Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, 1977-1992

Our Own Backyard

Our Own Backyard

The United States in Central America, 1977–1992

William M. LeoGrande

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

© 1998 William M. LeoGrande

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LeoGrande, William M.

Our own backyard: the United States in Central America,

1977–1992 / William M. LeoGrande.

    p. cm.

ISBN 0-8078-2395-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4857-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Central America—Foreign relations—United States.

2. United States—Foreign relations—Central America.

3. United States—Foreign relations—1977–1981.

4. United States—Foreign relations—1981–1989.

5. United States—Foreign relations—1989–1993. I. Title.

F1436.8.U6L453      1998

327.730728′09′048—dc21    97-18198

CIP

03 02 01 00 99    6 5 4 3 2

Brief excerpts from the following journal articles are used in this book: William M. LeoGrande, The Revolution in Nicaragua: Another Cuba? Foreign Affairs 58 (Fall 1979): 28–50, and William M. LeoGrande and Carla Anne Robbins, Oligarchs and Officers: The Crisis in El Salvador, Foreign Affairs 58 (Summer 1980): 1084–1103. Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs; copyright 1979 and 1980 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. William M. LeoGrande, From Reagan to Bush: The Transition in U.S. Policy toward Central America, Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 3 (October 1990): 595–621. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

To my parents, John and Patricia LeoGrande,

and my wife and partner, Martha Langelan

Contents

Preface

Abbreviations Used in the Text

Part I. Origins

1. A New Beginning

2. The Dragons’ Teeth of War

3. From Carter to Reagan

4. The Vicar Draws the Line

5. A New Policy for Nicaragua

6. Tough Guys

Part II. El Salvador

7. The Tonic of Elections

8. The War Party Takes Control

9. The President Moves to Center Stage

10. The Politics of Murder

11. From Conflict to Consensus

12. El Salvador Disappears

Part III. Nicaragua

13. Launching the Not-So-Secret War

14. Gunboat Diplomacy

15. Bringing the War to a Head

16. Peace Offensive

17. Project Democracy

18. Getting Back in the Game

19. High Noon

20. Iran-Contra

21. Giving Peace a Chance

22. The Last Hurrah

Part IV. Denouement

23. A Kinder, Gentler Policy?

24. Why Were We in Central America?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

When I began this book, I intended to write an account of the domestic opposition to Ronald Reagan’s Central America policy, focusing on the Congress. Not since Vietnam had Americans been so bitterly divided over a foreign policy issue as they were over Central America. I soon realized, however, that investigating the domestic debate was like pulling on a loose thread—it lead inexorably to other questions.

To understand the political struggle between the Reagan administration and its critics, it was first necessary to examine what was happening in Central America. As U.S. involvement deepened, a tension arose between the instinct of many U.S. policymakers to preserve Washington’s traditional hegemony in the region, and the desire of Central Americans to control their own destiny. On this issue, Washington discovered adversaries not only among Marxist guerrillas on the left, but also among military officers and businessmen on the right. Maintaining even tenuous control over allies such as the Salvadoran armed forces or the Nicaraguan contras proved as difficult for Washington as plotting strategy against the Salvadoran guerrillas and the Sandinistas.

In the United States, the tempo of the debate between the Reagan administration and its critics waxed and waned with the rhythms of the war on the ground. As the region’s civil strife escalated, Reagan’s opponents charged that his policy was failing to achieve its stated objectives; Reagan replied that the critics’ caviling tied his hands, preventing success.

I was also compelled to look at how policy was formulated inside the Reagan administration. From the beginning, it was beset by a severe internal schism between self-described hard-liners and pragmatists who struggled with one another for control over foreign policy in general and Central American policy in particular. On Central America, the hard-liners were inclined toward military solutions, and they bitterly opposed any diplomatic accord that gave Washington less than total victory. For the pragmatists, Central America was not the most important place on the globe, and the wars there were less a test of ideological mettle than a challenge to traditional U.S. security interests. If those interests could be reasonably safeguarded by diplomatic compromise, the pragmatists were willing to pursue it.

The policy differences between hard-liners and pragmatists were often reinforced by rivalries of ambition and personal animosity. It was not uncommon for different officials to describe U.S. policy in hopelessly contradictory ways within a few days—or even hours—of one another. Both camps leaked continually in an effort to gain the upper hand in the internal tug of war. With a president reluctant to resolve conflicts among his senior advisers and notoriously inattentive to the details of policy, the administration’s internecine conflict over Central America was never definitively resolved. Every policy decision bore the scars of it.

On one issue, however, the hard-liners and pragmatists could agree: both regarded the policy prescriptions of the liberal Democrats in Congress as anathema. The biggest battles fought in Washington over Central America pitted the Reagan administration against Congress, and most administration officials regarded the Democrats’ efforts to promote an alternative policy as ill informed and illegitimate.

Finally, I had to look beyond Central America at the behavior of U.S. allies and adversaries. For Ronald Reagan and his conservative loyalists, Central America was not intrinsically important. Its significance derived from its place in a global context; it was a theater in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. Indeed, Central America was the last major battle of the Cold War. Reagan’s policy cannot be understood outside that context, and the opposition to his policy from liberal Democrats reflected their rejection of Reagan’s Manichaean conception of international affairs. While Reagan invariably pointed to Soviet and Cuban machinations as justification for his approach, liberal Democrats pointed to the nearly universal opposition to U.S. policy among allies in Latin America and Western Europe—opposition that manifested itself in active efforts to resolve Central America’s armed conflicts diplomatically, despite persistent resistance from Washington. No one caused the Reagan administration more headaches than Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, whose regional peace plan won him the Nobel Peace Prize.

