1. Carlos Fonseca Amador was a Nicaraguan professor, politician, writer and revolutionary who was one of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
46 Facts About Carlos Fonseca
1. 2.
Carlos Fonseca has posthumously received the titles of National Hero of Nicaragua and Commander in Chief of the Sandinista Popular Revolution.
3.
Carlos Fonseca Amador was born in the El Laborio neighborhood of the city of Matagalpa on 23 June 1936.
4.
Carlos Fonseca was the son of Agustina Fonseca Ubeda, from San Rafael del Norte, a peasant and cook, and Fausto Amador Aleman, a member of a wealthy coffee-growing family and administrator of the La Reina mine in San Ramon, Matagalpa.
5.
Carlos Fonseca was born in a "corner house" his aunt Isaura owned, where his mother lived in a back room.
6.
Carlos Fonseca's father did not acknowledge Fonseca as his son until his elementary school years.
7.
Carlos Fonseca's father broke from the Conservative Party to align himself with the Somoza regime, managing several Somoza enterprises and acquiring large land holdings in the Managua and Matagalpa regions.
8.
In 1950 Carlos Fonseca entered secondary school at the Instituto Nacional del Norte, where he was named best student in his class while working odd jobs during holiday breaks.
9.
Carlos Fonseca became best friends there with Tomas Borge, with whom he shared a fondness for the writings of Thomas More, John Steinbeck and Howard Fast.
10.
Carlos Fonseca began his work in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship while at the INN by participating in a strike that demanded the removal of a plaque honoring Somoza from the University of Leon campus.
11.
Carlos Fonseca became increasingly interested in Marxism and joined the Partido Socialista Nicaraguense in 1954.
12.
In 1955, after graduating from INN, Carlos Fonseca moved to Managua, where he was named director of the library at the Miguel Ramirez Goyena Institute.
13.
Carlos Fonseca combined that work with studies at the School of Economics of the National University.
14.
Carlos Fonseca still embraced the PSN's commitment to peaceful and gradualist political struggle against the Somoza dictatorship and did not approve of the September 21,1956 shooting of Anastasio Somoza Garcia by Rigoberto Lopez Perez.
15.
Carlos Fonseca was nonetheless arrested in Matagalpa six days after the assassination when Anastasio Somoza Garcia's son and successor, Luis Somoza Debayle, declared a state of siege, arresting hundreds of students and other dissidents.
16.
Some were held for several years; Carlos Fonseca was held until November 14,1956, when he was released without charges, possibly due to his father's intervention.
17.
In 1957, Carlos Fonseca traveled to the Soviet Union as a PSN delegate to the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students organized by the World Federation of Democratic Youth.
18.
Carlos Fonseca later wrote a book chronicling his visit to the USSR entitled Un Nicaraguense en Moscu.
19.
Carlos Fonseca took part in the day of protest of the visit to the University by Milton S Eisenhower, brother of the then-president of the United States.
20.
Carlos Fonseca was arrested several times, in Managua and Matagalpa.
21.
Carlos Fonseca came to believe that the PSN was not suited to that task and that a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement could be created outside of the PSN and other existing groups.
22.
In 1959 Carlos Fonseca left Guatemala for Honduras and joined the "Rigoberto Lopez Perez" guerrilla column led by Commander Rafael Somarriba.
23.
On June 24,1959, the brigade was ambushed by Honduran and Nicaraguan troops in El Chaparral, Honduras, ending in the death of several rebels and the wounding and capture of many others, including Carlos Fonseca, who suffered a bullet wound to the lung.
24.
Carlos Fonseca was treated at the San Felipe General Hospital in Tegucigalpa.
25.
Carlos Fonseca was eventually flown, along with other guerillas held by Honduras, to Cuba.
26.
The JDN that Carlos Fonseca had helped found collapsed in 1959.
27.
Carlos Fonseca escaped from custody and fled to El Salvador, from which he returned to Nicaragua via Havana with the help of Tomas Borge and Julio Jerez.
28.
In 1961, together with other comrades, Carlos Fonseca founded the Movimiento Nueva Nicaragua.
29.
Carlos Fonseca published "The Ideology of Sandino" at this time.
30.
Carlos Fonseca's suggestion met opposition from more orthodox Marxists within the organization who argued that Sandino fought against foreign occupation but not imperialism.
31.
Together with the veteran Sandinista Santos Lopez, Carlos Fonseca studied the possibility of armed struggle on the ground reaching the banks of the Coco River.
32.
Rather than present a defense during his trial, Carlos Fonseca leveled charges against Somoza which were later detailed in his essay, From Prison, I Accuse the Dictatorship.
33.
On January 6,1965, Carlos Fonseca was deported to Guatemala, then deported to Mexico a few days later.
34.
Carlos Fonseca married Maria Haydee Teran, with whom he had fallen in love in prison, later that year.
35.
Carlos Fonseca later condemned this turn to legal work instead of armed struggle as a mistake that nearly led to the FSLN's disappearance as an independent revolutionary force.
36.
Carlos Fonseca escaped capture by hiding in the homes of people not associated with the FSLN, most notably his stay, disguised as a priest, for a week in November 1967 in the second floor of the Managua home of Dame Angelica Balladares de Arguello, who had been the former President of the Feminist League, "Woman of the Americas" in 1959, and since 1926 known as "The First Lady of Nicaraguan Liberalism".
37.
Carlos Fonseca left the underground life in Nicaragua for Costa Rica, where he reassessed the last few years of legal and guerrilla activity in an essay titled Hora Cero, while writing the first draft of what became known as the Programa Historico, which was then circulated among other members of the FSLN leadership.
38.
Carlos Fonseca left first for Mexico, then Cuba, where he remained until 1975.
39.
Carlos Fonseca attempted to address these divisions by urging each tendency to avoid ideological rigidity, but failed; while the FSLN did not split, factional rivalries persisted.
40.
Carlos Fonseca had been planning to resume his work within Nicaragua since 1970.
41.
Carlos Fonseca died on November 8,1976, in the area known as Boca de Piedra located at the foot of Cerro Zinica in the region of the same name in the municipality of Waslala, between Waslala and Siuna, in the department of Zelaya in the Autonomous Region of the North Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.
42.
Eyewitnesses indicate that Carlos Fonseca was killed after being captured.
43.
Yet while the FSLN continued to pay tribute to the memory of "a safely dead and saintly Carlos Fonseca", it departed from many of the policies he argued for in his years in exile, giving less priority to land reform and elevating military necessity over popular mobilization in fighting the contras.
44.
Carlos Fonseca married Maria Haydee Teran in exile in Mexico in 1965.
45.
Carlos Fonseca's family owned a publishing house, Editorial Antorcha, and a bookstore near the University.
46.
Carlos Fonseca maintained contacts with student activists and participated in different protests against the dictatorship.