los restos de la revolución
In 1979, after over a decade of struggle, the socialist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle,and ended the family’s more than forty-year reign. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN, quickly began the work of applying its social and ideological values in the hopes of creating a better Nicaragua.
Unfortunately, the United States government had other plans. In the Cold War environment of the 1980s, the prospect of a socialist government gaining a foothold in Central America was deemed unacceptable. The CIA began financing, arming, and training a clandestine rebel insurgency to destabilize the government. These anti-Sandinista counter-revolutionaries became known as Contras. Between 1980 and 1990, Nicaragua was the battleground of conflicting political ideologies. The promise of a bright future was lost as the nation descended into civil war.
Twenty years later, between 2009 and 2010, I traveled throughout Northern Nicaragua to consider the legacy left behind.
These photographs are notational records of that experience; they are an attempt to move beyond broad ideology and rhetoric, and navigate the collective memory of those involved. Although at one time sharply divided by two polarized political philosophies, the survivors are now bound by a landscape filled with physical and psychological scars. The markers of affiliation are slowly fading, but the horrors of war remain.
The following photographs are a small selection of a much larger body of work.
Los Restos de la Revolución will be released by Daylight Publishing in the Fall of 2012.