For me, then, what began as a relatively bounded project examining the domestic debate over Central America evolved into a comprehensive history of U.S. policy toward the region during its decade of crisis—how policy was made, how it worked, and how the administration tried to sell it to the American people. From the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the outbreak of the civil war in El Salvador in the late 1970s, to the final regional peace settlements negotiated a decade later at the end of the Cold War, this book chronicles the struggles—both in Central America and Washington—that shaped the region’s destiny. I have tried to give a reasonably full account of how the regional crisis unfolded on the ground, but the principal venue of this story is Washington, D.C. For good or ill, Central America’s fate during this crisis depended fundamentally on decisions made in Washington—decisions over which Central Americans themselves had little influence.

The narrative is predominantly chronological. Within that basic framework, I have tried to weave together four thematic elements corresponding to the dynamics described above: (1) the conflicts on the ground in the region; (2) the conflicts within the U.S. administration over what policy should be; (3) the domestic debate between administration supporters and critics, especially in Congress; and (4) the role played by other countries in Latin America and Europe in alleviating or exacerbating the crisis.

Part I begins by exploring the roots of the Central American crisis that erupted during the later years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Ronald Reagan came to office determined to reverse the basic thrust of Carter’s foreign policy, and Central America became a symbol and test case for demonstrating Reagan’s new hard line against international Communism. During Reagan’s first year in office, U.S. policy shifted from Carter’s attempts to seek a negotiated settlement in El Salvador, and coexistence with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, to Reagan’s effort to achieve military victory for the Salvadoran government, and the ouster of the Sandinistas by covert proxy war.

Part II focuses on El Salvador, which became one of the most controversial foreign policy issues of Reagan’s first term. As U.S. military support for the Salvadoran government increased, the civil war escalated dramatically. Congressional Democrats bitterly opposed Reagan’s apparently uncritical and unlimited support for a government that engaged in widespread and egregious violations of human rights. Under pressure from Congress, the administration tried to entice the Salvadoran government to reform, only to discover that managing the internal politics of the regime was as difficult as fighting the war.

Part III shifts the scene to Nicaragua. Although Reagan launched the covert war against the Sandinista government shortly after assuming office, it became a focus of public debate only toward the end of his first term. When Congress cut off U.S. support for the contras in 1984, senior administration officials led by National Security Council staff aide Oliver North conspired to keep aid flowing. The revelation of this effort to circumvent Congress, which came out during the Iran-contra investigation, shook the Reagan presidency to its foundations.

Part IV carries the narrative into the Bush presidency, when both the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran wars were finally settled by negotiations. In Nicaragua, the implementation of a regional peace agreement led to a free election in 1990 that was won by the Sandinistas’ civilian opponents. In El Salvador, after a surge in fighting in 1989, both sides concluded that a negotiated peace was preferable to endless war. With help from the international community, including the United States, they were able to reach a peace agreement in 1992. The book concludes with an assessment of what the decade of turmoil in Central America has meant for U.S. relations with Latin America, and for the Central Americans, who are left to recover and rebuild after long years of brutality and war.

Finally, the book looks at the consequences of Ronald Reagan’s policy for our own political process. Like the domestic turmoil unleashed by Vietnam, the struggle over Central America was so divisive that it damaged the fabric of democratic politics at home. It weakened the ties of comity between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, inflamed the tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch over control of foreign policy, and ultimately led some administration officials to circumvent the law. Just as domestic dissent over Vietnam led to the White House plumbers and Watergate, domestic opposition to Reagan’s Central American policy led to Oliver North and William Casey’s secret intelligence apparatus and the Iran-contra scandal.

To readers especially interested in Guatemala, I apologize for giving it short shrift. Although the war in Guatemala in the 1980s was no less intense or bloody than those in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Washington’s role was more peripheral. An ongoing congressional ban on military aid, which lasted until late in the decade, prevented the United States from becoming the arsenal of the Guatemalan army the way it did in El Salvador. Moreover, Guatemala’s guerrillas never achieved the strength to threaten the survival of the regime, so Washington had less impetus to intervene. Still, I would have liked to include several chapters on Guatemala, but considerations of space precluded it.

During the early 1980s, I had the good fortune to work on the staff of the Democratic leadership in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, dealing specifically with U.S. policy toward Central America. From 1982 to 1984, I worked with the Democratic Policy Committee, chaired by Senator Robert C. Byrd, and from 1985 to 1986, I worked with the House Democratic Caucus Task Force on Central America, chaired by Congressman Mel Levine. From these vantage points, I was able to witness and participate in many of the key battles between the administration and its congressional opponents.

In reconstructing events and conversations, I have relied, where possible, on official documents, published (e.g., presidential and congressional papers and hearings) and unpublished (e.g., declassified documents). During the debates on Central America, a surprising number of classified documents were leaked to the press by one or another faction inside the administration. For most key decisions, the record of internal deliberations available from journalistic sources is unusually complete. In citing documents, I have tried, to the extent possible, to direct readers to the most readily available published source when there is one. Some of the documents cited, mostly ones from Central American sources, have never been published. Almost all of these are in my possession. Most of the unpublished U.S. government documents cited are available at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.

