NICARAGUA, FLAG OF

horizontally striped blue-white-blue national flag with a central coat of arms. The flag has a width-to-length ratio of 3 to 5. Independence for Central America was first proclaimed on September 15, 1821, but Mexico then subdued the area for two years. The flag of the newly independent United Provinces of Central America was adopted on August 21, 1823, and consisted of blue-white-blue stripes with the national coat of arms in the centre. Those arms included basically the same design elements Nicaragua uses today. Even after the five member states of the federation became independent countries, Nicaragua continued to hoist the old flag. Finally, in 1854, a new horizontal Nicaraguan tricolour of yellow-white-scarlet was chosen, but it did not fly for long. Civil war and intervention by North American filibusters (military adventurers) subsequently resulted in a number of flags being introduced and quickly replaced. In 1908 the old federation flag was readopted as the national banner of Nicaragua, with appropriate modifications in the coat of arms. That basic design, with further changes to the coat of arms, was reaffirmed by the law of August 27, 1971, although the red-black horizontal bicolour of the Sandinista movement was de facto a secondary national flag during the years of Sandinista rule (197990). The coat of arms on the flag includes a triangle for equality, a liberty cap for freedom, and five volcanoes between two oceans, symbolic of the five original Central American countries between the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins. Whitney Smith History history of the area from Spanish exploration to the present. The Spanish conquistador Gil Gonzlez Dvila made the first attempt to conquer what is now Nicaragua in 1522. Although he claimed to have converted some 30,000 American Indians, carried off 90,000 pesos of gold, and discovered a possible transisthmian water link, Gonzlez was eventually run out of Nicaragua by angry native inhabitants. Some of the latter were commanded by Nicarao, from whom the country's name derives. It was not until 1524, under Francisco Hernndez de Crdoba, that permanent colonization began. The Spanish conquest was a disaster for the native population of Nicaragua's Pacific region. Within three decades an estimated Indian population of one million plummeted to a few tens of thousands, as approximately half of the indigenous people died of contagion with Old World diseases, and most of the rest were sold into slavery in other New World Spanish colonies. Few were killed in outright warfare. After the initial depopulation, Nicaragua became a backwater of the Spanish empire. In this setting, two colonial cities, Granada and Len, emerged as competing poles of power and prestige. The former derived its income from agriculture and trade with Spain via the San Juan River; the latter came to depend on commerce with the Spanish colonies of the Pacific coast. Both tiny outposts were subjected to frequent pirate attacks. Late in the 17th century, Great Britain formed an alliance with the Miskito Indians of the Caribbean coastal region, where the community of Bluefields had been established. The British settled on the Mosquito Coast, and for a time (174086) the region became a British dependency. Independence In 1811, inspired by struggles in Mexico and El Salvador, revolutionaries deposed the governing intendant of Nicaragua. Len, however, soon returned to the royalist cause, and Granada bore the brunt of the punishment for disobedience. In 1821 Len rejected and Granada approved the Guatemalan declaration of independence from Spain. Both accepted union with Mexico (182223), but they fought one another until 1826, when Nicaragua took up its role in the United Provinces of Central America. After Nicaragua seceded from the federation in 1838, the rivalry between Len, identified with the Liberal Party, and Granada, the centre of the Conservative Party, continued.