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In 1524, Conquistador Francisco Hernández de Córdoba founded the first Spanish permanent settlements, including two of Nicaragua's principal towns: Granada on Lake Nicaragua and Leon east of Lake Managua. Settled as a colony of Spain within the kingdom of Guatemala in the 1520s, Nicaragua became a part of the Mexican Empire and then gained its independence as a part of the United Provinces of Central America in 1821 and as an independent republic in its own right in 1838. The Mosquito Coast based on Blue fields on the Atlantic was claimed by the United Kingdom and its predecessors as a protectorate from 1655 to 1850; this was delegated to Honduras in 1859 and transferred to Nicaragua in 1860, though remained autonomous until 1894. Much of Nicaragua's early politics following independence was characterized by the rivalry between the liberal élite of León and the conservative élite of Granada. This rivalry sometimes spilled into civil war. Initially invited by the Liberals in 1855 to join their struggle against the conservatives, a United States adventurer named William Walker won the liberal's war so easily that he saw the chance to take over the country. Walker named himself president in 1856 and offered the United States a new slave state. Fearing the possibility of his plans for expansion, several Central American countries united to drive him out of Nicaragua in 1857, and he was executed in neighboring Honduras in 1861. A period of three decades of conservative rule ensued. Taking advantage of divisions within the conservative ranks, José Santos Zelaya led a liberal revolt that brought him to power in 1893. Zelaya ended the longstanding dispute with the United Kingdom over the Atlantic Coast in 1894, and reincorporated the Mosquito Coast into Nicaragua. Nicaragua offered assistance during World War II, and was the first country in the world to ratify the UN Charter. The leftist Sandinistas (the FSLN) took power after a long civil war and formed a government in 1979. The Sandanista government organized a literacy drive to prepare the largely illiterate electorate for elections, and then coordinated Nicaragua's first multiparty election in 1984, at which time the Sandinista's won a large majority of the popular vote. The country faced a violent insurgency by the Contras, significant elements of which were mercenary armies organized, trained and funded illegally by the United States (The United States and the Nicaraguan Revolution. The National Security Archive, The George Washington University; The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations / Documentation of Official U.S. Knowledge of Drug Trafficking and the Contras. The National Security Archive, The George Washington University). By the time of the next elections in 1990, the Sandinistas lost the mandate to rule and assumed the role of Nicaragua's primary opposition party |
Nicaragua Information: Inside
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