In addition to documents and contemporary journalistic reports, my account is also based on several hundred interviews conducted over the course of a decade with executive branch officials, members of Congress and their staff, and Central Americans on all sides of the region’s various conflicts. When interviews were conducted formally, with set ground rules, I have cited the sources appropriately. Conversations that occurred in the course of my work in Congress are cited anonymously, since people then were speaking to me as a colleague, not with the expectation that their views would eventually show up in print.

Aficionados of Congress will find that the notes contain additional detail on various procedural maneuvers. I banished this material to the notes because it is too arcane for most readers, but as a former congressional staff member, I couldn’t bring myself to edit it out completely.

Careful readers will also notice the frequency of citations to the daily press. One reason is simply that the narrative style I use frequently quotes comments in press briefings and interviews not reproduced in official documents (although I rely on official transcripts when available).

A second, more substantive reason is that the press played a crucial role in how the story unfolded. From the coverage of human rights violations in El Salvador to the revelations of the Iran-contra scandal, the press had a profound effect on the formation of both elite and mass opinion. And in Washington, warring factions inside the Reagan administration regularly used the press as a weapon in their internecine combat.

Finally, as the adage goes, journalists write the rough draft of history, and I wanted to show what a good job most of them did with the Central America story. In many notes, I juxtapose contemporary press accounts with documentary evidence that only became available much later, showing that reporters had the facts essentially right early on. The documentary evidence may be more authoritative, but it seemed to me only fair to give credit to those who had the story first. A number of reporters consistently filed high-quality reports, both from Central America and Washington—people such as Alan Riding, Karen DeYoung, Christopher Dickey, Raymond Bonner, Stephen Kinzer, Clifford Krauss, Don Oberdorfer, Alfonso Chardy, Roy Gutman, Dennis Volman, Sam Dillon, Julia Preston, Joanne Omang, Brian Barger, and Robert Parry.

Projects of this length and duration invariably accumulate debts to many people along the way, some of whose contributions are so great that they should be formally acknowledged. My thanks go first to friends and colleagues who read parts of the manuscript and provided valuable comments on it: Ken Sharpe, Janet Shenk, Alex Wilde, and Pete Vaky.

Peter Kornbluh at the National Security Archive gave me invaluable assistance finding my way through mountains of declassified government documents on Central America. Jim Lobe, Griffin Hathaway, Pat Bodnar, and Marshall Yurow were all kind enough to share with me interviews and documents collected in the course of their own research. Former Speaker of the House Jim Wright allowed me to see his memoir when it was still in manuscript. My editors, Elaine Maisner, Pam Upton, and Eric D. Schramm, were as skilled as any I have encountered.

Both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Open Society Foundation helped launch this project, without realizing it, when they provided me with fellowships to take time off from teaching in order to work as a congressional staff member. Financial support for writing the book was provided by the Area Foundation, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Congressional Center, American University, and W. H. Ferry and Carol Bernstein Ferry. My thanks to all for their generosity.

The burdens of writing a book are shared, unavoidably, by an author’s family. In my case, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife and partner, Martha Langelan. She tolerated my spending untold hours hunched in front of the computer screen, she read the whole manuscript when it was even longer than it is now and gave me editorial advice second to none, and she remained ever optimistic (outwardly at least) that this book would, in fact, get finished. That it did is in no small measure a result of her support.

Abbreviations Used in the Text

ACLU American Civil Liberties Union AID U.S. Agency for International Development AIFLD American Institute for Free Labor Development, AFL-CIO ANSESAL Salvadoran National Security Agency (Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Salvadorena) ARENA Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista), El Salvador CBI Caribbean Basin Initiative CIA Central Intelligence Agency CONDECA Central American Defense Council CORDS Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support COSEP Superior Council of Private Enterprise (Consejo Superior de la Empresa Privada), Nicaragua CPPG National Security Council Crisis Pre-Planning Group DCM deputy chief of mission DIES Directorate of Special Investigations (Directorio de Investigaciones Especiales), Honduras FAO Broad Opposition Front (Frente Amplio Opositor), Nicaragua FDN Nicaraguan Democratic Force (Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense) FDR Revolutionary Democratic Front (Frente Democrático Revolucionario), El Salvador FMLN Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), El Salvador FSLN Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), Nicaragua FY fiscal year GAO General Accounting Office GOP Republican Party IMF International Monetary Fund ISA U.S. Army Intelligence Support Activity LRRPS Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NED National Endowment for Democracy NHAO U.S. Department of State Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office NIO National Intelligence Officer NSC National Security Council NSDD National Security Decision Directive NSPG National Security Planning Group OAS Organization of American States ORDEN Nationalist Democratic Organization (Organización Democrática Nacionalista), El Salvador OSS Office of Strategic Services PCN National Conciliation Party (Partido de Conciliación Nacional), El Salvador PDC Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano), El Salvador PLO Palestine Liberation Organization RIG Restricted Inter-Agency Group RMTC Regional Military Training Center SEALS U.S. Navy Sea, Air, and Land special forces SELA Latin American Economic System South-Com U.S. Southern Command, Panama UCLAS Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets UCS Salvadoran Communal Union (Unión Comunal Salvadoreña) UDN Nicaraguan Democratic Union (Unión Democrática Nicaragüense) UNO National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositor), Nicaragua UNO United Nicaraguan Opposition (Unidad Nicaragüense Opositor) UNTS National Unity of Salvadoran Workers (Unidad Nacional de Trabajadores Salvadoreños) UPD Popular Democratic Union (Unión Popular Democrática), El Salvador

I Origins

We do control the destinies of Central America and we do so for the simple reason that the national interest absolutely dictates such a course. . . . Until now, Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those we do not recognize and support fall.

