"Petty-bourgeois adventurers" and "the old revolutionary generation": the FSLN and the PVP (1966-1970)

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to analyze the relationships between the political leadership of the PVP and the FSLN in the 1960s, based on the correspondence between Manuel Mora Valverde and Carlos Fonseca Amador, in order to identify the contradictions, discrepancies and coincidences between the leaders of both organizations, the first communist, and the second a nationalist guerrilla born under the imprint of the Cuban model. In this sense, we start from the question of how the relations between the Partido Vanguardia Popular (PVP) and the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) were during the 1960s, both organizations being of a different nature and maintaining different political lines on the strategy to follow in the antisomocista fight.

As a central hypothesis, we maintain that the establishment of relations between both organizations was a complex process, marked by mistrust and mutual differences, dragged from the very foundation of the FSLN towards the end of the 1960s, since both were the expression of two different revolutionary currents, that throughout the continent they disagreed based on the ways and strategies to combat the dictatorial regimes that dominated the region.