Murals of revolutionary Nicaragua

In the decade of Sandinista rule following the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, close to 300 murals were created in that country. These murals provided a narrative of the revolution, portraying recent and more distant history, and visualizing the better future promised by the revolution.
The first murals expressing solidarity with the Sandinistas were painted outside the country in Panama, by brothers Virgilio and Ignacio Ortega. They entered Nicaragua after the Sandinista takeover and continued their work there, and many other artists also took part over the following years. Despite the laws passed by the Sandinista government to protect the murals, most of them have since been destroyed.
In the 1920s an anti-imperialist movement was founded by Augusto Sandino to break U.S. dominance in Nicaragua. His guerrilla army won a short-lived victory for socialist policies. Following his assassination in 1934, Nicaragua experienced forty years of repression and violence under the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, which had U.S. support. Somoza was overthrown in 1979 by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN). Daniel Ortega, the revolution's clan leader, enacted a series of major literacy, healthcare, and land reforms. In the context of the Cold War and anti-communist movements in the U.S., Nicaragua's attempts to redistribute land and wealth unleashed a hostile response from the U.S., which financed and armed the Contras, a counter-revolutionary force.
The mural movement was a response to the original movement of Sandino and the revolution that was inspired by him nearly 50 years later. The murals both offer a realistic portrayal of what happened in the Sandinista-Contra War and reflect the socialistic and optimistic values of the FSLN government. It was in the 1990s, when the Sandinista government was voted out of office and replaced by a U.S. supported rightist government, that the murals began to be destroyed.
In the 1970s, brothers Virgilio and Ignacio Ortega formed the Felicia Santizo Brigade of Panama. Inspired by the Ramona Parra Brigades in Chile they began to paint murals all over Panama. Choosing locations on and around army bases, their murals centered on themes of nationalism, Marxism, anti-imperialism, pro-Palestinian and pro-Sandinista view points.
The Felicia Santizo Brigade of Panama marks the story of the first muralist expression of solidarity with Nicaragua from the outside in the struggle against Somoza. Historically, theirs were the first revolutionary themed murals painted throughout Nicaragua. In September 1979, within two months of the triumph of the Sandinistas, arrangements were made to have the brigade paint a mural in Nicaragua. This guerrilla brigade made their entry into Nicaragua with the support of the FSLN army and, similar to their work in Panama, most of their murals were painted in army and police bases. Their work – in consultation with local sponsors and residents – was centered on military themes, focusing on the physical facts of the insurrection. For example, a mural from the Nicarao Community Center in Managua depicts an angry mob of men and women – some armed with rifles and others with knives – looking down at a prostrate National Guardsman. A dagger hovers just above his throat, and his eyes are white with horror. Other murals by the Felicia Santizo Brigade adorn long walls, crowded with gun-toting figures, reclining corpses, and portraits of revolutionary predecessors such as Lenin, Sandino, and Che Guevara.
The Panamanians were the first of many artists from abroad who came to Nicaragua in the years after the Revolution to express their solidarity with the nation's new political climate. Their murals were among the first painted within Nicaragua, and were also the first to be destroyed.
The murals express a wide range of themes regarding politics, the people and the undocumented history of the nation, such as:
Throughout the mural movement, murals were painted all over Nicaragua. However, murals were unsurprisingly most concentrated in the areas in which the Nicaraguan revolution and Sandinista movements had been most intense. Following is a list of all the cities in which murals have been found and documented throughout Nicaragua and in parentheses is the number of murals that each town contains.
After the 1990 Sandinista loss in the Nicaraguan elections, the mayor of Managua, Arnoldo Alemán, started a campaign to paint over and destroy the murals, even though these murals were protected by various articles of the Nicaraguan constitution and Law 90. These statutes called for the protection of Nicaraguan culture, as well as for freedom of expression and preservation of "historic patrimony." None of those responsible for the destruction were ever successfully prosecuted. Alemán continually denied his sponsorship of the destructions and elimination of the murals and promised repeatedly to compensate the different artists for their lost artwork, although few payments were in fact made. It is suspected that much of the destruction movement was sponsored by the U.S. government in their attempt to eliminate pro-Sandinista, anti-U.S. imperialism propaganda from Nicaraguan society. Many of the oldest, best and most centrally placed murals were painted over and now only exist in memory, or in some cases in photographic records. After Alemán's campaign was underway, however, a movement of artists and concerned groups began to raise funds to restore and protect these murals and were successful to some extent; new murals were painted as well under the eventual return of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista National Liberation Front leadership in 2008.