—Undersecretary of State Robert Olds, 1927

CHAPTER 1

A New Beginning

As if on cue, the sun broke through the gray blanket of clouds over the city of Washington just as Ronald Wilson Reagan was sworn in as fortieth president of the United States. The sunshine pushed the temperature into the mid-fifties, making January 20, 1981, one of the warmest inauguration days on record. The rainstorm forecast for the afternoon never came.

On the inaugural platform, Reagan looked relaxed and resplendent in morning coat and striped pants. At sixty-nine, he was the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, but he looked vigorous next to Jimmy Carter. The outgoing president had not slept for three days, trying in vain to arrange the release of the fifty-two American hostages in Iran before the final hours of his presidency ticked away. Carter, who refused the suggestion by Reagan’s staff that he, too, don formal morning dress, looked weary and plain in his ordinary business suit.

A southern populist, Carter had tried to demystify the institution of the presidency by bringing the president closer to the people. After his own inauguration, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House rather than ride in a limousine. He insisted on being called Jimmy Carter, not James Earl. He was everyman, and after the Byzantine Court politics of the Nixon years, Americans found him reassuring. But people were not entirely comfortable with a president who seemed so common. Americans liked having some pomp and ceremony associated with the presidency. The office was no ordinary one, and it demanded an extraordinary person to fill it. Despite his intelligence and a real compassion for the less fortunate, Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Georgia, never projected a heroic persona.

An engineer by profession, Carter approached the presidency as a problem solver—clear-headed, unemotional, matter-of-fact. He appealed to the American people for support by explaining issues, trying to persuade them by dint of logic. Coming to office in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, during the Middle East oil crisis, Carter believed the days of U.S. military and economic global dominance were over, and he said so. To many Americans, it was an unwelcome message. Carter was not wrong when he observed, in his infamous malaise speech, that the country was plagued by self-doubt, but in the end it was easier to blame the messenger.

Ronald Reagan, a successful film actor for over twenty years, approached politics as if it were theater. He understood instinctively that the first task of the leading man is to form an emotional bond with the audience. Once the hero wins the audience’s loyalty, it will stick by him, rooting for him, even if he displays a few minor faults and even if the story line has an occasional hole in it. This was the secret of Reagan’s teflon presidency—a willing suspension of disbelief. He could make factual mistakes, he could advocate policies that most people disagreed with, but he was so warm and engaging, both in person and in front of the camera, that the audience was always on his side. He played the hero to perfection.

And he cast Jimmy Carter as the villain. When Carter told the American people that they had entered an era of limits, Ronald Reagan reassured them that it was not America that was unequal to the challenge; rather, Jimmy Carter was unequal to it. It is time for us to realize that we are too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams, Reagan said in his inaugural speech. We’re not, as some would have us believe, doomed to inevitable decline. We have every right to dream heroic dreams.¹

People liked Ronald Reagan because he told them they lived in a shining city on a hill and that the nation’s greatest days were still ahead. He told them that their traditional values—the belief in hard work, love of country, dedication to family, and the small-town sense of community—were not obsolete. Reagan’s appeal was classically conservative; he recognized people’s discomfort with the rapid economic, social, and cultural changes that had pounded the nation like a succession of hurricanes since the early 1960s—the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation. He held out the promise that fidelity to the old virtues could form the basis of a moral revival and make America great again, both at home and abroad. The lost tranquility of Norman Rockwell’s America could be recaptured. America would have a New Beginning.

Central America and the Legacy of Vietnam

In foreign policy, Reagan aimed to recapture the bipartisan unity and self-confidence that were shattered in Vietnam. Over the next eight years, he would pursue a foreign policy diametrically opposed to Jimmy Carter’s. Where Carter had sought to expand detente with the Soviet Union, Reagan would return to a Cold War posture of distrust and animosity, punctuated by the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Where Carter had sought to craft a new relationship with the Third World based on tolerance for ideological pluralism and a presumption against intervention, Reagan viewed the Third World primarily through the prism of the East-West struggle and, under the rubric of the Reagan Doctrine, would launch half a dozen covert paramilitary wars against perceived adversaries. Where Carter promoted human rights as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, Reagan would renew U.S. alliances with anti-Communist authoritarian regimes.

The foreign policies of these two presidents were as different as any in the post-World War II era, and nowhere were the differences clearer than in Central America. When civil conflicts erupted in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala in the late 1970s, Carter’s instinct was to limit Washington’s direct involvement and promote diplomatic settlements. Despite the growing strength of Marxist guerrillas, he refused to commit the United States to the defense of the status quo by resuming military aid to dictatorial regimes. From his first day in office, Ronald Reagan repudiated Carter’s approach in favor of active U.S. military support for Central America’s anti-Communists.

