Augusto Sandino was a gold miner turned guerrilla leader who fought the United States Marines to a standstill in the mountains of Nicaragua for six years. He mixed mysticism, nationalism, and anti-imperialism into a resistance movement that Washington could not crush, negotiated a peace deal after the Marines withdrew, and was assassinated by the National Guard commander the Americans had installed to replace them — Anastasio Somoza.

This episode traces Sandino from his illegitimate birth through the guerrilla war against American occupation, the peace that followed the Marine withdrawal, and the assassination that turned him into Latin America’s first anti-imperialist martyr.

• Sandino’s working-class origins and the Mexican revolutionary ideas that radicalized him
• The six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines in the Nicaraguan highlands
• The mystical nationalism that blended spiritualism with anti-imperialist politics
• The assassination by Somoza’s National Guard and the Sandinista movement that claimed his name fifty years later