For the Brazilian boxer with the same name see Carlos Fonseca (boxer)

Carlos Fonseca (boxer)

Carlos Antunes Fonseca is a retired boxer from Brazil, who competed in the men's middleweight division during the late 1970s and early 1980s....

.
Carlos Fonseca Amador (June 23, 1936 – November 8, 1976) was a Nicaragua

Nicaragua

Nicaragua is the largest country in the Central American American isthmus, bordered by Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south. The country is situated between 11 and 14 degrees north of the Equator in the Northern Hemisphere, which places it entirely within the tropics. The Pacific Ocean...

n teacher and librarian who founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front

Sandinista National Liberation Front

The Sandinista National Liberation Front is a socialist political party in Nicaragua. Its members are called Sandinistas in both English and Spanish...

 (FSLN). Fonseca was later killed in the mountains of Nicaragua, three years before the FSLN took power.

Early years

Born in Matagalpa

Matagalpa

Matagalpa is a city in Nicaragua, the capital of the department of Matagalpa. The city has a population of 109,100 , while the population of the department is more than 480,000. Matagalpa is Nicaragua's fifth largest city and one of its most commercially active outside of Managua...

, a town in northwestern Nicaragua, Fonseca was the son of Augustina Fonseca Úbeda, "an unmarried twenty-six year old washerwoman from the countryside". His father, Fausto Amador Alemán, a member of the prominent coffee-growing Amador family, did not acknowledge Fonseca until his elementary school years. Fonseca's father was part of a rich family, while his mother was a peasant. His father helped him later on to go to school and educate himself, but he always admired his mother more, because of her work ethic and strength. Because of this, Fonseca would repeatedly use her last name and was known as Carlos Fonseca Amador.

In 1950, Fonseca entered secondary school and slowly became involved with political groups. In the early 1950s, he attended meetings for a Conservative Party youth group and joined the Unión Nacional de Acción Popular (UNAP, National Union of Popular Action). Fonseca became increasingly interested in Marxism

Marxism

Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...

 and joined the Partido Socialista Nicaragüense (PSN, Nicaraguan Socialist Party). He left the UNAP in 1953 or 1954, complaining they were too "bourgeoisified" on social issues (the poor, the student movement, etc.) and that it "did not take on the Somoza

Anastasio Somoza García

Anastasio Somoza García was officially the President of Nicaragua from 1 January 1937 to 1 May 1947 and from 21 May 1950 to 29 September 1956, but ruled effectively as dictator from 1936 until his assassination.-Biography:Somoza was born in San Marcos, Carazo Department in Nicaragua, the son of...

 government. In 1954, he and several school friends founded and began to publish a "cultural journal" called Segovia.

Assassination plot

Fonseca was arrested by the Guardia Nacional and held for nearly two months. According to Zimmermann, at this point Fonseca remained "committed to nonviolent methods and believed the PSN provided the leadership Nicaragua needed".

In 1957, Fonseca traveled to the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 as a PSN delegate to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students

6th World Festival of Youth and Students

The 6th World Festival of Youth and Students was opened on 28 July 1957, in Moscow, Soviet Union. The festival attracted 34,000 people from 130 countries. This became possible after the bold political changes initiated by Nikita Khrushchev...

 organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth

World Federation of Democratic Youth

The World Federation of Democratic Youth is a progressive youth organization, recognized by the United Nations as an international youth non-governmental organization. WFDY describes itself as an "anti-imperialist, left-wing" organisation...

. Fonseca later wrote a book chronicling his visit to the USSR entitled Un Nicaraguense en Moscu (A Nicaraguan In Moscow). The book praised the accomplishments of the Soviet government, including its "free press, complete freedom of religion and the efficiency of its worker-run industries". Not listed in the book, he traveled to San Francisco, CA to stay with his relatives (Albert Amador, Sr. & Maria Amador) and to attend community college.

Taking Up Arms

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...

 and the 26th of July Movement

26th of July Movement

The 26th of July Movement was the revolutionary organization planned and led by Fidel Castro that in 1959 overthrew the Fulgencio Batista government in Cuba...

 took power in Cuba

Cuba

The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...

 on January 1, 1959. The Cuban Revolution

Cuban Revolution

The Cuban Revolution was an armed revolt by Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement against the regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista between 1953 and 1959. Batista was finally ousted on 1 January 1959, and was replaced by a revolutionary government led by Castro...

 was a major event all over Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

 and sparked both great concern and a sense of possibility in Nicaragua. The Cuban Revolution was a central event in Fonseca's political evolution as it "convinced [him] that revolution was possible and that a new organization was needed to lead it"[pp. 56-57, Matilde Zimmermann, Sandinista: Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000)]. Just as the Cuban revolution "had been organized outside the framework of the Cuban Communist Party", a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement could be created outside of the PSN and other pre-existing groups.