For the next decade, the Central American crisis would dominate America’s foreign policy agenda and polarize domestic politics. During the first Reagan administration, the civil war in El Salvador held center stage. Despite fervent opposition from congressional Democrats, who opposed aiding a regime guilty of massive human rights abuses, Reagan never wavered in his support for the Salvadoran military. In eight years, he poured nearly $4 billion in U.S. assistance into the country. During Reagan’s second term, El Salvador receded from Washington’s political agenda (though the war continued unabated), only to be replaced by Nicaragua. As part of its global campaign to roll back the tide of international Communism, the Reagan administration organized an exile army to wage a proxy war against Nicaragua’s revolutionary government. Here, too, Reagan met with stiff congressional resistance, but he would brook no opposition. When Congress finally voted to prohibit further U.S. aid to the exiles (contras), senior administration officials, led by National Security Council staff aide Oliver North, continued to support the contras clandestinely. The revelation that they had circumvented the law produced a political scandal reminiscent of Watergate and nearly destroyed Reagan’s presidency.

Why did such a small region loom so large in the American psyche during the 1980s? The debate over Central America was, in large measure, an extension of the debate over Vietnam. For the Reagan wing of the Republican Party, Central America was, first and foremost, an arena of struggle between Communism and Democracy. Those who, like Ronald Reagan, regarded Vietnam as a noble cause worried that the Vietnam syndrome was interfering with America’s ability to resist Soviet encroachments in the Third World.² Central America was a test of America’s mettle after the defeat in Southeast Asia, and conservatives were determined to win a clear victory to reinvigorate the nation’s will to use force abroad.

Much of the general public shared the Republican right’s distress about America’s position in the world. Defeat in Vietnam seemed to mark the end of America’s global preeminence. The 1970s oil crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the revolution in Iran all seemed to confirm that the United States was sliding downward toward the status of a second-rate power. Ronald Reagan pledged to stop the march of the Evil Empire of international Communism by restoring the United States to its rightful place as world leader.³ Central America was the place that Reagan would draw the line.

If anti-Communism was a unifying force for Republicans, it divided Democrats. The Democratic Party never fully recovered from the political trauma of Vietnam. The war split the party from top to bottom along ideological lines: The doves of the left-liberal wing backed Eugene McCarthy’s and Robert Kennedy’s insurgent challenges to Lyndon Johnson; the hawks stuck with their president and Hubert Humphrey. After Johnson’s withdrawal from the race and Kennedy’s assassination, the party convened in Chicago for a fratricidal bloodletting that paved the way for the election of Richard Nixon. Four years later, the Democrats nominated antiwar candidate George McGovern.

Although McGovern lost as decisively as Barry Goldwater had almost a decade earlier, the ideological center of the national Democratic Party moved to the left, just as the center of the Republican Party had moved to the right after 1964. Outside the South, Democrats who had been Cold War liberals became antiwar liberals. The few who resisted this evolution either migrated as neoconservatives to the Republican Party, or tried in vain to fight a rear-guard action against the Democrats’ ideological shift. In the South, however, most Democrats remained supporters of the war and a tough anti-Communist foreign policy. The shift of majority sentiment in the national party to an antiwar, anti-interventionist posture widened the chasm between southern Democrats and their northern colleagues, reinforcing the split over civil rights. Liberal Democrats regarded Vietnam as a mistake and were always on guard to be sure the mistake was not repeated in some other faraway land. To them, Central America looked like another Vietnam in the making—another benighted Third World region where America would run afoul of history by casting its lot with authoritarian military regimes defending an anachronistic social order. They were determined not to start down the slippery slope.

The American people—from the average citizen to the foreign policy elite-were as divided about the lessons of Vietnam as were the Republican and Democratic Parties. Among the elite, Vietnam shattered the bipartisan consensus constructed by Harry Truman at the onset of the Cold War. That consensus rested upon several basic premises: that the Soviet Union (and later, Communist China) was an aggressive power that had to be contained or, like Hitler’s Germany, it would subjugate others relentlessly; that the United States, as the leader of the free world, had primary responsibility for standing up to the Soviets; and, after Korea, that no corner of the world was too far away or too insignificant to defend from Soviet encroachment, lest aggression appeased become aggression repeated.

An unwritten corollary to this containment doctrine held that revolutions in the Third World created opportunities for Communist penetration. Instability was incompatible with U.S. security interests. With this precept as rationale, the United States took on the role of global policeman. In its zeal to block the advance of Communism, Washington often committed itself against the aspirations of revolutionary nationalists and social democrats in developing nations around the world. The war in Vietnam brought the limits of U.S. power into sharp focus. If the United States was no longer willing or able to pay any price, bear any burden in the international struggle against Communism, then debate was inevitable over what price should be paid, and where. Central America became the arena for that debate.

Among the general public, the war in Vietnam increased isolationist sentiment substantially, but it also split the internationalist public into two camps: those who thought Vietnam was justified and those who did not. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these two groups disagreed fundamentally over the most basic issues of American foreign policy. The antiwar group opposed virtually all U.S. military involvements abroad, especially if they involved sending American advisers or troops and therefore raised the specter of another Vietnam. Those who supported the war in Vietnam evinced no such fears and no reluctance about new adventures abroad.

