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Chapter Eighteen “Baptized in Blood” Children in the Time of the Sandino Rebellion, Nicaragua, 1927–1934 Michael J. Schroeder Toward the end of 1926, in the verdant Segovian mountains of northern Nicaragua, twelve-year-old Santos López joined the forces of Liberal General Augusto Sandino in the civil war raging between Liberals and Conservatives .1 The following May the boy-soldier saw that war end and another begin, as General Sandino became Supreme Chief of a guerrilla army that for the next six years waged a struggle of national liberation in the northern mountains against U.S.intervention in Nicaragua.By 1929,the fifteen-yearold had become Colonel Santos López and one of Sandino’s most trusted lieutenants. Narrowly escaping assassination alongside Sandino after war’s end, he survived more than four decades of dictatorship to become one of the few living links between the Sandino rebellion of the 1920s and 1930s and the Sandinistas of the 1960s and after. In 1976, the Sandinista Revolutionary Student Front published Santos López’s oral account of his years in Sandino’s Army. In common with similar testimonies produced after the 1979 Sandinista Revolution, his narrative offers insights into the lives of children in the time of the Sandino rebellion: before the war, crushing poverty, constant toil, and patriarchal oppression; during the war, many dangers, hardships, and opportunities, as well as new forms of community and much violence. Weaving together images of children as victims and children as agents in war, he crafted an ideologically inspired heroic story of national liberation that also captured key aspects of rural Segovian children’s lives and experiences in the 1920s and 1930s. 242 I come from a campesino family, my mother originally from Yalacaguina, a village in Las Segovias, my father also Segoviano; that one didn’t help my mother sustain our humble home, made up of five children. . . . Since my father completely ignored his obligations to us, my mother had to work to sustain us, she sold corn beer and eggs; and since this wasn’t sufficient she sent us to work on neighboring farms from the early age of eight years. Our pay was 20 cents a day, being mistreated physically by the landowners. My mother used to make trips to the San Albino mine and its outskirts to sell more, always looking for the best way to earn a livelihood. On one of these trips . . . we came upon a group from the troops of General Sandino. . . . I approached a group butchering a cow and asked for a piece of meat and asked if they enlisted kids, since I could see among them some of my age, at that time I was twelve. After recounting many episodes of heroism and hardship among Sandino’s “men” (himself included) and after discussing women’s roles in the struggle , he returned to the topic of children: I belonged to a group called the “Chorus of Angels” made up of kids from 13 to 16 years of age, the group numbered fifty kids divided into three smaller groups....these audacious and valiant kids were in the vanguard of the struggle . . . . the children of [Sandinista] women, born in battle camps, baptized with the blood that flowed day after day, had to be doubly patriotic. . . . The Yankees began the repression against the defenseless campesinos . . . [raping and] shooting the women,throwing the children back and forth like they were balls, passed from one bayonet to another till they died skewered on them. In the early 1980s more than a dozen elderly Sandinistas, interviewed as part of a state-sponsored memory project, recalled joining Sandino’s Army as boys, remembered the Chorus of Angels (dubbed so by their chants and songs during battle), and told similar stories of children’s victimization and agency.2 Using fragmentary, ideologically charged evidence, this essay examines the lives and experiences of rural Segovian children in the time of the Sandino rebellion. It focuses on how girls and boys were victimized and acted as agents in this conflict. Campesino children’s lives and experiences in the war, I suggest, were shaped most profoundly by unrelenting toil, suffering , violence, fear, and loss, and by resilient impulses toward hope, creativity , courage, and variously constituted and deeply affective bonds of family and community. Before examining this evidence it is necessary to sketch the war’s social and historical contexts. From independence in 1821, Nicaragua’s strife-torn “Baptized in Blood” 243 [3.22.249.158...

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