Nicaraguan National Guard

Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua (National Guard) was the military, police, and intelligence service of Nicaragua under the Somoza dynasty.² Created by the U.S. in the 1930s, the Guard served as the power base of the Somoza family's forty-six-year rule. Its officers formed the leadership core of the Contras after the Sandinista revolution.¹

Creation and U.S. Training

The U.S. created the National Guard in the 1930s and spent millions of dollars a year supplying weapons and training its officers in anticommunist counterinsurgency.¹ Training took place at Fort Gulick, Fort Benning, and Leavenworth. Anastasio Somoza told U.S. ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo in 1979 that of approximately nine hundred Guard officers, "eight hundred or so belong to your schools."

The Guard also encompassed the Oficina Seguridad Nacional (OSN), Somoza's secret police unit that monitored political dissidents. It managed the national police, state security and intelligence services, the postal service, and customs agency.

Collapse

When Somoza fled Nicaragua on July 17, 1979, the vaunted National Guard collapsed within hours.¹ Officers who could escape poured across the borders into El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica, or sought refuge in the Colombian embassy in Managua. Those who could not escape were imprisoned or faced firing squads.

Reconstitution as the Contras

The Central Intelligence Agency began reassembling the scattered National Guard brigades in 1980 under Enrique Bermúdez, a former military attaché in Washington who had been hired by the agency specifically for this purpose.¹ The Legion of September 15, an early Contra group made up primarily of ex-National Guardsmen, was based in Guatemala and commanded by Ricardo Lau and Bermúdez. This group later became the core of the FDN, the largest and most powerful Contra faction.²