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This article examines the formation of the Nicaraguan National Guard before and during the period of the Sandino rebellion, U.S. military intervention, and its aftermath (1925-1936). Focusing on the radically abrupt, upward displacement of coercive capacities in these eleven years of war, we emphasize the agency of Nicaraguans in shaping the kind of institution the Guard became. We argue that the process of war against a homegrown nationalist insurgency most profoundly shaped Guard identity and that the Somocista state represented a masked and modernized form of caudillismo, as a political system within which political authority and power resided in personal and patronage relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]