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Los Voluntarios: The Dialectics of Insurgency & Counterinsurgency in the Mountains of Las Segovias, Nicaragua, 1928-1929
Mon, May 30, 8:00 to 9:30am, TBAAbstract
This paper will examine a fascinating counterinsurgency experiment undertaken by the US Marines in 1929 to augment the Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional's limited military capabilities in its counterinsurgency campaign against the nationalist rebel movement led by Augusto C. Sandino. The Voluntarios experiment not only failed utterly, but backfired. Senior US military leaders created the Voluntarios mainly for political reasons. The goal was to put Nicaraguans in the field to help the Marines wage war against the Sandinista rebels, mainly to legitimate the US intervention in the eyes of the populace. Just-inaugurated President José María Moncada's interests dovetailed with those of top US military officials. Among the elite, the Voluntarios re-inflamed Liberal-Conservative conflicts from the just-ended Civil War. Among campesinos, the violence inflicted by Voluntario & Marine Corps troops inflamed popular sentiments against the state and toward Sandino. More broadly, the whole idea behind the Voluntarios ran directly against the grain of the larger, structural shift being engineered by the US State Department: the centralization of violence-making capacities in the institution of the Guardia Nacional. A short-term political fix, the scheme quickly backfired and was abruptly terminated by the Marine Corps brass. In the bigger picture, the failure of the Voluntarios speaks mainly to the success of the national state in rapidly monopolizing violence-making capacities in the institution of the Guardia Nacional. This paper, a condensation of a book project on this subject, explores an exceptionally illuminating cluster of ironies and unintended consequences that speak to broader issues of state formation, popular nationalism, civil war, empire formation, the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency, and more.