Nicaragua's Conservative Republic, 1858-93 (review)

This work will be welcomed by all those who lament both the scarcity of archival research on this period of Nicaraguan history and its frequent misrepresentation in synthetic or survey works. The author seeks not only to highlight Nicaragua's now undeniable steady economic advance during this period but to offer even greater praise for the political and institutional achievements of the Granadan conservative administrations. He artfully combines a range of period printed sources with what appears to have been quite lengthy interviews with José Coronel Urtecho in the first half of the 1990s to provide a fluid, highly readable account of an exceedingly murky period of regional history. While the great majority of the material comes from published, if very obscure, sources, the author has also analyzed quite carefully materials on tax revenues, exports, and foreign trade. His favorite topic is the story of political stability via conservative innovations that addressed problems in voting, candidate selection, access to office, and the management of succession that plagued both earlier and later liberal regimes. The author brings his deep knowledge of Granadan elite social lore to bear when documentary evidence provides only partial or indirect proof for his views. In sum, the specialist can learn a great deal from a close reading of this text.

However, deeply problematic positions are inherent in these very strengths. The author's receptivity to unabashed conservative and elite Granadan apologetics clouds many of his judgments of liberals and nonelite Granadans. The author also needlessly retains in his own language many of the invidious social distinctions made in the source material, which undermines the very perceptiveness in his accounting for the use or silencing of social and racial prejudices in partisan conflicts. For example, he notes (p. 30 and note 26) that the "white" leaders of the Granadan aristocratic party were actually mestizo and mulatto sons of elite fathers who suffered the mockery of their rivals. But such insights appear to fall by the wayside when certain actors continue to be referred to as don repeatedly in the present, while others, presidents included, are denied the term.

Cruz is most dismissive when dealing with the anti-Conservative forces within Granada itself and all those actors associated with the rise of Liberal dictator José Santos Zelaya at the end of the period. For example, he never uses "don" to refer to Cleto Ordoñez, Granadan strongman and populist president in the 1820s, but instead dismisses him via a period quote as the "bastard son of a notable, by a commoner." In an equally egregious, if more subtle, case of dismissal by misnaming, Cruz claims that Indian dispossession was far less frequent or important in Nicaragua than in neighboring El Salvador or Guatemala (p. 83), and then proceeds to depict the Indian rebels of Matagalpa in 1881 as engaging not in an uprising or a rebellion but in "riots." This, even when their dead bodies were so thick along the roadsides that a special ditch had to be dug to dispose of them before the inauguration of the new telegraph line—whose construction by means of their forced labor had helped spark the uprising (p. 97)!

Equally troubling is the author's unwillingness to consider any historical outcomes as comparable in worth to material advance and political stability based on the institutionalization of elite consensus. Cruz himself notes that Granadan elite conservatives prevented the rise within their own ranks of certain men of talent and wealth but the wrong birthplace or pedigree. Rather than seeing this as a potentially fatal weakness on their part, Cruz depicts it as a small price to be paid for the greater good of stability. He saves his most severe criticism for new liberal political actors of similar humble means, such as José Dolores Gómez within the Zelaya regime (p. 136). This particular conservative bias is perhaps less a...