Today in Manhunting History -- May 12, 1927: The Peace of Tititapa

By May 1927, Nicaragua's perpetually feuding Conservative and Liberal factions had been fighting a bloody civil war for nearly year.  In February, the heart of Chinandega was blasted out in street-to-street and house-to-house fighting.  Hundreds were killed on each side, and one observer noted the bones of some bodies had been picked clean by vultures, while others had "only their abdominal cavities scooped out by the ravaging beaks of turkey buzzards who gorge themselves to a nauseating stupor."

In an attempt to end the strife, President Calvin Coolidge sent former Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson to Nicaragua as his personal representative.  Stimson subsequently negotiated an agreement in which the Conservative President Diaz would remain in office until new presidential elections supervised by Americans could be held in 1928.  In the meantime, Diaz would reappoint the Liberal congressmen and judges removed by his coup and appoint Liberal civil governors in Nicaragua's six Liberal-dominated provinces.  Both parties would disband their armies and surrender their arms for bounties.  These forces, including the regular army, would be replaced before the 1928 election by a new, nonpartisan Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua, which would be trained, officered, and supported by the United States Marines. 

While today such a mission would be considered a model peacekeeping operation, in 1927 it was an unprecedented form of intervention by U.S. forces in Latin America. 

Although his Liberal forces held the upper hand, Liberal General Jose Marie Moncada admitted to Stimson during their May 11 meeting under a blackthorn tree just outside the village of Tititapa "that neither he nor the Government could pacify the country without the help of the United States."  Consequently, on May 12 Moncada informed the Americans that each of his twelve generals had signed the Tititapa agreement and begun to disarm.

All of his commanders, that is, except for one.

That lone holdout, Augusto C. Sandino, would become the target of what was the longest strategic manhunt in U.S. military history until the recently concluded hunt for bin Laden.