8 JULY 1979 — Thirty years ago, this image impressed upon me the profound disconnect between what a country’s armed forces contended to be and what they actually were. Three decades after I made this picture, that impression is the same. What is most sad about this image, I think, is that the National Guard […]
2 JULY 1979 — I traveled to the northern city of Esteli, the scene of ferocious fighting between government forces and insurgents struggling to defeat them. In the picture above, a Sandinista rebel serenades his “companeros” during a lull in the battle. By this time fighting had spread to population centers across Nicaragua. The foreign […]
27 JUNE 1979 — Members of President Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard fire at Sandinista insurgents during heavy fighting along the contested northern highway leading from the capital of Managua to the international airport. As in too many of these conflicts, this war pitted neighbor against neighbor, family against family, brother against brother. While reviewing these […]
25 JUNE 1979 — Anti-government rebels holding positions behind barricades take a break from the battle against Nicaragua’s Somoza dictatorship. Into these poor “barrios” or slums, journalists like myself ventured each day to document the conflict. And because the vast majority of the foreign press corps had fled the country after the killing of ABC […]