“People know what can be achieved when Nicaraguans run the country in their own interests and not those of foreign powers.”
By Julie Lamin
This is an edited version of an article first published by NSCAG on 21 May 2026.
Solidarity can mean many things, but its first requirement is that you lift yourself from a place of comfort to follow your conscience, whether it’s to sign an online petition or to travel several thousand miles to another country. All acts of solidarity matter, but it’s the last one that not only matters most but is the most rewarding.
For the past decade, the links of solidarity between the National Education Union (NEU) and its Nicaraguan sister union, ANDEN, have been growing stronger. What started with a hug and a handshake between union leaders in 2016 has become an interwoven bond between dozens of classroom teachers and union members of both countries. This is thanks to the jointly organised NEU-funded Teacher Exchanges to support Nicaragua’s ambitious target of creating generations of students able to speak English alongside their mother tongue, Spanish.
In the last ten years we have become much more than comrades in name: we are also friends and activists, working hard in both countries to keep strengthening the bond, and extending it to include the children and young people we teach in the UK and in Nicaragua. The words ‘sister and brother’ encapsulate our relationship because we feel we are family as well as international comrades.
As part of the exchange, ANDEN representative Sebastian Mendieta was invited to the NEU’s Conference this year as an international guest. During his visit, he spoke with knowledge and passion, representing not only ANDEN but the people of Nicaragua who have been through so much suffering to arrive at where the country is now.
Free lifelong education from the smallest child to the oldest adult is one example of what has been achieved. An ambitious education plan is being put in place to enable Nicaraguans to be the best resource capable of leading their country out of the poverty and violence of the twentieth-century Somoza dictatorship and neo-liberal governments.
Sebastian is a living testimony to that struggle for progress. As a teenager, he was prepared to give his life by fighting as a Sandinista against the cruelty and corruption of the Somoza dictatorship.
Following the triumphant 1979 Sandinista Revolution, Sebastian was one of the 60,000 young people who took up the best weapons against poverty – the pen and the notebook – and was part of Nicaragua’s successful Literacy Crusade – Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización, which reduced illiteracy from 50% to 12%.
Sebastian told us that he enjoyed the teaching experience of the Literacy Crusade so much that he chose to become a teacher. Alongside teaching PE, he became active in ANDEN and is now Regional Secretary for Carazo and a representative on ANDEN’s National Executive Committee.
At the NEU Conference International Fringe Meeting, he told a full-to-capacity audience that although Nicaragua was not suffering such intense US-funded violence, sanctions and blockades as Cuba, Palestine and Lebanon, all four countries have the same shared enemy: imperialism.
Nicaraguans have a hundred and fifty-year history of the US invading and trying to run Nicaragua, but the country has always resisted: 50,000 people died in the 1970s insurrection against the Somoza dictatorship, and thousands more were killed by US-backed counter-revolutionaries (‘contras’) in the 1980s.
Immense progress has been made with the Sandinistas in government since 2007. This includes housing, the infrastructure of brand-new roads connecting regions that were once isolated, extensive access to nourishing food, and free health care and education. People know what can be achieved when Nicaraguans run the country in their own interests and not those of foreign powers.
“Sovereignty is everything,” Sebastian told the meeting. “If we are forced to, we will defend our sovereignty with weapons in our hands and with our lives. We have done it before, and we can do it again. There is no going back: Ni un paso atràs!”
The only ‘going back’ was that of the NEU teachers to Nicaragua in summer this year who stayed with families and visited schools. It was an exchange in the truest sense: supporting teachers in their classrooms with effective methods of learning a second language, while receiving an abundance of Nicaraguan hospitality.
Ten years on from those first handshakes and hugs between trade union leaders, this exchange has become an even more solid example of the true essence of international solidarity.
- Julie Lamin has been a solidarity activist for many years and is co-chair of the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign Action Group (NSCAG). She is also a long-standing member of the National Education Union (NEU) and has led four NEU- sponsored educational exchanges taking UK teachers to Nicaragua.
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