The rebel victory in Cuba was mirrored by an increase in armed anti-Somoza actions in Nicaragua. Fonseca took part in one such uprising in 1959. In February of that year, Fonseca, as well as many other more prominent Nicaraguan radicals, traveled to Cuba.

In mid-1959, Fonseca joined a Nicaraguan guerrilla brigade which had a training camp in southern Honduras

Honduras

Honduras is a republic in Central America. It was previously known as Spanish Honduras to differentiate it from British Honduras, which became the modern-day state of Belize...

. On June 24, 1959, the brigade was ambushed by Honduran and Nicaraguan troops in Honduras, ending in the death of several rebels and the wounding and capturing of many others, including Fonseca.

This incident marks the end of Fonseca's relationship with the PSN. Whereas Fonseca's revolutionary zeal increased in the aftermath of the ambush, the PSN became convinced that a revolution in Nicaragua was "impossible". Labelling Fonseca and other Nicaraguans who fought in the brigade as too "guerrilla-ist," the PSN expelled Fonseca and the others.

It is a bit unclear how (it has been rumored that his father Fausto Amador pulled strings to free him), but Fonseca managed to leave the military hospital in Honduras where he was taken after the June 24th ambush and went to Cuba. It is at this point that Fonseca "began a serious study of Sandino

Augusto César Sandino

Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino was a Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of a rebellion against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933...

". Fonseca also began to host political meetings in a small apartment in the Miramar section of Havana. The meetings were frequented by people who would later become part of the FSLN.

Sandinista

Between 1959 and 1963, Fonseca and those who would become the earliest members of the FSLN "experimented with a variety of different organizational forms" in the hopes of forming a true revolutionary organization. Having formed several short-lived groups, the FSLN came to be in 1963. Originally, Fonseca hoped to duplicate the Cuban revolution in Nicaragua, drawing up battle plans based on the Cuban experience.

In mid-1963, a guerrilla cadre entered the Rios Coco y Bocay area of Nicaragua. Poorly prepared and having done little advanced work in the area, several guerrillas were killed by the Guardia Nacional, while others were able to escape across the Honduran border. This incident would highlight the error of having an "excessive emphasis on military actions without corresponding political work".

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

Anastasio Somoza Debayle

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was a Nicaraguan leader and officially the 73rd and 76th President of Nicaragua from 1 May 1967 to 1 May 1972 and from 1 December 1974 to 17 July 1979. As head of the National Guard, he was de facto ruler of the country from 1967 to 1979...

. Rather than present a defense during his trial, Fonseca leveled charges against Somoza which were later detailed in his manuscript, From Prison, I Accuse the Dictatorship.

Between 1964 and 1966, the FSLN "concentrated on educational work and community organizing

Community organizing

Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. A core goal of community organizing is to generate durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence...

", creating indoctrination classes and campaigning to bring resources to working class neighborhoods in Managua. While Fonseca continued to hold the top leadership position in the FSLN, he was out of the country for much of the mid-1960s period, having fled to Mexico and then Costa Rica.

By mid-1966, plans for a second FSLN guerrilla operation in the Pancasan region (near Matagalpa) were underway. The operation began in May 1967 with about forty guerrillas. This time, the guerrillas were better trained and armed, and more interestingly, had women among their ranks. Fonseca, along with a few other FSLN leaders were "committed to the idea of including women", however, 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 being wiped out by the Guardia Nacional. However, Fonseca, and the others that survived, considered the operation a political victory "because it showed the whole country that the FSLN still existed".

According to Vasili Mitrokhin, Fonseca was a KGB agent. In his book The World Was Going Our Way, Mitrokhin relates how, as part of 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 that Fonseca handpicked, and the twelve were the core of the new Sandinista organization. However, UCLA historian J. Arch Getty

J. Arch Getty

John Archibald Getty, III is an American historian and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is noted for his research on Russian and Soviet history, especially the period under Joseph Stalin and the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.-Life and career:Getty was...

, whose specialty is Russia, 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

Bahukutumbi Raman

Bahukutumbi Raman is a former Additional Secretary , Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India and former head of the counter-terrorism division of India's external intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing . He is currently the director of the Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai...

also questions both the validity of the material as well as the conclusions drawn from them.

External links

Carlos Fonseca Biography