The Salvadoran FMLN, the Nicaraguan FSLN, and the Sahrawi Polisario were born in the heat of the Cold War; they rubbed shoulders and looked to Cuba, and presented themselves as emancipatory vanguards. Two went on to function as ruling or state parties and did so for years; the third never achieved that status and exercised its authority from exile in Tindouf.
Decades later, their trajectories converge on an uncomfortable pattern: the same logic of a closed vanguard, repression of internal dissent, democratic deficit, and privileges for the leadership. The difference lies in scale and setting, not in nature.
This parallel cannot be understood without the Cuban school. The Department of Revolutionary Orientation (DOR) was the ideological laboratory of Castroism: the apparatus that produced the revolutionary “cadre”—the militant trained in the party line, capable of reproducing the party’s discourse and exercising command without question. It was not merely a center for ideological indoctrination; it was a school of political discipline.
Cadres from all three organizations passed through that mold, to varying degrees and in different formats. The FSLN found ideological inspiration, strategic guidance, training, and sanctuary in Cuba beginning in the 1960s. The FMLN did not come together spontaneously: the unification of its five organizations took place under Cuban sponsorship and mediation in Havana, and Cuba trained hundreds of Salvadoran cadres.
The Polisario received military and political training, and thousands of young Sahrawis were educated in Cuba to become the administrative and intellectual elites of the future Sahrawi state.
Cuban indoctrination lives on as gratitude toward the system and rejection of anything that contradicts it; within the Polisario, as blind loyalty to the single party—nearly four decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and perestroika—and forgiveness for its abuses.
The very same school that made them revolutionaries also made them autocrats and tolerant of the lack of freedoms; they never put themselves in the Cubans’ shoes to acknowledge their weariness and their deplorable living conditions. It is not gratitude: it is the involuntary reflex of those who were indoctrinated to believe that the cage is equivalent to the homeland.
The closed vanguard, iron discipline, and the equating of dissidents with the enemy—the traitor—were not accidents of war; they were a political culture that was learned, practiced, and perfected.
Internal repression is the second thread, and the case of the Polisario is the most stark because it has a specific name: Rashid Prison in Tindouf. Testimonies from former detainees and survivors describe torture, extrajudicial executions, solitary confinement, and cruel treatment of internal dissidents. It is estimated that more than one hundred people lost their lives due to torture and inhumane detention conditions at Rashid.
Various human rights organizations have documented that the camps function in practice as an “open-air prison” for those who question the leadership. A state is not necessary to reproduce authoritarianism: it is enough to administer a camp, humanitarian aid, and a narrative of resistance.
Within the FMLN, the Salvadoran Truth Commission recorded more than 800 complaints of serious acts of violence attributed to the Front, nearly half of which were linked to deaths—mostly extrajudicial executions. The FMLN referred to them as “executions”: mayors, judges, officials, and “traitors” were eliminated under a political ideology that equated “opponent,” “subversive,” and “enemy.”
Within the FSLN, internal repression was not an excess of war, but rather a practice inherited and perfected. The purge of historic figures such as Bayardo Arce, Eden Pastora, or “Comandante Cero” has been described as the first acts of repression in a systematic campaign within Sandinism itself that culminated in the exile of the opposition.
Rosario Murillo did not invent the purge: she studied it through the internal eliminations of the 1980s and is now carrying it out with calculated precision. The party that was founded to prevent caudillismo ended up in the hands of a single family that cannot conceive of relinquishing power. This closure of internal space leads directly to the third characteristic: the democratic deficit.
Within the Polisario, there is unanimity in describing the political leadership as “a closed enterprise” rife with nepotism, clientelistic loyalties, and political inertia. Leadership structures based on tribe and patronage remain intact, and the same names have taken turns in the highest positions of responsibility for more than fifty years without free elections or accountability. The difference from other cases is that in the Polisario, a multi-party system is still prohibited, just as it is in North Korea.
In the FMLN, the leadership lost its capacity for self-criticism and drifted toward a relatively authoritarian internal structure based on coercion. The party, which claimed to be the vanguard of the people, failed to embrace internal diversity or manage its contradictions, and its leadership became so ossified that it drifted away from the rank-and-file it claimed to represent. In the FSLN, the situation is extreme: what some analysts describe as a personal and family-based power of a despotic nature is unparalleled in Nicaragua’s modern history, including that of the Somoza regime. The family’s takeover of the party and the state is the culmination of a logic of top-down control and the elimination of the “other” that Sandinismo first practiced outwardly and now inwardly.
But it would be a mistake to downplay corruption within the Polisario simply because it has not exercised sovereignty over a state. For half a century, it has managed humanitarian aid, Algerian funds, and support from Libya, Cuba, Venezuela, and South Africa. An OLAF report cited by the media concluded that Polisario leaders systematically diverted humanitarian aid and accumulated property in Spain.
There is documented evidence of real estate in Mauritania, Spain, Tindouf, and some Algerian cities, as well as a lavish lifestyle and privileges enjoyed by the ruling families: high-level university education and health care abroad for their children, while the population in the camps lives in far more precarious conditions.
In the FMLN, allegations of corruption among high-ranking officials played a key role in discrediting the party.
In the FSLN, the Ortega-Murillo family has built a kleptocratic state that uses political power to extract public resources for its own benefit. The scale differs; the logic of appropriation does not.
The different outcomes do not absolve the third party. The FMLN and the FSLN came to hold state power; the Polisario did not. That difference is real and must be acknowledged: some faced the challenge of managing a state and an economy; the other managed a territory in exile and a flood of international aid. But it demonstrates precisely that it is not necessary to take over the state to reproduce authoritarianism.
The FMLN went from governing El Salvador to securing barely 6% of the vote in 2024. The FSLN consolidated an authoritarian regime marked by contested elections and growing international isolation. The Polisario faces a loss of international support (dozens of countries have withdrawn their recognition of the Sahrawi Republic) and a growing rift between its leadership and the rank-and-file in the camps. All three thus share a decline marked by a loss of popularity, erosion, and a loss of influence among their respective publics.
This is not to deny the fame and epic nature of these organizations, nor to mechanically equate their contexts. It is to point out an uncomfortable pattern: the very same crucible that forged them as revolutionaries also hardened them into autocrats. The FMLN and the FSLN had the opportunity to govern a state and turned it into a platform for privileges and purges; the Polisario, lacking a state, reproduced in Tindouf the same logic of a closed vanguard, internal repression, and opacity.
The difference lies in scale and setting, not in nature. And that is, perhaps, the bitterest lesson from these guerrilla groups that claimed to be emancipatory: the power they fought against ultimately corrupted even those who led them.