How Nicaragua developed its own sign language

Nicaragua recently lamented the death of Carlos Tünnermann, a former education minister who led a massively successful literacy campaign in one of the poorest countries in 1980s Latin America.

Mr. Tünnermann, who died at 90, served as head of education from the start of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, playing a central role in Nicaragua’s so-called Literacy Crusade, which cut illiteracy rates from 52 to 13 percent in the 1980s and won a UNESCO award in the process.

More than 100,000 teachers and collaborators from Nicaragua and abroad took part in the program, many of them volunteers. Children’s families also took an active role, with special emphasis on rural areas, where the inability to read or write reached up to 75 percent of households. 

Mr. Tünnermann joined the Sandinista movement during its spring, but “more due to an ethical commitment towards social transformation than because of political party affiliations,” Nicaragua history expert Fred Maciel tells The Brazilian Report. 

Eventually, Mr. Tünnermann would become a critic of the movement, along with several other former revolutionaries. Comparing him to the right-wing Somoza family they had once conspired to overthrow, Mr. Tünnermann said that president and former Sandinista Daniel Ortega had turned into a “new dynastic dictator.”

But his remarkable legacy meant that the president still paid respects to Mr. Tünnermann after his passing.

Through a note to the press, the Ortega administration recognized the former education minister’s “special and valuable contributions to teach the nation to read and write,” choosing to ignore...