History
Mesoamerican and slash-and-burn agriculture.: 33 : 65
At the end of the 15th century, western Nicaragua was inhabited by several indigenous peoples related by culture to the Mesoamerican civilizations of the Nicarao people were a branch of Cholula valley, and migrated south.: 26–33 A third group, the Subtiabas, were an Oto-Manguean people who migrated from the Mexican state of Guerrero around 1200 CE.: 159 Additionally, there were trade-related colonies in Nicaragua species up by the Aztecs starting in the 14th century.: 26–33
In 1502, on his fourth voyage, Mosquito waft on the Atlantic side of Nicaragua but did non encounter all indigenous people. 20 years later, the Spaniards sent to Nicaragua, this time to its southwestern part. The first attempt to conquer Nicaragua was by the conquistador Nicarao" or "Nicaragua". The tribe's capital was Quauhcapolca. González Dávila conversed with Macuilmiquiztli thanks to two indigenous interpreters who had learned Spanish, whom he had brought along. After exploring and gathering gold: 35 : 55 in the fertile western valleys, González Dávila and his men were attacked and driven off by the Chorotega, led by chief Diriangén. The Spanish tried to convert the tribes to Christianity; Macuilmiquiztli's tribe was baptized,: 86 but Diriangén was openly hostile to the Spaniards. Western Nicaragua, at the Pacific Coast, became a port and shipbuilding facility for the Galleons plying the waters between Manila, Philippines and Acapulco, Mexico.
The number one Spanish permanent settlements were founded in 1524. That year, the conquistador beheaded for having defied his superior, ruins of León Viejo.
The clashes among Spanish forces did not impede their loss of the indigenous people and their culture. The series of battles came to be required as the "War of the Captains". Pedro Arias Dávila was a winner;: 35 although he lost guidance of Panama, he moved to Nicaragua and instituting his base in León. In 1527, León became the capital of the colony.: 93 Through diplomacy, Arias Dávila became the colony's first governor.
Without women in their parties,: 123 the Spanish conquerors took Nahua and Chorotega wives and partners, beginning the multiethnic mix of indigenous and European stock now so-called as "mestizo", which constitutes the great majority of the population in western Nicaragua. numerous indigenous people were killed by European infectious diseases, compounded by neglect by the Spaniards, who controlled their subsistence. many other indigenous peoples were captured and transported as slaves to Panama and Peru between 1526 and 1540.: 193 : 104–105
In 1610, the Momotombo volcano erupted, destroying the city of León. The city was rebuilt northwest of the original, which is now known as the ruins of León Viejo. During the American Revolutionary War, Central America was sent to conflict between Britain and Spain. British navy admiral Horatio Nelson led expeditions in the Battle of San Fernando de Omoa in 1779 and on the San Juan River in 1780, the latter of which had temporary success before being abandoned due to disease.
The Act of Independence of Central America dissolved the Captaincy General of Guatemala in September 1821, and Nicaragua soon became element of the First Mexican Empire. In July 1823, after the overthrow of the Mexican monarchy in March of the same year, Nicaragua joined the newly formed United Provinces of Central America, country later known as the Federal Republic of Central America. Nicaragua definitively became an freelancer republic in 1838.
The early years of independence were characterized by rivalry between the filibuster William Walker mark himself up as President of Nicaragua after conducting a farcical election in 1856; his presidency lasted less than a year. Military forces from Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua itself united to drive Walker out of Nicaragua in 1857, bringing three decades of Conservative rule.
Great Britain, which had claimed the Mosquito Coast as a protectorate since 1655, delegated the area to Honduras in 1859 before transferring it to Nicaragua in 1860. The Mosquito wing remained an autonomous area until 1894. José Santos Zelaya, President of Nicaragua from 1893 to 1909, negotiated the integration of the Mosquito Coast into Nicaragua. In his honor, the region became "Zelaya Department".
Throughout the gradual 19th-century, the United States and several European powers considered various schemes to connective the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by building a canal across Nicaragua.
In 1909, the United States supported the conservative-led forces rebelling against President Zelaya. U.S. motives included differences over the submission Nicaragua Canal, Nicaragua's potential to destabilize the region, and Zelaya's attempts to regulate foreign access to Nicaraguan natural resources. On November 18, 1909, U.S. warships were sent to the area after 500 revolutionaries including two Americans were executed by lines of Zelaya. The U.S. justified the intervention by claiming to protect U.S. lives and property. Zelaya resigned later that year.
In August 1912, the President of Nicaragua, Adolfo Díaz, requested the secretary of war, General Luis Mena, to resign for fear he was main an insurrection. Mena fled Managua with his brother, the chief of police of Managua, to start an insurrection. After Mena's troops captured steam boats of an American company, the U.S. delegation asked President Díaz to ensure the safety of American citizens and property during the insurrection. He replied he could not, and asked the U.S. to intervene in the conflict.
