Carlos Fonseca Amador (23 June 1936 – 8 November 1976) was a Nicaraguan professor, politician, writer and revolutionary who was one of the founders of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).

[5] Although his father later helped him go to school and educate himself and occasionally invited him to his mansion in Matagalpa, Fonseca held greater admiration for his mother because of her work ethic and strength.

[6] In 1950 Fonseca entered secondary school at the Instituto Nacional del Norte (INN, National Institute of the North),[7] where he was named best student in his class while also working odd jobs during holiday breaks.

The book featured uncritical praise of the accomplishments of the Soviet government, including its "free press, complete freedom of religion and the efficiency of its worker-run industries.

"[citation needed] He returned to Nicaragua on December 16 and was immediately arrested at the Las Mercedes International Airport in Managua by the Guardia Nacional.

In March 1958 he signed the Minimum Program of the Movilización Republicana (MR, Republican Mobilization) party, which called for a general amnesty and the return of exiles.

Fonseca and his allies hoped to use the JDN to attract youth outside the relatively small number of university students to the resistance to the Somoza regime, primarily by leading demonstrations and painting slogans against tyranny on walls, while pointing out the shortcomings of the Unión Nacional Opositora (UNO, National Opposition Union) controlled by the Conservative Party.

Nearly the entire city turned out for the funeral march the next day and both students and faculty forced the University to permanently bar the Guardia Nacional from the campus.

These short-lived groups did, however, leave a tradition of militant street action, solidarity with the Cuban revolution, and independence from both the existing mainstream parties and the PSN.

[21] Fonseca also began to host political meetings in a small apartment in the Miramar section of Havana that were frequented by a number of Nicaraguan exiles who would later become part of the FSLN.

The MNN then transformed itself into a group known as the Frente de Liberación Nacional (FLN, the National Liberation Front), which took its name from the movement fighting French colonialism in Algeria.

[23] At a meeting of the FLN held in Honduras in July, Fonseca proposed the name "Sandinista National Liberation Front" for the armed revolutionary organization.

Inspired by the example of the Cuban Revolution, and in particular Castro and Guevara's insistence on the primary role of an armed uprising, while giving less importance to political organizing among the peasantry and urban workers,[25] Fonseca and Santos López tried to copy the Cuban movement's tactics, down to adopting a timetable modeled on the amount of time that passed from the outbreak of hostilities in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains to the guerrillas's march into Havana.

[27] Largely unable to communicate with the Sumo-speaking peasants of the region, and having done little advance work in the area, several guerrillas were killed by the Guardia Nacional in a confrontation in August, while Fonseca and others were able to make it across the Honduran border over the next month.

[32] While Fonseca continued to hold the top leadership position in the FSLN during this period, he was out of the country for much of it, writing several pieces about the poet Rubén Darío while working with colleagues within Nicaragua.

That translated in practice into educational work and community organizing, creating indoctrination classes and campaigning to bring resources to working-class neighborhoods in Managua.

[37] The state responded to the Pancasan operation by increasing the repression of the peasantry, forcing the FSLN to redirect its efforts to organizing underground urban networks.

The FSLN created a network of safe houses and developed a culture of pseudonyms, code words and other security measures,[38] while assassinating one of the Somoza regime's torturers and robbing banks and businesses to raise money for the movement.

[40] Fonseca left the underground life in Nicaragua for Costa Rica, where he reassessed the last few years of legal and guerrilla activity in an essay titled Hora Cero, while writing the first draft of what became known as the Programa Historico, which was then circulated among other members of the FSLN leadership.

[42] Supporters in France and El Salvador demanded that Costa Rica release Carlos Fonseca and his companions, but it was not until October 21, 1970 that they were released after FSLN militants seized two American executives of United Fruit Company by highjacking a Costa Rican commercial flight on which they were passengers, then exchanging them for Fonseca, Ortega and the other prisoners involved in the failed prison break attempt.

While in exile Fonseca undertook extensive research on Nicaragua's history in the nineteenth and twentieth century, producing five books and essays about Sandino and several short works about Rigoberto López Pérez, who assassinated Anastasio Somoza García in 1956.

[44] During his years in Havana disagreements over fundamental issues of political direction surfaced between the exiles and those still working in Nicaragua and among the exiles: how much to emphasize military tactics rather than political organizing, whether to focus on urban rather than rural warfare, the role that different social classes should play in the struggle, the timing and pace of revolutionary action, vanguardism, and alliances with other parties and groups.

Fonseca attempted to address these divisions by urging each tendency to avoid ideological rigidity, but failed; while the FSLN did not split, factional rivalries persisted.

Factionalism reached its height in 1975, when the National Directorate expelled the principal leaders of the Proletarian Tendency, dealing a serious blow to the FSLN's urban support base.

[46] The crisis within the movement finally moved him in 1975 to return to Nicaragua, where he met with those activists in charge of the FSLN's urban networks at a safe house outside Managua to discuss their political disagreements and to create the support needed for a military assault on the regime.

Yet while the FSLN continued to pay tribute to the memory of "a safely dead and saintly Carlos",[50] it departed from many of the policies he argued for in his years in exile, giving less priority to land reform and elevating military necessity over popular mobilization in fighting the contras.

[52] However, Russia historian J. Arch Getty, writing in the American Historical Review, raised questions about the trustworthiness and verifiability of Mitrokhin's material about the Soviet Union, doubting whether this "self-described loner with increasingly anti-Soviet views" would have had the opportunity to "transcribe thousands of documents, smuggle them out of KGB premises", etc.