WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY RESOURCES: NICARAGUA
Civil Society and NGO Reports, Papers and Statements | UN Documents | Government Statements and Reports | Books, Journals and Articles

Civil Society and NGO Reports, Papers and Statements

Over Their Dead Bodies: Denial of Access to Emergency Obstetric Care and Therapeutic Abortion in Nicaragua
Human Rights Watch, October 2007

Ten Years After: Women in Sandinista Nicaragua
Alicia Giriazzo, Ecumenical Program in Central America and the Caribbean, May 2004
Since the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, both the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) as well as other popular organizations have evaluated their role during the last ten years of the revolution. The following article examines the role of women in Nicaragua during the revolution, particularly the role of the Sandinista women's organization AMNLAE (Association of Nicaraguan Women "Luisa Amanda Espinoza"), and raises the question: "Was the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua also liberating for women?"

Declaracion de Mujeres Nicaraguenses
Convencion Feminista de Nicaragua, Managua, Nicaragua, el 16 de noviembre 2002

UN Documents

Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on the first periodic report of Nicaragua
CEDAW A/44/38, 1989

Government Statements and Reports

Nicaraguan Government Fourth Periodic Report, CEDAW/C/NIC/4 (submitted 28 August 1998) and Fifth Periodic Report, CEDAW/C/NIC/5 (submitted 9 September 1999)
Submitted to UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), 2001

Books, Journals and Articles

The Country Under My Skin : A Memoir of Love and War/El Pais Bajo Mi Piel: Memorias De Amor Y Guerra
Gioconda Belli, October 2003
An electrifying memoir from the acclaimed Nicaraguan writer and central figure in the Sandinista Revolution. Until her early twenties, Gioconda Belli inhabited an upper-class cocoon: sheltered from the poverty in Managua in a world of country clubs and debutante balls; educated abroad; early marriage and motherhood. But in 1970, everything changed. Her growing dissatisfaction with domestic life, and a blossoming awareness of the social inequities in Nicaragua, led her to join the Sandinistas, then a burgeoning but still hidden organization. She would be involved with them over the next twenty years at the highest, and often most dangerous, levels.
Her memoir is both a revelatory insider’s account of the Revolution and a vivid, intensely felt story about coming of age under extraordinary circumstances. Belli writes with both striking lyricism and candor about her personal and political lives: about her family, her children, the men in her life; about her poetry; about the dichotomies between her birth-right and the life she chose for herself; about the failures and triumphs of the Revolution; about her current life, divided between California (with her American husband and their children) and Nicaragua; and about her sustained and sustaining passion for her country and its people.

Nicaragua Revolucion Relatos de Combatientes Del Frente Sandinista
Pilar Arias, Siglo Veintiuno Editores Siglo XXI Editores, January 2002

After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala
Ilja A. Luciak, Johns Hopkins University Press; September 2001
"Gender equality and meaningful democratization are inextricably linked," writes Ilja Luciak. "The democratization of Central America requires the full incorporation of women as voters, candidates, and office holders." In After the Revolution: Gender and Democracy in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, Luciak shows how former guerrilla women in three Central American countries made the transition from insurgents to mainstream political players in the democratization process.
Examining the role of women in the various stages of revolutionary and national politics, Luciak begins with women as participants and leaders in guerrilla movements. Women contributed greatly to the revolutionary struggle in all three countries, but thereafter many similarities ended. In Guatemala, ideological disputes reduced women's political effectiveness at both the intra-party and national levels. In Nicaragua, although women's rights became a secondary issue for the revolutionary party, women were nonetheless able to put the issue on the national agenda. In El Salvador, women took leading roles in the revolutionary party and were able to incorporate women's rights into a broad reform agenda. Luciak cautions that while active measures to advance the political role of women have strengthened formal gender equality, only the joint efforts of both sexes can lead to a successful transformation of society based on democratic governance and substantive gender equality.

Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs – Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979 – 1999
Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Johns Hopkins University Press; September 2001
How did a group of overwhelmingly poor, older women in a third-world country emerge to become a powerful force in their country's politics? Founded during the Nicaraguan revolution, the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs of Matagalpa comprises women who supported the revolution but did not carry guns; who, in their words, gave up their loved ones to the struggle.
In this book Lorraine Bayard de Volo focuses on this group to reveal what she calls "the dominant but rarely examined maternal identity politics of revolution, war, and democratization." Dividing Nicaraguan politics (1979-99) into four periods, Bayard de Volo uses both macro- and micro-levels of analysis to capture the dialectical relationship between large-scale political processes and the "micropolitics" of collective action. She shows how Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas mobilized both mothers and maternal imagery and in turn analyzes how this imagery was adopted and manipulated by the Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs. Employing a feminist Gramscian approach to address the gendered nature of cultural politics and collective identity, the author shows how, in the battle to capture Nicaraguan hearts and minds, both sides relied primarily on maternal images of women. Such "mobilizing identities" propelled women into unprecedented levels of collective action, yet at the same time ! channeled them away from feminist priorities.

Sandino’s Daughters: Testimonies of Nicaraguan Women in Struggle
Margaret Randall and Lynda Yanz, Rutgers University Press; September 1995
First published in 1981 in the wake of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) revolution in Nicaragua, Sandino's Daughters can now be seen not as a triumph of revolutionary ideals, but as a triumph of the spirit. Through a series of interviews with participants at all levels in the resistance, Margaret Randall recounts the lives of ordinary women who became pillars of strength and perseverance during their decades-long involvement in the Sandinista struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. Believing firmly that women's liberation was inextricably linked with national liberation, many of these women were in the vanguard of the movement inspired by Augusto Sandino. At the peak of revolutionary activity, women from all classes and backgrounds comprised 30 percent of the Sandinista army. For many of these women, politics became one with the personal. Hindsight perhaps offers the greatest irony of the women's alliance with the FSLN in the fact that it was a woman, Violeta Chamorro, who challenged and defeated the Sandinistas in the free elections of 1990. Though lured by the revolutionary quixotism of a promise that lasted slightly more than a decade, the women of Sandino's Daughters will stand as a monument to all those who yearn to be free.

Mujeres en Tiempo de Guerra
Saakes and Flor de María Zuñaga. Instituto de Investigaciones Mujer y Cambio. Nueva Guinea, 1993