Nicaragua

Envío: 40 years, 470 issues, more than 2,800 texts... an indispensable archive

The monthly magazine envío, an initiative of the Society of Jesus in Central America, was born in February 1981, a year and a half after the triumph of the Nicaraguan Revolution, to "send out" (enviar) news from a liberation theology perspective on a country that attracted world interest during that decade.

The revolution’s positive international projection—and US President Ronald Reagan’s determination to “roll it back”—turned our modest effort into a publication with a widespread readership. A team of Nicaraguan and foreign, largely US, research journalists and outside contributors analyzed its political, social, cultural economic—and by then also military—evolution.
The promise of that revolutionary decade was shattered by the tragic war, financed by the US government but fought by Nicaraguans, victims of a Cold War mentality that gave no quarter to the concept of national liberation. It was also a time of a deeply polarizing “information war.” Many read us because our information came from the scene. We tried to be critical, but like many didn’t always succeed, as the texts of those years show.

A number of international cooperation agencies have supported our work throughout these years. From the beginning, all issues were translated into English, and starting in 1994, the magazine has also been published, in full or in part, in Italian.

In those times virtually no article was signed, largely an expression of a stage in which the collective was valued over the individual, but also to protect the anonymity of authors of the occasional articles about neighboring countries whose governments did not appreciate our perspective.

After the FSLN’s electoral defeat in February 1990, envío extended its coverage to include other Central American countries, Mexico and Latin America, as well as critical issues such as North-South relations, the environment, human rights and the specific rights of migrants, women and indigenous peoples.

We created this web page in 2003 to make available this valuable body of work in all three languages. It is visited frequently by professors, students and journalistic researchers, and by many of the hundreds of thousands who have visited Nicaragua and left a little bit of their soul here.

In April 2018, we analyzed the unanticipated explosion of civic insurrection demanding a free Nicaragua, and the equally unexpected violent response to it, and came down on the people’s side in this remake of an unfortunately polarized and polarizing information war.

In June 2021, after 40 years, we are closing the book on this journalistic stage, leaving in this universal library called Internet the legacy of our effort, a cyber-archive perusable by chronology, author, country or theme, as well as by the excellent search engine for more specific information.

Here you will find research, analyses, reflections, news, documents, stories, evolving moments and stages, multiple voices covering these four decades of Nicaragua and the rest of the region, a corner of the planet with deep inequalities and never fulfilled yearnings for justice and liberation.

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