The history of Nicaragua

Nicaragua, the largest country in Central America, lies between two oceans and two great lakes, a geography that has shaped its history. Its Pacific lowlands were the southern edge of Mesoamerica, settled by peoples who had migrated from Mexico, while its Caribbean forests belonged to Chibchan-speaking peoples linked to South America. Spanish conquest in the 1520s was followed by an Indigenous slave trade of devastating scale, while the Caribbean coast long remained outside Spanish control under the Miskito and their British allies. Since independence, Nicaragua's history has been one of rivalry between the cities of León and Granada, repeated intervention by the United States, the forty-year Somoza dictatorship, the Sandinista revolution of 1979 and the Contra war, and, since 2007, the increasingly authoritarian rule of Daniel Ortega.

People have lived in Nicaragua for many thousands of years. On the shore of Lake Managua, a group of people walking across fresh volcanic mud about 2,100 years ago left the footprints of Acahualinca, one of the oldest such traces in the Americas, and petroglyphs cover the rocks of Ometepe island in Lake Nicaragua. The Pacific region formed part of a cultural area archaeologists call Greater Nicoya, shared with northwest Costa Rica, known for its polychrome pottery and its stone statues, such as those of Zapatera island.

The peoples the Spanish met in the west had arrived from the north in successive migrations. The Chorotega, or Mangue, speakers of an Oto-Manguean language related to those of Oaxaca, came from southern Mexico some time between about 600 and 800 CE. The Subtiaba, or Maribio, arrived later from Guerrero, and around 1200 the Nicarao, speakers of Nawat, a language close to the Nahuatl of the Aztec Empire, settled the narrow land between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific. These were Mesoamerican societies: they farmed maize, beans, squash and cacao, used cacao beans as money, held markets, built temples, kept books of deerskin and were governed by chiefs, called caciques, with councils of elders. The country's name comes from the Nicarao.

The centre and the Caribbean side belonged to different traditions. Peoples speaking Misumalpan languages, ancestors of the Mayangna (Sumu) and Matagalpa, and Chibchan-speaking peoples such as the Rama lived in villages in the forests and along the rivers, hunting, fishing and growing cassava and other root crops by shifting cultivation, with ties to the Caribbean islands and South America. How many people lived in Nicaragua before the conquest is unknown, but estimates for the Pacific region alone run to several hundred thousand or more.

Christopher Columbus sailed along the Caribbean coast in September 1502 on his fourth voyage, naming the cape at the mouth of the Coco River Gracias a Dios. The conquest, however, came from the south. In 1522 Gil González Dávila led an expedition from Panama into the Pacific lowlands, where the Nicarao chief Macuilmiquiztli, long remembered in Spanish accounts simply as Nicarao, received him and accepted baptism. The Chorotega leader Diriangén attacked the Spaniards instead and forced them to retreat.

In 1524 Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, sent by Pedrarias Dávila, the governor of Panama, founded the towns of Granada on Lake Nicaragua and León near Lake Managua. Rival expeditions arrived from Honduras, including one sent by Hernán Cortés from Mexico, and the conquistadors fought each other as well as the Indigenous peoples. Pedrarias had Hernández de Córdoba beheaded in 1526 and made himself governor of Nicaragua, ruling from León until his death in 1531.

What followed was among the worst demographic disasters of the conquest. Epidemics, war and forced labour struck as elsewhere, but Nicaragua also became the centre of a trade in Indigenous slaves, shipped to Panama and then to Peru after the conquest led by Francisco Pizarro. Estimates of the number exported in the first decades range into the hundreds of thousands, and many died at sea or in the mines and households of the Viceroyalty of Peru. By the late sixteenth century the Indigenous population of the Pacific region had fallen by perhaps 90 per cent or more. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who spent time in Nicaragua, denounced these abuses, and Spain's New Laws of 1542 banned the enslavement of Indigenous people, though forced labour continued.

Nicaragua became a province of the Captaincy General of Guatemala, part of New Spain and of the Spanish Empire. León, the administrative and church capital, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1610 and rebuilt at its present site; the ruins of the first city, León Viejo, are now a World Heritage Site. Granada, with access to the Caribbean through Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River, grew rich on trade, and its merchant families became the core of a conservative elite. The Pacific lowlands produced cattle, indigo and cacao, while surviving Indigenous communities such as Subtiaba, Masaya and Monimbó kept their identity under colonial rule.

