I.  Introduction

          Over the years I have found, photocopied, and transcribed about one thousand unpublished Sandinista documents -- letters, notes, orders, diaries, prayers, lists, drafts, receipts, certificates, songs, poems -- the great majority captured by the Marines and Guardia during offensive operations.  A huge cache of documents -- about half of those in my possession -- did not appear in the National Archives' inventories until after the year 2000.  I was fortunate to be the first person in 70 years (1934-2004) to look at them. 

          More than a third of these S-Docs are transcribed from photocopies of originals; most of the rest are transcriptions of English translations produced by the Marines & Guardia; in the latter case, the originals were probably either destroyed or taken as war souvenirs. 

          The Sandinistas produced tens of thousands of documents, of which only a small portion survives to the present day, at least in public repositories.  Just about everything that does survive, and that hasn't been published elsewhere, will reside here.  This material is probably the single most important collection on this website.

           Only about ten documents appear on each page.  This is to make loading the pages easier; to make lifting the material off the website a tad more arduous; to make it easier to keep track of things; and to accord each document the attention it deserves.  At ten documents per page, there will eventually be about 100 pages in this collection.  Right now there are 16.  An index to these pages appears here; a link to it appears on every S-Docs page.  There are two other indices:  one lists the documents by author, another by recipient.  Sandino, for example, authored around 277 of these documents (at the current count).  None have been published before now. 

          (It should be noted that most of the S-Docs reproduced here are relatively short; as the war picked up steam, the missives grew considerably longer.  While this site includes about 16 percent of the S-Docs [ca. 160 of 1,000], it probably includes only around 2 percent of the total number of words in the S-Docs collection.)

          There follows the "master inventory" of these documents (organized chronologically), followed by explanatory notes that apply to all S-Docs pages. 

II.  Master Inventory