Adios Muchachos is a candid insider's account of the leftist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. During the 1970s, Sergio Ramirez led prominent intellectuals, priests, and business leaders to support the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), against Anastasio Somoza's dictatorship. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime in 1979, Ramirez served as vice-president under Daniel Ortega from 1985 until 1990, when the FSLN lost power in a national election. Disillusioned by his former comrades' increasing intolerance of dissent and resistance to democratization, Ramirez defected from the Sandinistas in 1995 and founded the Sandinista Renovation Movement. In Adios Muchachos, he describes the utopian aspirations for liberation and reform that motivated the Sandinista revolution against the Somoza regime, as well as the triumphs and shortcomings of the movement's leadership as it struggled to turn an insurrection into a government, reconstruct a country beset by poverty and internal conflict, and defend the revolution against the Contras, an armed counterinsurgency supported by the United States. Adios Muchachos was first published in 1999. Based on a later edition, this translation includes Ramirez's thoughts on more recent developments, including the re-election of Daniel Ortega as president in 2006.
Preface to the Spanish Edition, Published in 2007 / The Shadow of the Caudillo xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. Partial Confession 5 2. Saintly Living 17 3. The Age of Innocence 35 4. The Swan over the Burning Coals 49 5. The Age of Malice 65 6. Monkey on a Leash 81 7. Manifest Destiny 93 8. The Likely Number Thirteen 113 9. Heaven on Earth 127 10. The Year of the Pig 143 11. Rivers of Milk and Honey 159 12. The Palace at Last! 173 13. Saturn's Jaws 191 Epilogue 207 Chronology, 1979-1990 211 Glossary 223 Index 229
Sergio Ramirez was Vice President of Nicaragua from 1984 to 1990. This is his memoir of the turbulent years that toppled the Samoza dictatorship in 1979 and the triumphs and shortcomings of the Sandinista National Liberation Front that was charged with national reconstruction and social transformation in a country and region besieged by internal conflicts and foreign aggression. Ramirez brings this work up to the present day and offers unique insights into the current resurgence of "new left" governments in Latin America and the history of their relationship to populism and opposition in neoliberal U.S. policies.
"Adios Muchachos is an extraordinary memoir of the origins, triumphs, and ultimate decline of the Sandinista Revolution. It is written by Sergio Ramirez, one of Nicaragua's and Central America's leading literary figures and an influential politician and statesman during the crucial decades he discusses, the 1970s through the 1990s. Few memoirs of the Sandinista period treat the movement's ultimate defeat from a critical perspective, and fewer still have been written by one of that period's leading political actors, let alone crafted in such an engrossing fashion, with such an eye for intimate political and cultural detail." Gilbert M. Joseph, co-editor of A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War "Writers who become revolutionaries are a rare breed, and in our age, few compare to Sergio Ramirez. In this lovely, lyrical, but ultimately heartbreaking, book, he gives an insider's view of how radicalism succeeds and fails. His account is thrilling, poignant, and frightening, decorated with vivid profiles of tyrants, bullies, and idealistic heroes. Ramirez has long since broken with the increasingly repressive Sandinistas; their loss is literature's gain." Stephen Kinzer, author of Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua
