"How could you consider giving up your life for the people?" asked General José María Moncada in his last meeting with General Augusto C. Sandino. "The people won’t thank you; what’s important is living comfortably."

Moncada, the head of the Liberal army to whom the US had promised the Nicaraguan presidency, was attempting to convince Sandino not to fight against the invasion of the US Marines. Sandino walked out of the meeting and retreated with his troops to the city of Jinotega. From there, on May 12, 1927, he made a general announcement by telegraph that he had decided to fight to the bitter end against the US military occupation.

Nicaragua was in the midst of a civil war between Liberals and Conservatives that had started after the presidential elections, when the losing Conservative candidate Gen. Emiliano Chamorro overthrew winner Carlos Solórzano. After a few months of battle, the Liberals were winning. The US troops had arrived in Nicaragua in 1926 by request of the Conservative government, now headed by Adolfo Díaz, whom the US had placed in power in an attempt to "pacify" the country by replacing Chamorro.

The US military offered the Liberals two options: sign a peace treaty guaranteeing that they would hold presidential elections again under the vigilance of the US Marines; or face the occupying army which would immediately enter into combat to smash the "Liberal rebels."

Moncada didn’t hesitate. He chose the first alternative, and duly informed the US captains. All his subordinates and the troops he led accepted his surrender. All except one: Augusto C. Sandino.

Sandino was a short, abstemious, shy youth who made himself into a military leader as the only way to fight against the ruling political classes’ schemes to turn their country over to foreign interests, and against the US government’s "imperialist ambitions" in Nicaragua.

He was born on May 18, 1895, in the town of Niquinohomo in the department of Masaya. He was the illegitimate child of coffee plantation owner Gregorio Sandino and coffee-picker Margarita Calderón.

Augusto C. Sandino grew up in the poverty, deprivation and misery characteristic of illegitimate children of wealthy men in the feudal and patriarchal society of that time. Even if they were accepted into the father’s home, they were obligated to perform the household’s most menial tasks to earn their keep.

As Sandino told a journalist, "I opened my eyes in misery and grew up amidst the same misery, lacking even the most basic necessities. While my mother picked coffee, I was left alone, abandoned. As soon as I could walk I spent my time among the coffee plants, helping my mother fill her basket to earn a few cents. Poorly dressed and even more poorly fed, I grew, or rather didn’t grow, perhaps for those very reasons. When there was no coffee to pick we were sent out to cut wheat or pick corn, with such low wages and such difficult tasks that life itself was nothing but pain."

Sandino, called the General of Free Men by French intellectual Henry Barbusse, united campesinos, artisans and professionals into the National Sovereignty Defense Army, dubbed the "crazy little army" by Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. For six long years they fought against the US occupying forces.

1931 to 1932: The fighting between the Sandinistas and the US Marines reaches the proportions of a national war. Except for the Pacific region nearest the capital, the rest of the national territory is the scene of repeated incursions from Sandino’s guerrilla forces. The Las Segovias region, in northern Nicaragua, is completely controlled by the Sandinistas. On Oct. 2, 1932, Sandinista troops occupy the town of San Francisco del Carnicero, on the north coast of Lake Managua and only few kilometers from the capital. The city is shaken by this action, according to the US embassy records from that time.

On Jan. 1, 1933, the US Marines abandon Nicaragua; they have been defeated by the National Sovereignty Defense Army, led by Sandino.

And just as the hero promised, when the military hostilities are over and the last foreign soldier is off of Nicaraguan land, Sandino begins to negotiate terms to disband his troops. On Feb. 2, 1933, the army is officially disbanded.

Despite handshakes and celebrations, one point has not been clarified by General Sandino: the National Guard (created and trained by US troops) begins to play the role of an occupying army. Throughout 1933 it harasses, jails and even kills the unarmed former members of the National Sovereignty Defense Army.

Sandino decides to make several trips to Managua to discuss these problems with President Juan Bautista Sacasa. On more than one occasion he declares to the newspapers that he considers the National Guard to be an army illegally and unconstitutionally created, one more step in the US’s illegal military occupation of the country.

On the night of Feb. 21, 1934, the last of his trips to Managua, Sandino was returning from a dinner with President Sacasa when his car was stopped by the National Guard.

Sandino and the others in the car were taken to be executed in an uninhabited area on the outskirts of Managua. They were lined up in front of a trench that had been dug ahead of time and shot to death in the beam of a truck’s headlights. Their bodies, stripped of clothes and other personal effects (watches, rings) – which were sold the next day in Managua – were thrown into the trench. The location of that tomb would be a state secret from that time on.

The next day, the National Guard made a surprise attack on the agricultural co-operatives that had been organized by Sandino’s former fighters. Over 300 campesinos were killed.

Two months later, Anastasio Somoza García, commanding chief of the National Guard who would later found a dynastic tyranny which would rule Nicaragua for nearly 50 years, assumed responsibility for Sandino’s murder, affirming that he had committed the act "for the good of Nicaragua."

General Sandino’s struggle took its place as part of the legacy of the Nicaraguan people’s rebellion against foreign domination. The ruling political class, with their willingness sell out to foreign powers, betrayed him and sent him to his death, but his actions and his example will last for a long time in Nicaraguan history.

On July 19, 1979, a popular insurrection led by Sandinista guerrilla fighters overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle - direct descendant of Sandino’s murderer – by fighting and winning against the same National Guard. Since that time, the National Guard no longer exists in Nicaragua.