Today was the 28th–yes, twenty eighth (time flies!)–anniversary of the seizure of power by the Sandinista Front for National Liberation (FSLN) in Nicaragua’s revolution after some clashes with the brutal Somoza dictatorship.
The photo above is from a demonstration in central Managua leading up to the tenth anniversary celebration. I was there in June, 1989, as part of a pre-electoral observation project. Of course, less than a year later, the FSLN would be voted out of power.*
And today, the FSLN celebrated its first Revolution Day back in power, its leader from the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Ortega, having been voted back in as President (thanks, in part, to some crafty institutional engineering) in late 2006.
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* I still have posted in my UCSD office a newspaper cartoon from 1990 that depicted a disheveled little Daniel Ortega arriving on the Cuban shore on a rickety raft and a big burly Fidel Castro hovering over him and saying “You lost a what??“
