This is the homepage for 80-some oral testimonies of elderly former Sandinistas.  In the early 1980s, in an official state-sponsored memory project, the Instituto de Estudio del Sandinismo, a branch of the Sandinista Ministry of Culture, sent young revolutionaries up into the northern mountains to interview the old-timers who had fought with Sandino half a century before.  The goals of the project were to rescue these memories and at the same time strengthen the lines of ideological continuity connecting the struggle of the revolutionary Sandinista government with the struggle of Sandino and the EDSN half a century before.  The cassette tapes were then transcribed at the IES office in Managua.  Sadly, the present location of these transcribed testimonies is unknown.  They are not housed in the successor institution to the IES, the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (IHNCA-UCA).  Nor are they available in the Archivo Militar in Managua, which houses the original cassette tapes.  But thanks to the kind courtesy of the IES staff in 1990, photocopies of 77 transcribed testimonies are in the possession of the author.

     These IES-DOCS webpages will house digital images and searchable transcriptions of the full text of these 77 transcribed IES testimonies — nearly 1,000 hardcopy pages in all.  These extraordinarily rich documents arguably comprise the most important primary sources produced on the rebellion since Sandino's assassination in 1934.  For a brief discussion of the contexts of these texts' production and some of the interpretive challenges they present, navigate to the East Coast pages > Documentary Annex > Page 13, or click HERE.  (Photo: Walter Castillo Sandino and his uncle Pedro Antonio Aráuz, San Rafael del Norte, 1980).  Accompanying these 77 IES testimonies are six additional oral testimonies from other sources.