Sacramento's Nicaragua Connection

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During preparations for the annual anniversary of the Sandinista revolution on July 18, 2007, workers put up a banner of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Managua, Nicaragua. In the 1920s and ’30s Sandino led a bloody guerilla war against the U.S. Marines that ultimately forced the Marines out.

However, the revolutionary socialist was  executed a few years later. It wasn’t the first (or last) time Americans fought on that country’s soil. During the Gold Rush one of the swifter alternatives to a sea passage around Cape Horn was an overland passage across the isthmus of Central America — through Nicaragua or Panama. In one of Sacramento’s strangest historical episodes, a foreign expedition was launched here in 1851 to seize control of the Nicaraguan route and install the American leader of the motley crew as dictator of that country. It involved the richest man in America, ferry boats, a local newspaper editor, and a kind of swashbuckling chutzpah that seems to characterize that period in our history. It ended in ignominy and execution.

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