At a Democratic debate last month, Bernie Sanders was asked about his sympathy for the Sandinistas — a Nicaraguan revolutionary movement that in 1979 ousted the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled the small Central American nation for over forty years.

The Sandinistas were an inspiration for a generation of leftists. Whatever their shortcomings, they became a shining example of successful revolutionary politics during a period of disillusionment for the international left. During the 1980s, Nicaragua was a red republic in the United States’ backyard, clinging to socialist principles at the height of the Cold War.

When he was mayor of Burlington, Sanders visited the country as a guest of the revolutionary government. While in Nicaragua, he pledged to help stop US intervention in the region — at the time, the Reagan administration was funding a brutal anti-Sandinista insurgency that would ultimately leave more than sixty thousand dead. Burlington even entered into a sister-city agreement with Puerto Cabezas, an embattled city on the country’s Caribbean coast.