Part 5 - The Occupation Doesn't End, Just Changes
By 1924, a moderate conservative, Carlos Solorzano was elected president presenting a coalition ticket with liberal Juan Bautista Sacasa as his vice president, although he ended up purging all liberals from his government. Solorzano then requested that the U.S. stay to build a national military force, which would be the National Guard. After deciding it was “safe” to leave the Central American nation, the remaining Marines were withdrawn after a thirteen-year occupation on Aug. 3, 1925.
Not even a month after the occupation forces left, former conservative president (1917 -1921) General Emiliano Chamorro launched a coup d'état, forcing Solorzano and Sacasa to flee the country, and proclaimed himself president on January 1926. The political situation broke into a civil war by May, as exiled liberal forces landed in the Caribbean port of Bluefields.
Fearing the new round of conservative-liberal violence and mainly worrying that the infighting in Nicaragua might result in a liberal victory as it happened a few years earlier in Mexico, the U.S. invaded Nicaragua once again. A peace was brokered by the U.S. between liberal and conservative factions in October 1926. Chamorro resigned and the Nicaraguan Congress elected former president (1911- 1916) Alfonso Diaz to serve as head of state once again.
Yet due to Chamorro’s resignation, his vice president liberal Sacasa returned from exile from Guatemala and declared himself Constitutional President of Nicaragua from Puerto Cabezas on Dec. 1, 1926, only recognized by Mexico who was providing weapons to the liberal army.
Thousands of liberal soldiers made their way towards Managua led by General Jose Maria Moncada, winning key battles along the way. In January 1927, U.S. President Calvin Coolidge lifted the arms embargo on the Nicaraguan government, allowing his country to legally provide military aid to the conservatives. Coolidge then sent politician Henry Stimson to negotiate an end to the war. On May 20, 1927, both factions agreed to sign the truce known as the Pact of Espino Negro, under the conditions that Diaz would remain president until a new, U.S.-supervised election in 1928, both sides would disarm ending the Constitutionalist War, and a new National Guard would be established.
Sacasa left the country since he refused to sign, as did another liberal leader, Augusto Cesar Sandino.
Source:
https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/sandino-us-imperialism-making-20200219-0029.html
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