The San Juan River made Granada vulnerable. English, French and Dutch buccaneers sailed up it to sack the city more than once in the seventeenth century, and Spain built the fortress of El Castillo on the river in the 1670s. In 1780 a British expedition that included the young Horatio Nelson captured the fort, only to be forced out by disease.

Spain never controlled the Caribbean side. There, a people who became known as the Miskito formed from the mixing of Indigenous communities with Africans who had escaped slavery or survived shipwrecks. Trading with English buccaneers and settlers from Jamaica, they obtained firearms and expanded along the coast, raiding Spanish settlements and their Indigenous neighbours, some of whom they sold as slaves. From the mid-seventeenth century the British Empire treated the Miskito kingdom as a protectorate, and its kings were crowned with British approval. Enslaved Africans brought to the coast by British settlers, and later free English-speaking Black Caribbean migrants, formed the Creole communities of Bluefields and Pearl Lagoon.

Nicaragua took part in Central America's declaration of independence from Spain on 15 September 1821, an outcome of the Spanish American wars of independence. It was briefly annexed to the Mexican Empire of Agustín de Iturbide in 1822 before joining the Federal Republic of Central America with Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica in 1823. As the federation broke apart, Nicaragua declared itself a separate state in 1838.

Independence brought decades of civil war between liberals based in León and conservatives based in Granada, who often treated the state as a prize for their city and families. In 1852 Managua, which lay between them, was chosen as a compromise capital. Meanwhile Nicaragua's geography attracted foreign interest. After gold was found in California in 1848, the American magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company carried thousands of travellers from New York to San Francisco by steamboat up the San Juan River, across Lake Nicaragua and over a short road to the Pacific port of San Juan del Sur, and both Britain and the United States dreamed of a canal along the same route.

In 1855 the liberals of León hired a band of American mercenaries led by William Walker, a Tennessee-born adventurer. Walker seized Granada, took control of the government and in July 1856 had himself proclaimed president. He made English an official language, invited American settlers and legalised slavery, hoping to bring Nicaragua into the orbit of the slaveholding American South. His seizure of the Transit Company's property turned Vanderbilt into his enemy.

The other Central American states, led by Costa Rica, went to war against him. Nicaraguan forces defeated Walker's men at the Battle of San Jacinto in September 1856, Granada was burned by his retreating troops, and in May 1857 Walker surrendered to the US Navy. Captured on a later expedition, he was executed in Honduras in 1860. The National War, as Nicaraguans call it, discredited the liberals, and conservative governments ruled from Managua for the next thirty years. In 1860 Britain gave up its protectorate over the Mosquito Coast, which became an autonomous Miskito reserve under Nicaraguan sovereignty.

In 1893 the liberal José Santos Zelaya took power. He modernised the state, separated church and state, expanded coffee exports and railways, and in 1894 sent troops to the Caribbean coast to end the autonomy of the Miskito reserve, bringing the region under direct Nicaraguan rule. When the United States chose Panama for its canal, Zelaya sought other foreign partners for a rival Nicaraguan route. In 1909, after he executed two Americans who had joined a conservative rebellion, Washington backed the rebels, and Zelaya resigned.

From 1912, when US Marines landed to support a conservative government against a revolt, the United States kept troops in Nicaragua almost continuously until 1933, and American bankers controlled the customs and national bank. The Bryan–Chamorro Treaty of 1914 gave the United States the exclusive right to build a canal through Nicaragua, which it never used. When civil war broke out again in 1926, the US envoy Henry Stimson negotiated a settlement in 1927, but one liberal general, Augusto César Sandino, refused to accept it. From the mountains of Las Segovias in the north, Sandino fought a guerrilla war against the Marines and their Nicaraguan allies for six years, becoming a hero across Latin America. Before leaving, the Americans created a new army and police force, the National Guard.

The withdrawal of the Marines in 1933, during the Great Depression and the "Good Neighbor" policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, left the National Guard as the real power, under its commander Anastasio Somoza García. In February 1934, after Sandino had agreed to make peace, Guard officers acting on Somoza's orders seized him after a dinner at the presidential palace and shot him. Somoza forced President Juan Bautista Sacasa from office in 1936 and became president himself in 1937. He governed through the Guard, the Liberal Party and a family fortune built on land, cattle, coffee and businesses of every kind, while remaining a loyal ally of Washington. In World War II Nicaragua declared war on the Axis, and Somoza used the occasion to seize properties owned by German-Nicaraguans.

