Adios Muchachos

Preface to the Spanish Edition, Published in 2007 / The Shadow of the Caudillo xi Acknowledgments xix Introduction 1 1. Partial Confession 5 2. Saintly Living 17 3. The Age of Innocence 35 4. The Swan over the Burning Coals 49 5. The Age of Malice 65 6. Monkey on a Leash 81 7. Manifest Destiny 93 8. The Likely Number Thirteen 113 9. Heaven on Earth 127 10. The Year of the Pig 143 11. Rivers of Milk and Honey 159 12. The Palace at Last! 173 13. Saturn's Jaws 191 Epilogue 207 Chronology, 1979-1990 211 Glossary 223 Index 229

"Adios Muchachos is an extraordinary memoir of the origins, triumphs, and ultimate decline of the Sandinista Revolution. It is written by Sergio Ramirez, one of Nicaragua's and Central America's leading literary figures and an influential politician and statesman during the crucial decades he discusses, the 1970s through the 1990s. Few memoirs of the Sandinista period treat the movement's ultimate defeat from a critical perspective, and fewer still have been written by one of that period's leading political actors, let alone crafted in such an engrossing fashion, with such an eye for intimate political and cultural detail." Gilbert M. Joseph, co-editor of A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America's Long Cold War "Writers who become revolutionaries are a rare breed, and in our age, few compare to Sergio Ramirez. In this lovely, lyrical, but ultimately heartbreaking, book, he gives an insider's view of how radicalism succeeds and fails. His account is thrilling, poignant, and frightening, decorated with vivid profiles of tyrants, bullies, and idealistic heroes. Ramirez has long since broken with the increasingly repressive Sandinistas; their loss is literature's gain." Stephen Kinzer, author of Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua