In 2007, revolutionary commander Daniel Ortega returned to power in Nicaragua, claiming to enact the “second phase” of the Sandinista Popular Revolution (1979-1990). However, this was not a return to revolution as Nicaraguans had come to know it. The Ortega regime established timely alliances with former adversaries, including the leadership of the Catholic Church as well as the nation’s business elites. Moreover, Sandinismo was recast from the figures of revolutionary militancy and the disciplined party-state to a personalistic vision of the loving patriarch, disseminating a kitsch-ified, religiously inflected doctrine of ‘love’ to the neoliberalized masses. Though Ortega was elected without a majoritarian mandate, his regime quickly grew in popularity while also consolidating an authoritarian political project that dismantled incipient liberal-democratic institutions and constitutional guarantees in the name of ‘the people.’ Based on 24 months of participant-observation research between 2014 and 2018 in the peripheries of a city located in the urban pacific of Nicaragua, a traditional Sandinista stronghold, this dissertation investigates the Ortega regime’s capacity to hail Nicaraguans into relation with Sandinismo and the FSLN party in the post-revolutionary moment. I argue that the material exchanges that are most often taken to explain the mobilizing capacities of authoritarian populism must be analyzed in conjunction with the economy of affects that circulate in and through exchanges, which issue powerful forms of identification that help sustain people’s attachments to the FSLN even when redistributive politics fades away. For historical militants and other Sandinistas that lived through the 1980’s, attachments to the FSLN are structured by way of a ‘revolutionary a structure of feelings’ that continues to be reproduced in the contemporary moment. For my interlocutors, the gift of being a Sandinista, narrated as a political birth, brought with it an unpayable debt that produces obligations to Sandinismo. It is this very structure of feeling that enables militants to cope with multiple injuries to which the party routinely subjects them, which I argue come to be experienced as sacrifices on Sandinismo’s behalf. Moreover I suggest that being wounded by the FSLN itself might afford pleasure, and that it might be the site of production of a victimized identity, one dependent on attachment to that which injures. Finally, I argue that for a younger generation, Sandinismo has also produced strong forms of identification in the absence of historically structured attachments. This time, attachments are predicated not on the notion of a revolutionary inheritance, but on Sandinismo as a patriarchal family which rewards its members with a sense of mediatized recognition, righteousness, and power in exchange not for sacrifices, but for following the injunction to ‘produce prosperity’ as good neoliberal subjects aspiring to gain access to a range of consumer pleasures. It is these affective excesses that sharpen the boundaries of the political community and invest it with a vibrance it could not otherwise achieve, inviting and enabling those that are part of it to the often violent, permanent defense of Sandinismo.

Au début des années 1990, au terme d’une décennie de guerres internes, le Salvador et le Nicaragua ont été les théâtres d’une multiplication sans précédent d’associations de développement et d’ONG humanitaires. Provenant des anciennes mouvances révolutionnaires du Front sandiniste de libération nationale au Nicaragua et du Front Farabundo Martí pour la libération nationale au Salvador, ces organisations nouvelles ont été le signe de l’apparition d’un militantisme professionnel et technicisé proche de « l’humanitaire-expert » et en rupture avec les engagements politico-militaires qui avaient jusqu’alors dominé les scènes militantes centraméricaines. Comment dès lors comprendre l’émergence de ces phénomènes associatifs ? Nés à la croisée de bouleversements sociaux et politiques majeurs, entre la fin des guerres, l’effondrement des gestes révolutionnaires et l’avènement de régimes démocratiques, ces faits associatifs ont d’abord été le fruit d’une conversion de leurs dirigeants. Anciens cadres révolutionnaires du parti-État sandiniste et des guérillas salvadoriennes, ceux-ci occupaient en effet déjà à la fin des années 1980 la tête des mouvances associatives du Front sandiniste et du Front Farabundo Martí. Or c’est là, au sein de ces nébuleuses, que ces acteurs se sont saisis de schèmes humanitaires nouveaux et de registres managériaux, entraînant dans leur sillage « l’ONGisation » de leurs organisations et l’investissement de causes féministes, indigénistes ou environnementalistes. De sorte que l’histoire de ces associations et de leur émergence est l’histoire de cette conversion. D’où le choix de ce travail de retracer le parcours de ces militants depuis leur basculement dans la lutte armée et les organisations révolutionnaires jusqu’à leur conversion à l’humanitaire-expert et leur insertion dans le monde des ONG. Ce faisant, ce travail met en résonance plusieurs analyses. Une réflexion d’abord sur les modalités de basculement dans la violence armée et d’incorporation aux organisations de guérillas. Une réflexion ensuite sur les logiques de conversion politique et de reconversion professionnelle des acteurs politico-militaires. Une réflexion enfin sur la naissance des milieux associatifs et la constitution de carrières militantes. Et au travers de ces analyses se dessine in fine une enquête plus générale sur la nature même des phénomènes associatifs au Salvador et au Nicaragua, leurs usages et leurs fonctions, et montrent le rôle de « supports » sociaux et politiques qu’ils jouent aujourd’hui dans les nouvelles démocraties centraméricaines. / At the beginning of the 1990s and after a decade of internal wars, El Salvador and Nicaragua were the stages of an unprecedented growth of development’s organizations and humanitarian NGOs. Originating from the former revolutionary movements of Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua and from Farabundo Marti National Front in El Salvador, those new organizations were a sign of professional technologized militancy close to « expert humanitarian work » but also breaking with the military-political commitments which had preponderated over the Central American activist scene so far. How then can we understand the emergence of those voluntary phenomena? Resulting from major social and political disruptions, as well as the end of wars, the collapsing of revolutionary actions and the advent of democratic regimes, those voluntary actions first started with the conversion of their leaders. As former revolutionary officers of the Sandinista state-party and of the Salvadorian guerrillas, by the end of the 1980s those were already heads of the non-profit movements of Sandinista Front and Farabundo Marti Front. Yet this is in the middle of this political maze that those leaders seized upon a new humanitarian framework as well as managerial repertories, bringing in their wake the « NGOzation » of their organizations and their commitment to the feminist as well as indigenist and environmentalist causes. In this way, the history of the emergence of those organizations is actually the history of that conversion. Hence the choice that has been made to work on recounting the activists’ paths from the moment they turned into an armed conflict and revolutionary organizations to their actual conversion into expert humanitarian work and the world of NGOs. In order to do this work several analyses have been compared; first, a reflection about the ways and means of their changeover into armed violence and their enlistments in guerrillas’ organizations; then a thought about the mindset of political conversion and the career change of the military-political leaders; then finally a reflection about the birth of the non-profit domain and the development of activists’ careers. And so, through these analyses appears a more general study on the true nature of voluntary phenomena in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and on their practices and functions, that shows the roles they play as social, political supports in the new Central American democracies nowadays.