In 1956 the poet Rigoberto López Pérez shot Somoza in León, and he died of his wounds. His sons Luis and Anastasio Somoza Debayle succeeded him, ruling directly or through allies, and during the Cold War the regime presented itself as a bulwark against communism, allowing the exiles who invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to sail from its Caribbean port of Puerto Cabezas. That same year, inspired by the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro, Carlos Fonseca and others founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), named after Sandino. Cotton and cattle booms enriched the elite but drove many peasants off their land.

The turning point was the earthquake that destroyed central Managua on 23 December 1972, killing more than 10,000 people. Much of the international aid was diverted by the Somoza family and the Guard, alienating even business leaders. In 1974 a Sandinista commando seized hostages at a Christmas party and won the release of prisoners, and the regime responded with martial law and brutal counterinsurgency in the countryside. On 10 January 1978 Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa, was assassinated, and the country rose: general strikes, uprisings in Masaya, Monimbó and León, and in August a Sandinista raid on the National Palace. Somoza answered with aerial bombing of rebel cities. The administration of Jimmy Carter cut off military aid, and in mid-1979 a Sandinista offensive and a final general strike forced Somoza to flee on 17 July. Tens of thousands of people had died in the insurrection.

On 19 July 1979 the Sandinistas entered Managua. A governing junta that included Daniel Ortega and Violeta Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín's widow, took power, though real authority soon lay with the FSLN leadership. The new government nationalised the Somoza family's vast properties, carried out land reform and launched a literacy crusade in 1980 that sent tens of thousands of young volunteers into the countryside and sharply reduced illiteracy. It also built close ties with Cuba and the Soviet Union, restricted the press and built up a large army.

The administration of Ronald Reagan saw Nicaragua as a Soviet foothold and, from 1981, organised, armed and funded the Contras, rebel forces initially led by former National Guard officers and based in Honduras and Costa Rica. The war that followed killed around 30,000 people, devastated the economy, and was marked by abuses on both sides; the Contras attacked cooperatives, health centres and civilians, while the government forcibly relocated Miskito villages along the Coco River in 1982, driving many Miskito to fight against it. In 1984 Ortega was elected president in a vote that most foreign observers considered broadly fair but that the main opposition coalition boycotted. In 1986 the International Court of Justice ruled that the United States had broken international law by supporting the Contras and mining Nicaraguan harbours, and the secret, illegal funding of the Contras through arms sales to Iran became the Iran–Contra scandal. A 1987 autonomy statute created two self-governing regions on the Caribbean coast, and a Central American peace plan led by Costa Rica's president Óscar Arias produced a ceasefire in 1988.

In February 1990, as the Cold War ended, Violeta Chamorro, leading a broad opposition coalition, defeated Ortega and became the first woman elected president in the Americas. The Sandinistas handed over power peacefully, the Contras disarmed, and the army was reduced and placed under civilian authority, though many Sandinista leaders kept properties confiscated in the 1980s. Chamorro's successor, Arnoldo Alemán, presided over recovery from Hurricane Mitch, which killed thousands in 1998, but was later convicted of corruption. A pact between Alemán and Ortega in 2000 divided control of the courts and electoral council between their parties and lowered the share of the vote needed to win the presidency.

Ortega returned to power in the 2006 election with 38 per cent of the vote. Ruling with his wife Rosario Murillo, who became vice-president in 2017, he built alliances with business leaders and the Catholic hierarchy at first, while gaining control of the courts, the electoral body and the police. Court rulings and a 2014 constitutional amendment removed limits on re-election, and he won in 2011 and 2016 amid accusations of fraud. In April 2018 a cut to pensions set off nationwide protests led by students; police and pro-government armed groups killed at least 325 people, according to human rights investigators, and tens of thousands of Nicaraguans went into exile in Costa Rica and beyond. Before the 2021 election the government arrested its main rival candidates, and the result was rejected as illegitimate by the Organization of American States, the United States and the European Union.

In January 2025 a constitutional reform defined Nicaragua as a revolutionary socialist state, made Murillo co-president with Ortega, extended the presidential term to six years and moved the next election to 2027. On 19 July 2026, the anniversary of the revolution, Ortega announced that Nicaragua would hold no more elections, saying the opposition was controlled by the United States; Murillo later said his remarks had been taken out of context and that elections would be held "based on our sovereignty". With about seven million people, Nicaragua remains one of the poorest countries in the Americas, heavily dependent on money sent home by emigrants.