Mayorga, Silvio (1936–1967)

Silvio Mayorga (b. 1936; d. 27 August 1967), Nicaraguan leader and cofounder of the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Mayorga was born in Matagalpa at approximately the same time as Carlos Fonseca. They grew up together and in 1954 entered law school at the National Autonomous University in León. Mayorga immediately became a student leader and joined the Nicaraguan Socialist Party in 1955. Like Fonseca, he soon rejected the passive character of the Socialists and encouraged more aggressive student radicalism. He became active in the Nicaraguan Patriotic Youth organization in the late 1950s and joined Fonseca's New Nicaragua Movement in 1960. In July 1961 Mayorga founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front with Fonseca and Tomás Borge.

Mayorga was one of the principal commanders of guerrillas based in the village of Walaquistan. There he cooperated closely with Borge in planning the first Sandinista attack at Río Coco in 1963. He was gravely injured in an attack at San Carlos in the same year and spent several months recuperating. He reappeared in 1964 as a student organizer in León and Managua. For the next three years, Mayorga encouraged students and the urban poor to support the Sandinistas. In 1967, he led an expedition to explore Quinagua as an alternative guerrilla base in the mountains of Las Segovias. Mayorga's forces had little military experience, and some of his soldiers were teenagers. This proved disastrous when they attacked Pancasán in August 1967. Mayorga and fifty combatants were killed by the National Guard. His death and the Pancasán fiasco forced the Sandinista leadership to suspend frontal attacks on the Guard and seriously reevaluate its political and military strategy over the next two years. Mayorga was the first original Sandinista to fall in combat.

See alsoNicaragua, Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frente Estudiantil Revolucionario, Historia del FSLN (1975).

Donald Hodges, The Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1986).

U.S. Department Of State, Bureau Of Public Affairs, Nicaraguan Biographies: A Resource Book (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Díaz Araujo, Enrique. El sandinismo nicaragüense. Mendoza, Argentina: Ediciones la Rosa Blanca, 2004.

Flakoll, D.J., and Claribel Alegría. Nicaragua, la revolución sandinista: Una crónica política, 1855–1979. Managua, Nicaragua: Anama Ediciones Centroamericanas, 2004.

                                           Mark Everingham