To restore the rights of the Nicaraguan people who since 1909 have found themselves oppressed by the Yankee bankers. The Nicaraguan people do not owe one cent to the government of the United States of America, and all the treaties, pacts, concessions, and conventions that have been celebrated since that epoch until the present, and that may now be celebrated, between the U.S. government and the governments of Nicaragua, imposed by Yankee bayonets, do not possess any validity whatsoever, since they have been entered into and are now entered into behind the backs of the Nicaraguan people. If before signing the onerous and unfair treaties to which we refer the opinion of the Nicaraguan people had been consulted, such documents would have been rejected without further consideration because of the infamy from which they suffer.

We have understood that the principal intention of the United States of America in Nicaragua is that of appropriating to itself that portion of Central America territory where there exist possibilities for the opening of the interoceanic canal route, aside from the Gulf of Fonseca for a naval base. And for that reason our army, along with all the Nicaraguan people not corrupted or contaminated, have concluded that both the interoceanic canal and the naval base alluded to should be regarded as within the sovereignty of the Latin American nationality, for its progress and its own defense. Because, effectively, the region that has aroused the greed of imperialism, though it is situated in the Central American isthmus, must be controlled by our Latin America, since the interoceanic canal route as well as the Gulf of Fonseca have been summoned by natural law to fulfill a historic and decisive role in the life and the future of the nations of the glove, but above all those of Latin America.

The concept I have of the North American people is:

The North American people are as imperialistic as their own leaders. If in the United States there exist some anti-imperialistic organizations, it is not precisely because they are clearly integrated by North Americans, but rather in the majority they are Russians, Lithuanians, Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Latin Americans, from all parts of the world, without the North Americans. Rare will be the exceptions who break this general rule.

If the United States of America wishes to avoid a catastrophe and its imminent collapse, it should have greater respect for the weak nations and those of fewer resources.

Ex-President Coolidge and ex-Secretary of State Kellogg, despite their imperialist adventures, are a couple of failures whom the North American people ought not to blame, since the fact that their names have passed into history enveloped in crimes and blood weighs also, in brief, upon the shoulders of all the North American people, accomplices in their crimes. Those two moral wretches thought at the outset of the armed struggle in Nicaragua that Sandino was a leader of cheap patriotism. But with the passage of time the justice of our cause has demonstrated to them that we have been sent to serve as a restraint and as a punishment for their own unbridled crimes and those of their successors.

Declarations authorized with our signature.

Patria y Libertad.

A. C. SANDINO

Mexico, D.F.
January 28, 1930