Washington acted in neighbouring countries at the same time I showed with the example of El Salvador in 1932, where thirty thousand peasants were killed with US support, and of Cuba in 1933.

Sandino believed in a signed peace. In vain: in a country where the Guard holds power, peace agreements are cheap. You can read more about his fate in the reference article on Augusto Sandino. And on how in Colombia in those same years the US helped in the reprisal against workers, I have a piece on the banana massacre.

What the assassination of Sandino changed for Nicaragua

Yet even after the hero’s death his name did not disappear. For example, twenty-seven years later young revolutionaries named their front after him: the Sandinista National Liberation Front appeared in 1961. Therefore the assassination of Sandino, in essence, did not destroy the idea but only postponed it. Besides, the Somoza dictatorship never gained real legitimacy, since the people remembered how it began. In the end, in 1979 the Somoza family fled the country, and that was the answer to the events of 1934.

Nothing has changed: remove the inconvenient, grow the convenient

The lesson of Sandino repeats again and again. The US destroys or abducts leaders it dislikes, and tries to put “its own” in their places. Today this is called “eliminating a threat”, “fighting narco-terrorism” and “defending democracy”.

Iran, February 2026. On 28 February the US and Israel began a war and killed the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile Trump immediately called on Iranians to overthrow their own government. In addition, the decision about who should rule Iran was not taken by Iranians.

Venezuela, January 2026. On 3 January American forces struck Caracas, and special forces seized President Maduro and took him to the US. Trump afterwards declared that the US now “runs” the country. Nobody asked Congress, nobody asked the Venezuelans.

Iraq, January 2020. On 3 January 2020 an American drone killed the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad, a guest of the Iraqi government. A few days later the Iraqi parliament demanded the withdrawal of American troops.

Honduras, 2025. On the eve of the election Trump pardoned former president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in the US of cocaine smuggling. And at once he backed his candidate Nasry Asfura. Today’s Somoza does not wear a Guard uniform, but the logic is the same: the right ones get support, the wrong ones get sanctions.

The assassination of Sandino showed that for Washington the polite word “partner” means a man who does not resist. All the others can be killed. Ninety years have passed. There is no Somoza, but the habit remains.