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The FSLN of Nicaragua

The Background of the FSLN:

Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) or in English: The Sandinista National Liberation Front was established in Nicaragua in 1961 as a human rights guerilla revolutionary movement whose goal is to end racial discrimination. It was started by three students at the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua, José Carlos Fonseca Amador, Silvio Mayorga, and Tomás Borge Martínez in the late fifties. their initial intent was to see if they could create this organization that would grow into something big enough to have attacks on the government, which eventually they did accomplish but it took a little time before the organization had enough members to begin to do this. Their group struggled to grow into about twenty members a little while after it was first created. Many of these members had faced imprisonment there for making it hard for the group to grow big enough to do any thing since once they'd get a good number of members, many of them would be taken away making it so they had to start over again to recruit more members into the FSLN. From there the group continued to grow until it was finally big enough to launch limited military initiatives.

The Rise of the FSLN:

The FSLN's first big move happened on December 27, 1974, when they had taken a few leading Nicaraguan officials as hostages and had taken the home of a former government worker. That attack was not expected by the Government and that's why the small group was so successful. This same day the FSLN then became considered a national revolutionary movement because of their very successful attack on the Government, but they did have to pay a pretty high price for that successful attack. The Government then issued a retaliation against the FASL in which many of the members were arrested or were killed, including one of the founders, José Carlos Fonseca Amador. The Nicaragua Government also started many anti-FSLN campaigns. The attacks on the FSLN lasted nearly a year hurting the FSLN population wise, but luckily for the FSLN it practically became a trend among the common people of Nicaragua that while they were losing members many new ones were joining at the same time.

Women of the FSLN:

The FSLN was practically the first official coalition to have both male and female members in Latin America. one of the strategies of the FSLN was to actually reach out to the native woman to get them to join so they'd be able to have a larger population than if it were just then men and therefore they'd have a better chance of being supported by all and overthrowing the Government in Nicaragua. Society viewed them letting women in as being not a good thing at all. It was hard to convince women to join initially when there were no or very few women. Initially, though, women were not allowed into the FSLN as equals to men, but things eventually did change. Once the FSLN established equal rights for the men and women members, many woman began to join because the benefits while being in the FSLN were so much greater than trying to live under the Governments benefits which were very poor conditions.

It turns out though that most of the women in the FSLN were more educated than the men in the FSLN. The reason for this was because women out there getting an education while living in a country where it was considered social unacceptable for women to get an education were more exposed to violent acts and were therefore more motivated to join a coalition like the FSLN. Many of the women in the FSLN had even been through some college where as many of the men were much less educated and not as well off as lots of the FSLN women. The women generally also had less obligations, like no families to tie down their attention. one reason for them not having anything like families is also because many of the women were recruited when they were young and just getting out into the world looking for something to move onto and establish a real life doing.

A suspected 30% of the FSLN members were women, which for the times that was a lot for that particular type of organization. Also and estimated only 6.6% of the FSLN dead who were killed for being in the FSLN were women.

The Expansion of the FSLN:

The FSLN grew to 40,000 members all in support of Nicaragua's leftist FSLN. In 1975 the FSLN began to grow so quickly that it then split into three different groups, each with a different idea for how to go about carrying out the revolution. The three sections were: The Proletarian section that worked to organize the factory workers and anyone living in the poor areas, The Prolonged War who believed that the revolution take a long time and would require many labor and peasants movements, and finally the Third Way faction that called for ideological pluralism and the Third Way faction supported joint efforts with non-Marxist. Actually in the end the Third Way faction prevailed over the other two FSLN groups. In July of 1979 the FSLN was one to help in the over taking of the Somoza Government. Today the FSLN is still in existence still working hard against the Government and to try and keep them from mistreating the inhabitants of Nicaragua.

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