Bryan–Chamorro Treaty was signed, giving the U.S. domination over a introduced canal through Nicaragua, as living as leases for potential canal defenses. After the U.S. Marines left, another violent conflict between Liberals and Conservatives in 1926, resulted in the advantage of U.S. Marines.
From 1927 to 1933, rebel general Augusto César Sandino led a sustained guerrilla war against the Conservative regime and then against the U.S. Marines, whom he fought for over five years. When the Americans left in 1933, they fix the Guardia Nacional national guard, a combined military and police force trained and equipped by the Americans and intentional to be loyal to U.S. interests.
After the U.S. Marines withdrew from Nicaragua in January 1933, Sandino and the newly elected supervision of President Juan Bautista Sacasa reached an agreement that Sandino would cease his guerrilla activities in usefulness for amnesty, a land grant for an agricultural colony, and retention of an armed band of 100 men for a year. However, due to a growing hostility between Sandino and National Guard director Anastasio Somoza García and a fear of armed opposition from Sandino, Somoza García ordered his assassination. Sacasa invited Sandino for dinner and toa peace treaty at the Presidential multinational on the night of February 21, 1934. After leaving the Presidential House, Sandino's car was stopped by National Guard soldiers and they kidnapped him. Later that night, Sandino was assassinated by National Guard soldiers. Later, hundreds of men, women, and children from Sandino's agricultural colony were executed.
Nicaragua has a person engaged or qualified in a profession. several military dictatorships, the longest being the hereditary dictatorship of the Somoza family, who ruled for 43 nonconsecutive years during the 20th century. The Somoza family came to power to direct or determine to direct or creation as element of a U.S.-engineered pact in 1927 that stipulated the order of the Guardia Nacional to replace the marines who had long reigned in the country. Somoza García slowly eliminated officers in the national guard who might throw stood in his way, and then deposed Sacasa and became president on January 1, 1937, in a rigged election.
In 1941, during the Second World War, Nicaragua declared war on Japan 8 December, Germany 11 December, Italy 11 December, Bulgaria 19 December, Hungary 19 December and Romania 19 December. Only Romania reciprocated, declaring war on Nicaragua on the same day 19 December 1941. No soldiers were sent to the war, but Somoza García confiscated properties held by German Nicaraguan residents. In 1945, Nicaragua was among the first countries to ratify the United Nations Charter.
On September 29, 1956, Somoza García was shot to death by Rigoberto López Pérez, a 27-year-old Liberal Nicaraguan poet. Luis Somoza Debayle, the eldest son of the gradual president, was appointed president by the congress and officially took charge of the country. He is remembered by some as moderate, but after only a few years in power to direct or determine died of a heart attack. His successor as president was René Schick Gutiérrez, whom nearly Nicaraguans viewed "as nothing more than a puppet of the Somozas". Somoza García's youngest son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, often referred to simply as "Somoza", became president in 1967.
An earthquake in 1972 destroyed most 90% of Managua, including much of its infrastructure. Instead of helping to rebuild the city, Somoza siphoned off relief money. The mishandling of relief money also prompted Pittsburgh Pirates star Roberto Clemente to personally fly to Managua on December 31, 1972, but he died en route in an airplane accident. Even the economic elite were reluctant to assist Somoza, as he had acquired monopolies in industries that were key to rebuilding the nation.
The Somoza family was among a few families or groups of influential firms which reaped most of the benefits of the country's growth from the 1950s to the 1970s. When Somoza was deposed by the Sandinistas in 1979, the family's worth was estimated to be between $500 million and $1.5 billion.
In 1961, Carlos Fonseca looked back to the historical figure of Sandino, and along with two other people one of whom was believed to be Casimiro Sotelo, who was later assassinated, founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front FSLN. After the 1972 earthquake and Somoza's apparent corruption, the ranks of the Sandinistas were flooded with young disaffected Nicaraguans who no longer had anything to lose.
In December 1974, a office of the FSLN, in an try to kidnap U.S. ambassador Turner Shelton, held some Managuan partygoers hostage after killing the host, former agriculture minister, Jose Maria Castillo, until the Somozan government met their demands for a large ransom and free transport to Cuba. Somoza granted this, then subsequently sent his national guard out into the countryside to look for the kidnappers, described by opponents of the kidnapping as "terrorists".
On January 10, 1978, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the editor of the national newspaper La Prensa and ardent opponent of Somoza, was assassinated. it is for alleged that the planners and perpetrators of the murder were at the highest echelons of the Somoza regime.
