ABSTRACT
For the first time in Nicaraguan history, the impoverished majority came to have a voice and power in many aspects of the decision making that affected their lives. The grassroots organizations, especially the neighborhood Sandinista Defense Committees, were bitterly criticized by disgruntled Nicaraguans and detractors in the United States as being little more than vigilante committees or gangs of thugs acting as mindless puppets of their Sandinista masters. One of the first signs of the pragmatic, nonorthodox nature of Sandinista economic policy was the decision, taken by the Sandinistas at the time of the Triumph, to honor Somoza's onerous $1.6 billion foreign debt despite the fact that the departing dictator and his accomplices had left barely $3 million in the public coffers. The most important long-term concern of the Sandinista Revolution was to improve the human condition of the downtrodden majority of the Nicaraguan people.
