Background
Carlos Fonseca Amador was born in Matagalpa on 23 June 1937.
Carlos Fonseca Amador was born in Matagalpa on 23 June 1937.
After Fidel Castro came to power in January 1959, a small group of Cubans and Nicaraguans—including Fonseca Amador—had landed on the Caribbean coast but were decimated by the Nicaraguan National Guard.
Fonseca, together with a group of other dissidents from the Socialist Party of Nicaragua, the country’s orthodox Communist Party, created the Sandinista Liberation Front in 1962, to wage guerrilla war on the Somoza regime in the same region that Augusto Cæsar Sandino had fought the U.S. Marines in 1927— 1928. In late 1964 Fonseca Amador was arrested. Then, in the aftermath of university student sit-in strikes, as well as efforts to discipline Guard officers engaged in unauthorized violence and torture. President René Schick Gutiérrez intervened and saved Fonesca from almost certain death. After being sentenced to prison by a civilian court, he was allowed to go into exile.
In late 1966 a group of FSLN fighters, fresh from training in Cuba, surfaced in Pancasán, Matagalpa. Fonseca Amador’s activities for the next four years remain obscure. However, some FSLN elements sought to establish an urban guerrilla force, an effort that was smashed by the Guard by July 1969.
The focus of the Frente activities then shifted briefly to Costa Rica. In Sep¬tember 1969 Fonseca Amador was arrested there on a charge of bank robbery. Numerous efforts to secure his release failed until in October 1970 a FSLN team hijacked a Costa Rican airliner with four U.S. citizens aboard. The plane and passengers were released only after Fonseca Amador and three fellow FSLN members were freed and flown to Cuba.
After Fonseca’s flight to Cuba, the FSLN began to build a network of student organizations, neighborhood committees, rural organizations, women’s groups, and sectors within the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the wave of repression that followed the December 27, 1974, seizure by FSLN of many prominent guests at a farewell party for U.S. Ambassador Turner Sheldon, and the resulting release of 14 prisoners and payment of a $1 million ransom, Carlos Fonseca Amador was killed in the northern mountains.
After the FSLN came to power in July 1979, Fonseca Amador’s picture— along with Sandino’s—came to adorn the National Palace, billboards, wall murals, and textbooks.