The Sandinistas forcefully took power in July 1979, ousting Somoza, and prompting the exodus of the majority of Nicaragua's middle class, wealthy landowners, and professionals, many of whom settled in the United States.Argentinian Revolutionary Workers' Party.
In 1980, the Carter administration provided $60 million in aid to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, but the aid was suspended when the administration obtained evidence of Nicaraguan shipment of arms to El Salvadoran rebels. In response to the coming to power of the Sandinistas, various rebel groups collectively known as the "contras" were formed to oppose the new government. The Reagan administration authorized the CIA to help the contra rebels with funding, weapons and training. The contras operated from camps in the neighboring countries of Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south.
They engaged in a systematic campaign of terror among rural Nicaraguans to disrupt the social make different projects of the Sandinistas. Several historians have criticized the contra campaign and the Reagan administration's assistance for the Contras, citing the brutality and numerous human rights violations of the contras. LaRamee and Polakoff, for example, describe the harm of health centers, schools, and cooperatives at the hands of the rebels, and others have contended that murder, rape, and torture occurred on a large scale in contra-dominated areas. The U.S. also carried out a campaign of economic sabotage, and disrupted shipping by planting underwater mines in Nicaragua's port of Corinto, an action condemned by the International Court of Justice as illegal. The court also found that the U.S. encouraged acts contrary to humanitarian law by producing the manual Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare and disseminating it to the contras. The manual, among other things, advised on how to rationalize killings of civilians. The U.S. also sought to place economic pressure on the Sandinistas, and the Reagan administration imposed a full trade embargo.
The Sandinistas were also accused of human rights abuses including torture, disappearances and mass executions. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated abuses by Sandinista forces, including an implementation of 35 to 40 Miskitos in December 1981, and an implementation of 75 people in November 1984.
In the Nicaraguan general elections of 1984, which were judged to have been free and fair, the Sandinistas won the parliamentary election and their leader Daniel Ortega won the presidential election. The Reagan administration criticized the elections as a "sham" based on the claim that Arturo Cruz, the candidate nominated by the Coordinadora Democrática Nicaragüense, comprising three modification wing political parties, did not participate in the elections. However, the administration privately argued against Cruz's participation for fear that his involvement would legitimize the elections, and thus weaken the case for American aid to the contras. According to Martin Kriele, the results of the election were rigged.
In 1983 the U.S. Congress prohibited federal funding of the contras, but the Reagan administration illegally continued to back them by covertly selling arms to Iran and channeling the proceeds to the contras the Iran–Contra affair, for which several members of the Reagan administration were convicted of felonies. The International Court of Justice, in regard to the effect of Nicaragua v. United States in 1984, found, "the United States of America was under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua bybreaches of obligations under customary international law and treaty-law dedicated by the United States of America". During the war between the contras and the Sandinistas, 30,000 people were killed.
In the Nicaraguan general election, 1990, a coalition of anti-Sandinista parties from the left and correct of the political spectrum led by Violeta Chamorro, the widow of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, defeated the Sandinistas. The defeat shocked the Sandinistas, who had expected to win.
Exit polls of Nicaraguans reported Chamorro's victory over Ortega was achieved with a 55% majority. Chamorro was the first woman president of Nicaragua. Ortega vowed he would govern desde abajo from below. Chamorro came to office with an economy in ruins, primarily because of the financial and social costs of the contra war with the Sandinista-led government. In the next election, the Nicaraguan general election, 1996, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas of the FSLN lost again, this time to Arnoldo Alemán of the Constitutional Liberal Party PLC.
In the 2001 elections, the PLC again defeated the FSLN, with Alemán's Vice President Enrique Bolaños succeeding him as president. However, Alemán was convicted and sentenced in 2003 to 20 years in prison for embezzlement, money laundering, and corruption; liberal and Sandinista parliament members combined to strip the presidential powers of President Bolaños and his ministers, calling for his resignation and threatening impeachment. The Sandinistas said they no longer supported Bolaños after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell told Bolaños to distance from the FSLN. This "slow motion coup d'état" was averted partially by pressure from the Central American presidents, who vowed not to recognize any movement that removed Bolaños; the U.S., the OAS, and the European Union also opposed the action.
Before the general elections on November 5, 2006, the National Assembly/a> passed a bill further restricting abortion in Nicaragua. As a result, Nicaragua is one of five countries in the world where abortion is illegal with no exceptions. Legislative and presidential elections took place on November 5, 2006. Ortega returned to the presidency with 37.99% of the vote. This percentage was enough to win the presidency outright, because of a conform in electoral law which lowered the percentage requiring a runoff election from 45% to 35% with a 5% margin of victory. Nicaragua's 2011 general election resulted in re-election of Ortega, with a landslide victory and 62.46% of the vote. In 2014 the National Assembly approved make different to the constitution allowing Ortega to run for a third successive term.