On July 19, 1979, Sandinista troops entered Nicaragua’s capital marking the victory of the Sandinista Revolution. They had defeated the repressive U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship and were greeted by hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans.
The Revolution marked a significant period in Nicaraguan history and revealed the country as one of the major proxy war battlegrounds of the Cold War with the events in the country rising to international attention.
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Although the initial overthrow of the Somoza regime in 1978–79 was a bloody affair, the Contra War of the 1980s took the lives of tens of thousands of Nicaraguans and was the subject of fierce international debate.