These policy differences within the public and the political elite tended to follow partisan cleavages, especially as the Republicans became more conservative and the Democrats more liberal. Partisan politics no longer stopped at the water’s edge. For any post-Vietnam American president, the combined political weight of anti-interventionist and isolationist sentiment would have been a formidable obstacle to military commitments abroad. The simultaneous shift in institutional power between the president and the Congress made foreign commitments even harder to sustain.⁴

Until Vietnam, Congress, the press, and the public had left control of foreign policy to the president. Without the normal checks on executive power that keep domestic politics on a relatively even keel, the Imperial Presidency became powerful enough to wage war with little regard for public opinion, until discontent erupted into massive antiwar protests at home. In reaction to what Senator William Fulbright (D-Ark.) called the arrogance of power came the democratization of foreign policy—the reassertion by Congress of a more active role. In 1973, Congress tried to recapture its constitutional power to declare war by passing the War Powers Resolution over President Nixon’s veto. Later that same year, Congress ended America’s role in Indochina’s wars by prohibiting all U.S. military and paramilitary combat operations in or over Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia.⁵ In 1975, the Clark amendment (named for Senator Dick Clark, Democrat from Iowa) prevented Henry Kissinger from extending Washington’s covert role in the Angolan civil war. Revelations of the CIA’s misdeeds—including spying on Americans, conducting medical experiments on unwitting subjects, and plotting to assassinate foreign leaders—led Congress to create permanent committees to oversee the intelligence community and require that they be notified of all covert operations.⁶ Finally, in the late 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws prohibiting the United States from providing foreign assistance to governments that were gross and consistent violators of internationally recognized human rights.⁷

The legacy of Vietnam—public uncertainty about America’s proper role in the world, partisan division over foreign policy, and institutional conflict between Congress and the executive branch—was not something Ronald Reagan could simply wish away, even though he had been elected on a platform that promised to make America great again. The Reagan Republicans sometimes liked to think that the Vietnam syndrome could be exorcised easily, that the restoration of American preeminence was simply a matter of political will.

Certainly, as the sun shone down on Ronald Reagan riding along Pennsylvania Avenue in his inaugural parade, everything seemed possible to the Republican faithful who lined the route, eagerly straining for a glimpse of their conquering hero. Patriotic songs filled the air—God Bless America, Anchors Aweigh, The Battle Hymn of the Republic—and Reagan sang along as the marching bands played. A red, white, and blue float carrying young girls in tight outfits passed the presidential reviewing stand, releasing hot-air balloons that carried aloft an American flag. Oh, it’s so good it made me cry, gushed Maxine Hinkle, a Republican from West Virginia. I can’t believe how everything is coming out a happy ending.⁸

Only about a thousand demonstrators marred the carefully staged celebration, trying to puncture the festive bubble. Standing in clusters at various points along the inaugural parade route, they carried placards proclaiming their opposition to the new president on a variety of issues. They were not disruptive, but their mere presence was an unwelcome intrusion, an unpleasant reminder that outside the Republicans’ cocoon of good feeling, America was still deeply divided and unsure of its future. Reagan pointedly looked away as he passed the demonstrators, so he probably didn’t see the signs held up by some of them demanding, U.S. Out of El Salvador.⁹

CHAPTER 2

The Dragons’ Teeth of War

Perhaps it was inevitable that Americans would have to finish the debate over Vietnam in Latin America, where the United States had long been the predominant power. Vietnam was 12,000 miles away, but Latin America was our own backyard. El Salvador was closer to Miami than Miami was to Washington, D.C., as Ronald Reagan regularly reminded us. Harlingen, Texas, was just a few days drive from Managua, Nicaragua.¹ If Washington’s commitment in Vietnam was a mistake because it was too far away, because the culture was too alien for Americans to understand, or because the interests at stake did not justify the sacrifice, none of these reasons applied in Central America.

The isthmus of Central America stretches from Mexico’s southern border to Panama, encompassing five former Spanish colonies—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Nicaragua, the largest, is about the size of Michigan; El Salvador, the smallest, is the size of Massachusetts. Only about 23 million people live in the entire region, whose average gross national product per capita in the 1980s was well below $1,000.

Central America has always been among the most underdeveloped regions in Latin America. Even during the colonial period, it was a sparsely settled backwater. Unlike the colonial centers in Mexico and Peru, Central America had few precious minerals to attract the Spanish and, except in Guatemala, there were too few indigenous people to work the mines or the large landed estates. Central America’s subsistence economies were not fully integrated into the world market until the late nineteenth century, when the coffee and banana booms spurred a rapid expansion of export agriculture.²

Contemporary Central American society was built on coffee and bananas. Most of the banana plantations were owned by U.S. businessmen, but coffee was locally controlled. Successful entrepreneurs joined with the traditional landed aristocracy to form powerful coffee oligarchies that dominated society and politics in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. They built their plantations by forcing small peasant farmers off the land, and they built modern armies to suppress the resulting unrest.

Despite stark inequities, these societies survived virtually intact into the second half of the twentieth century, held together by repressive force. By the mid-1970s, however, the oligarchic regimes had begun to decay. In Nicaragua and El Salvador, the established order broke down in the face of popular revolution, confronting the United States with brushfire wars in its own backyard.

