Nicaragua historical timeline

Nicaragua's history is that of a country with a coveted position -- the lake and the river that were the obvious canal route -- and a divided elite, which between them invited in every intervention of the last two centuries. What a visitor sees, from the colonial towns to Managua's empty centre, is the record of each.

Chronology

1. 1524 Francisco Hernández de Córdoba names Granada on Lake Nicaragua, arguably the first European city on the American mainland, and founds León the same year; Momotombo's eruption of 1610 forces León to move 48 kilometres west, leaving the ruins of León Viejo that were inscribed as World Heritage in 2000.
2. 1821 Independence from Spain, followed by two years in the First Mexican Empire and membership of the United Provinces of Central America from 1823; Nicaragua becomes an independent republic in its own right in 1838, and the rivalry between Liberal León and Conservative Granada degenerates repeatedly into civil war.
3. 1856 Invited by the Liberals in 1855, the American adventurer William Walker declares himself president and makes English the official language; he is defeated and expelled, and Granada is sacked as he leaves.
4. 1912 The United States occupies Nicaragua from 4 August 1912 to 2 January 1933 as part of the Banana Wars, the formal occupation following years of intermittent intervention. Marines had already landed at Bluefields on the Caribbean coast. Twenty-one years of occupation is the background to every Nicaraguan political argument about the United States, and it is longer than the Sandinista revolution and the Contra war put together.
5. 1927 Augusto César Sandino leads a rebellion against the occupation between 1927 and 1933, drawing units of the United States Marine Corps into an undeclared guerrilla war. American troops withdrew in 1933 after overseeing the election and inauguration of President Juan Bautista Sacasa. This is the man the Sandinista National Liberation Front is named for, and his silhouette -- hat and boots -- is the most reproduced image in the country.
6. 1934 Sandino is executed on 21 February by National Guard forces under General Anastasio Somoza García, who seizes power in a coup two years later, is elected president by an overwhelming margin in 1936 and establishes a dictatorship. The family ruled Nicaragua for more than 40 years, and the murder is the founding act of both the dynasty and the movement that eventually overthrew it.
7. 1936 The Somoza dynasty takes power and holds it until 1979, through the decades in which the poet Rubén Darío's León and the university of 1812 are the country's intellectual counterweight.
8. 1972 The Managua earthquake of December kills over 10,000 people and leaves 500,000 homeless; the misuse of relief aid becomes a turning point against the regime.
9. 1979 The Sandinista insurrection overthrows the dictatorship in 1978–79 and Somoza Debayle flees to Miami; the Contra war of 1981 to 1990 that follows takes tens of thousands more lives and ends when the Sandinistas lose the election of 1990.
10. 1998 Hurricane Mitch never enters Nicaragua but its circulation drops over 50 inches of rain, the flank of the Casita volcano fails as a lahar, and at least 3,800 people are killed in the country, more than 2,000 of them in the towns of El Provenir and Rolando Rodríguez. Two million Nicaraguans were directly affected. Mitch was the deadliest Atlantic hurricane in over 200 years, and it is why hillside settlement and volcanic slopes are treated as a hazard question here rather than a view.
11. 2006 Daniel Ortega is elected president again; the years since 2007 bring what the encyclopaedia calls democratic backsliding, with opposition candidates and activists arrested.
12. 2018 From 19 April, protests over a social-security reform, the canal project and forest fires in the Indio Maíz reserve are met with violence and repression; the Canadian advisory counts hundreds of deaths and detentions since, and the political situation remains the first fact of any visit.

What survived, and how

The colonial towns survived because they were never the capital for long: Granada was sacked in 1856 and rebuilt, León kept its cathedral and its university, and Managua -- the compromise capital between them -- lost its centre to the earthquake of 1972 and never fully rebuilt it. The volcanoes survived everything and shaped it, moving León in 1610 and giving the country its skyline.

What survived least is trust in the state: the ruins of 1972, the memorials of 1979 and the barricades of 2018 are the same argument in three centuries of masonry.