Nicaragua, 1980 — dissident coup conspiracy

Event Summary

This entry is coded 17 November 1980, during the consolidation of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the emergence of armed opposition to it. The Sandinista National Liberation Front had overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in 1978-1979 and governed through a Juntai of National Reconstruction, but by late 1980 the broad anti-Somoza coalition was fracturing as private-sector and conservative figures broke with the increasingly Marxist-leaning junta. The most prominent rupture came on 17 November 1980 with the killing of Jorge Salazar, a coffee grower and vice-president of the private enterprise council COSEP and leader of the agricultural producers' union UPANIC, who was shot dead by Sandinista state security forces; he believed he was in contact with dissident army officers to oppose the leadership, and the government accused him of a conspiracyi to arm a counter-revolutionary movement.

Meanwhile the armed counter-revolutionary bands that would become the Contras were beginning to form from 1980 onward. The 17 November 1980 coding sits in this period of anti-Sandinista conspiracyi and the regime's crackdown on suspected plotters as armed opposition took shape.