Nicaragua: Autumn of the Patriarch

The history of U.S. involvement in Nicaragua stretches back to the California Gold Rush in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1848, as a result of the war with Mexico, the United States acquired the western territories of New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and California, thereby fulfilling its Manifest Destiny to control all the territory between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. To reach the West, however, required months of perilous journey across the plains and the Rocky Mountains, so the prospect of establishing a passage across the isthmus of Central America began to attract serious interest. The Gold Rush of 1848 set off a stampede of people into the western territories and gave new urgency to the idea of a Central American canal.

Like Panama, Nicaragua was always regarded as a logical site for a canal. By traveling up the San Juan river and across Lake Nicaragua, a shallow-draft boat could get within twelve miles of the Pacific coast. In 1853, Cornelius Vanderbilt established a lucrative business transporting travelers across Nicaragua by building a decent road over that twelve-mile finger of land.

With U.S. business came the gunboats of the U.S. government, intent upon preserving the honor and interests of its citizens. The first of eleven U.S. interventions in Nicaragua came in 1853 when a contingent of Marines landed on the Atlantic coast to settle a dispute between Vanderbilt’s transit company and local Nicaraguan authorities. They resolved it in Vanderbilt’s favor, of course. A year later, a U.S. diplomat was grazed by a bottle thrown from an angry crowd during a fracas with the mayor of San Juan del Norte, a small Atlantic coast port. In retribution, a U.S. naval gunship bombarded the town until hardly a building remained standing. A landing party of Marines then looted the ruins and put them to the torch.³

All this was mere prelude, however, to one of the most amazing and, for Nicaraguans, most galling episodes in the history of relations with the United States. In 1854, the Nicaraguan Liberal and Conservative Parties were engaged in a civil war. The Liberals appealed to a North American named William Walker to raise a contingent of filibusters—mercenaries—to bolster their forces. Walker’s troops managed to capture the Conservative capital of Granada and, by holding hostage the wealthy families of the Conservative leaders, Walker forced them to surrender. Calling himself the Grey-Eyed Man of Destiny, Walker then took control of the Nicaraguan government, had himself elected president, made English an official language, and legalized slavery.

The occupation of Nicaragua by Walker and his filibusters had one salutary effect: it led the states of Central America, who were engaged more often than not in fratricidal conflicts with one another, to set aside their differences and unite to oust this Yankee interloper. In 1856, the combined armies of Central America drove Walker out of Nicaragua. When he tried to return in 1860 to resume the war, he was captured in Honduras and shot.⁴

The first two decades of the twentieth century were no less traumatic for U.S. relations with Central America. These were the years of gunboat and dollar diplomacy. Behind this interventionist impulse was the rapid expansion of U.S. interests, both economic and strategic. The closing of the U.S. frontier marked the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, but not its satiation. As U.S. economic power grew, entrepreneurs began to seek profitable investment opportunities beyond the bounds of North America. They were drawn to the regions lying on the geographic periphery of the continental United States—Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and the Caribbean. As the economic interests of U.S. business extended into these regions, so too did their stake in political stability. When that stability appeared tenuous and investments were in jeopardy, the U.S. government was not hesitant to deploy gunboats and Marines to protect them.

The turn of the century also marked the emergence of the United States as a world power. At the same time, the Great Powers of Europe were busy carving up the Third World into colonial domains. Latin America was safe from European depredations by virtue of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, in which the United States declared its willingness to fight to prevent European recolonization of the New World. But as the United States itself entered the ranks of the Great Powers, the Western Hemisphere seemed its logical domain. To justify the subordination of Latin America to the United States, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was resurrected in a new form: it was the natural right of the United States to expand its influence throughout the hemisphere, just as it had been its natural right to span the continent. The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, articulated in 1904, declared Washington’s right to exercise an international police power to maintain order and stability when Latin American governments exhibited chronic wrong-doing.⁵

Nicaragua was among the countries most often victimized by the new Manifest Destiny.⁶ In 1912, Nicaragua became a virtual protectorate of the United States when three thousand U.S. troops landed, ostensibly to protect American lives and property during a period of civil strife. A contingent of Marines stayed for thirteen years to guarantee the survival of the Conservative Party government. Asked in 1922 what prospects Conservative president Adolfo Díaz would have if the Marines left, W. Bundy Cole, a New York banker who managed the National Bank of Nicaragua, answered, I think the present government would last until the last coach of Marines left Managua station, and I think President Díaz would be on that last coach.⁷

In 1925, the Marines did leave briefly, and Cole’s prediction was proved right. The Liberals immediately took up arms against the Conservatives, and in 1927, six thousand Marines returned to restore order. But the United States never quite succeeded in pacifying Nicaragua during the second occupation. Augusto César Sandino, a Liberal Party leader, refused to accept Washington’s imposition of a Conservative president. Leading a rag-tag Army for the Defense of Nicaraguan National Sovereignty, Sandino fought a six-year guerrilla war against the U.S. Marines, achieving international stature as a nationalist and anti-imperialist.⁸

The U.S. war against Sandino left a bitter legacy. Today we are hated and despised, wrote an American coffee planter in Nicaragua in 1931. This feeling has been created by employing the American Marines to hunt down and kill Nicaraguans in their own country.⁹ Despite President Calvin Coolidge’s warning that Sandino was an agent of Bolshevik Mexico and that Mexico was intent on extending Soviet-style Communism to all of Central America, opposition to the futile war rose in the United States. Entertainer Will Rogers began asking in his act, Why are we in Nicaragua, and what the hell are we doing there?¹⁰ In 1932, Congress refused to finance any additional troop deployments.

