A Brief History of Envío Magazine (Revista Envío)

Revista Envío (Envío magazine) provides current and historical information about Nicaragua´s revolution and its ongoing struggles for freedom and justice. Its web site provides a brief history of Envío magazine (Revista Envío):

Our magazine was born in February 1981, a year and a half after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution. Its name comes from the Spanish verb enviar, to send, because we wanted to send everyone news about the revolutionary process that was putting Nicaragua on the world map.

The revolution’s international projection turned a small-scale product into a “global” publication: at the outset, there were editions in several languages other than Spanish. Among them, the English-language edition has remained and was joined in 1994 by an Italian edition published in Italy.

In the eighties, we defined envío as a publication that provided “critical support” to Nicaragua’s revolutionary process from the perspective of liberation theology’s option for the poor. They were years of war on many fronts, including a war of information about the goals of the revolutionary project. We tried to be objective and critical in our interpretations, but like all journalism, we did not always achieve it. Although those were years of censorship, we were never censored; in fact, one Sandinista official once said, only partly in jest, that they read envío to understand the meaning of what they had just done. Many abroad read envío because our information and analysis comes from where the events are taking place, and in fact the monthly analysis of Nicaragua’s key events and dynamics over the years (called, simply, “The Month” in the English edition) provides a quite thorough history of the country and its relationship with the rest of the world.

It is significant that virtually no articles were signed in the eighties. While part of the goal was to protect contributors living in still-repressive neighboring countries, its more important aim was to emphasize collective thinking at a time in Nicaraguan history in which communitarian efforts were valued over individual ones.

Following the FSLN’s electoral defeat in February 1990, envío opened out increasingly to include the rest of Central America and other countries in the greater Caribbean region and the themes affecting them. Many of those are also international themes—North-South relations, neoliberalism, globalization, the women’s movement, ecology, the foreign debt—that give us clues about the construction of that other possible world we are working to bring about.

In 2003, we decided to put our more than 20 years of work in this universal library called Internet. These texts are perhaps the most complete public documentation of what happened in Nicaragua in the eighties, one of the most important stages in the country’s history. They also document what has happened in the region since then, as Nicaragua and its neighboring countries and peoples continue their search for peace, democracy and equity.

We are still reporting from and on Nicaragua and the rest of Central America; we are one of the voices from the South that find it increasingly difficult to be heard, perhaps bacause we remain committed to a project of justice that opens space for all peoples and keeps alive the hope of such a world.