Pluralism, Development, and the Nicaraguan Revolution

A few months before he was gunned down by accomplices of the Somoza dictatorship in the rubble of downtown Managua in 1978, La Prensa editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro published the story “El enigma de las Alemanas.”¹ In it he describes the unsettling effects of a bus full of female German tourists “with blue eyes and very white skin” arriving in Totogalpa, the town in the Segovias that fifty years before had been the site of the US marine bombardment of Augusto Sandino’s forces. The German tourists initially integrate with the community, until one day they strip naked and cavort in