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Among historians of the US Marine Corps, Major-General Merritt A. ('Red Mike') Edson's Río Coco Patrol is well known.1His expedition up Nicaragua's Coco River in 1928 represented a significant step forward in what the US military would later call 'riverine' operations. The mission also made the career of a young officer who would lead one of the Raider Battalions in the Second World War and receive the Medal of Honor for his participation in the campaign to capture Guadalcanal.

This article examines the formation of the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua before and during the period of the Sandino rebellion, US military intervention, and its aftermath (1927-1936). Focusing on the radically abrupt upward displacement of coercive capacities in these eight years of war, we emphasize the agency of Nicaraguans in shaping the kind of institution the Guardia became. We argue that the process of war against a homegrown nationalist insurgency most profoundly shaped Guardia identity and that the Somocista state represented a masked and modernized form of caudillismo, as a political system within which political authority and power resided in personal and patronage relations.