To Herbert Clark Hoover
President of the United States of America
Sir:
I am pleased to inform you that through the efforts of our soldiers we have managed to remove from action the ex-leader of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, and his secretary of state, Franklin B. Kellogg. This is the pair of insolent individuals who brazenly ordered the massacre of my countrymen, desolating our fields with fire, violating our women, and pretending to deny us our sacred rights to freedom.
As always our army of liberation is firm and victorious and eagerly awaits the orientation that you will give to the macabre and conspiratorial policy that Coolidge and Kellogg left behind them in Nicaragua. We wish to inform you as well that we are ready to punish implacable every abuse of the United States of America in the affairs of our country.
Nicaragua does not owe a single penny to the United States, but you owe us the peace lost in our since 1909, when the Wall Street bankers introduced the corrupting vice of the dollar in Nicaragua. For every thousand dollars that the Yankee bankers have introduced into my country, a Nicaraguan has died, and our mothers, sisters, wives, and sons have shed tears of sorrow.
In August, 1909, the spurious Adolfo Díaz was a simple fourth-class employee with a daily salary of $2.65–two dollars and sixty-five cents–at the North American mining company La Luz and Los Angeles, located in Pis-Pis, the department of Bluefields, the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. From that mine Adolfo Díaz was taken to be the instrument in Nicaragua of the Wall Street Bankers, who encouraged him to join the rebellion that had begun with the treason of Juan J. Estrada against the constitutional government. At that time Juan J. Estrada held the post of governor of Bluefields.
The Wall Street bankers supplied $800,000–eight hundred thousand dollars to Adolfo Díaz for the support of that unfortunate rebellion, and since that tragic moment mourning and grief have spread across my country. If all the blood spilled and all the Nicaraguan corpses produced by Wall Street dollars from that time until the present could be brought together in one place, so that on July 4 the U.S. imperialists in Washington and New York could consume those corpses and drink the blood of my compatriots, together they could not eat and drink everything on that holiday on which the independence of the United States is celebrated. All Nicaraguans are fully aware of the truth of the words I have expressed.
The Wall Street bankers with their high and mighty dollar looked upon Adolfo Díaz and other corrupt Nicaraguans as instruments that they themselves created to make Nicaragua accept loans which we did not need. Those bankers chose those corrupt turncoats to give an appearance of legality to the treaties and pacts that would allow them to take possession of Nicaragua. The Yankee pirates understood that the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people angrily rejected the treaties and pacts celebrated between the bankers and some four Nicaraguan sell-outs. This recognition has caused the U.S. government to employ every trick to keep in power in our country the Nicaraguans who offered themselves as their hand-servants to wield power over their own brothers.
For this reason in 1923, at the behest of the Yankee government, the Central American governments celebrated treaties aboard the United States cruiser Tacoma in the Gulf of Fonseca, and the same Yankee government proposed the terms to be agreed to by those governments . Among the terms of those treaties, it was established that no government of Central America coming to power though a coup d’état was to be recognized by the other Central American governments, or by the government of the United States.
What the Yankees hoped to achieve by this was to secure power to those persons who had sold them Nicaragua’s sovereignty, because the treaties they had made with the sell-outs were to last for ninety-nineyears and could be prolonged at the will of the United States. At that time the Wall Street bankers saw themselves as lords and masters of Nicaragua. They knelt down before their strong boxes full of metal, their hands and eyes lifted toward heaven, giving thanks to the god Gold for the great miracle he had granted them (the accursed dollar, the wood-borer that weakens the foundations of Yankee imperialism, and will cause its downfall)!
Rejoicing in the same manner were the hypocritical Nicaraguan sell-outs who were kept in power at that time, as they are today, with the support of Yankee bayonets.
Divine Justice brought an end to the life of Don Diego Manuel Chamorro, president of Nicaragua at the time the Tacoma treaties were agreed to. The Nicaraguan people, who had thought their right to freedom had been forever lost, saw an improvement in the prospects for Nicaraguan sovereignty with the death of Diego Manuel Chamorro. The citizen Bartolomé Martínez assumed the presidency and supported a just and honorable election, as a result of which Carlos Sólorzano and Dr. Juan Bautista Sacasa were elected president and vice president respectively, assuming the duties granted to them by the Nicaraguan people.
Too much pride disturbed the hearts of the ex-president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, and of the secretary of state, Frank B. Kellogg, when they saw justice had placed itself on the side of our people; an evil purpose disturbed the minds of Adolfo Díaz, Emiliano Chamorro, and their followers, and thus it was that on the night of October 24, 1925, they carried out their famous Lomazo, now well known to the civilized world.
They then demanded that Don Carlos renounce the presidency of the Republic, declaring him insane. They disavowed the legality of Dr. Sacasa’s vice presidency, persecuted him, and forced him to leave the country.
Chamorro made himself president Nicaragua. The United States of America, making a display of political decency for the civilized world, did not recognized Chamorro. Instead, however, it recognized his accomplice, Adolfo Díaz. There is no doubt in our minds that all of this was the work of Coolidge and Kellogg, responding to the orders of Wall Street.
Mr. Hoover: If you have the eyes to see, see. If you have the ears to hear, hear. Consider, if not yourself, the people you represent.
Coolidge and Kellogg are two North American politicians whose policies have come to naught. Their activities in Nicaragua have brought an enormous loss of prestige to the land of Washington. They have caused torrents of blood and tears to flow in my country, and they have brought sorrow and tears to many American homes. With a tiny bit of intelligence on their part, none of this would have happened, and the United States would have continued to conceal the true nature of its policies. Today the democracy of the United States finds itself at the edge of an abyss, and either you can stop it or you can push it over. Your government’s acts are now a matter of life or death for your country.
Until six years ago you had been able to maintain an appearance of legality in your treaties and in your intrusions into Nicaragua, but after the death of Dan Diego Manuel Chamorro, or good friend Fate unmasked the Yankee policy in my country.
By the actions that kept Coolidge and Kellogg in my country, they have produced an enormous wave of hatred and distrust for you which is almost worldwide in scope. In Nicaragua you have no friends except a small group of evil men who do not represent the genuine feelings of the Nicaraguan people. I, on the other hand, represent with my army the true feelings of our countrymen. Though they have not taken up a rifle in my army, the vast majority of Nicaraguans are with me in spirit.
I am not unaware of the material resources that your nation has at its disposal. In fact you have everything, but “what you lack is God.”
Among those who were intimidated in Tipitata on May 4, 1927, only the spiteful, the weak, and the irresolute allowed themselves to be humiliated by the noisy demands of Yankee power. Dr. Sacasa was the man whose task it was to reject Coolidge’s abuses against Nicaraguan sovereignty with force, but he failed to do so. He was a afraid, and so you have him there, humiliated and down on his knees before you.
Perhaps you are mistaken when you think you will humiliate everybody, as you did Sacasa. As long as you continue the policies of Coolidge and Kellogg, you will continue encountering Sandinos.
It must be seen that there exists a divine breath of justice that sustains us but is a tempest for those who would perform evil acts.
It is upon reason, justice, and right that I have made my stand in opposition to the policies that you have unleashed against my country.
Patria y Libertad.
AUGUSTO CÉSAR SANDINO