When Washington finally withdrew in 1933, it left the task of ensuring Nicaraguan stability to a U.S.-trained constabulary, the National Guard. The Guard was commanded by Anastasio Somoza García, who had been the liaison between the U.S. Marine commander and the Nicaraguan government. One of Somoza’s first achievements was to lure the legendary Sandino to Managua on the pretext of arranging peace, only to have him assassinated. In 1936, Somoza forced the civilian president from office, arranged his own election, and thus initiated the family dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for the next forty-two years.¹¹

The Somoza dynasty rested upon two pillars: the National Guard, transformed by patronage into the Somozas’ personal gendarme; and the support of the United States, ensured by the Somozas’ anti-Communism and their ability to maintain order. Occasionally, Washington pressured the Somozas to be more tolerant of their political opponents and move toward democratic rule, but it was never willing to risk destabilizing such a reliable ally by pushing too hard. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s apocryphal but oft-repeated description of Somoza captured the flavor of Washington’s attitude: Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.¹² When the United States took on the task of training Latin American military officers after World War II, more soldiers from Nicaragua’s National Guard were trained than from any other Latin American army.¹³

The elder Somoza was succeeded by his sons, Luis and then Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the latter a West Point graduate who spoke better English than Spanish and who always seemed a bit anachronistic; he peppered his conversation with English slang that had disappeared in the 1950s. His enemies called him the last Marine.

Though their reign did little to alleviate the tremendous poverty of Nicaragua, one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries, the Somozas proved adept at personal enrichment. At the end, Anastasio Somoza Debayle controlled an economic empire worth nearly $1 billion, including one-third of the nation’s arable land, the meat-packing industry, the construction industry, the fishing industry, the national airlines, the only television station, radio stations, banks, and more. So complete was his economic control that foreign investors avoided Nicaragua for want of reasonable investment opportunities.¹⁴

During the first three decades after World War II, opposition to the Somoza dynasty was weak and divided. The middle-class and upper-class moderates of the traditional opposition political parties were paralyzed by the Somozas’ close ties with the United States. Time after time, Somoza lured them into unequal alliances with the government—alliances that gave them little real power, but branded them as opportunists and collaborators in the eyes of the public. The slang expression for such politicians was zancudos—blood-sucking mosquitoes. Radical opposition in the lower classes, on the other hand, was controlled by ferocious repression. Thus the future of the dynasty seemed secure when, on December 23, 1972, the earth began to move, changing not only the physical geography of Nicaragua, but its political geography as well.

The political aftershocks of the earthquake that destroyed the capital city of Managua in December 1972 fatally weakened the structure of Somoza’s rule. Turning adversity to advantage, Somoza and his cronies enriched themselves shamelessly by stealing international aid intended for earthquake victims. With Somoza in charge of reconstruction, Managua was rebuilt on Somoza’s land, by Somoza’s construction companies, with money funneled through Somoza’s banks.

The corruption, together with the expansion of Somoza’s economic empire after the earthquake, alienated both the middle and upper classes. Among Nicaragua’s lower classes, the economic adversity caused by the earthquake stimulated radical opposition, manifested in a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and land seizures that swept the country in 1972–73.¹⁵ The moderate opposition coalesced around the leadership of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a reformist member of the Conservative Party and editor of the opposition newspaper, La Prensa. The radical opposition was led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, FSLN), named for nationalist hero Augusto Sandino.

Founded in 1961, the FSLN was one of the many guerrilla organizations spawned in Latin America by the example of the Cuban Revolution. It had scant success during its first decade; it was routed by the National Guard in its only two serious military ventures.¹⁶ Throughout the 1960s, the FSLN received arms and training from Cuba, though the amount of Cuban assistance was circumscribed by the FSLN’s small size—fewer than fifty members—and its inability to establish a guerrilla base against the well-trained and well-equipped National Guard.¹⁷

One of the Sandinistas’ most dramatic actions took place on December 27, 1974, when a band of guerrillas invaded a Managua Christmas party and captured a dozen of Nicaragua’s most prominent business and political leaders. The guerrillas exchanged their hostages for fourteen political prisoners, $1 million in ransom, and safe passage to Cuba. The boldness of the operation brought the Sandinistas national recognition.

Somoza’s embarrassment over the Christmas raid led him to embark upon a war of extermination against the FSLN. He declared a state of siege, created an elite counterinsurgency force within the National Guard, and secured an 80 percent increase in U.S. military aid. The National Guard then proceeded to conduct a reign of terror in the northern provinces of Matagalpa, Jinotega, Estelí, Zelaya, and Nueva Segovia, where the FSLN had been most active. We want to be sure no new guerrilla focal point will rise in those hills, a National Guard officer told journalist Bernard Diederich. We want to eliminate the contaminated peasants.¹⁸ For two years, people in the northern provinces were subjected to a systematic campaign of torture, murder, and forced relocation. Such gross violations of human rights appalled Nicaragua’s moderates and earned the Somoza government well-deserved international opprobrium. When the Carter administration unveiled its new human rights policy in 1977, Nicaragua became one of its principal targets.

A Policy as Good and Decent as the American People

Jimmy Carter made a conscious effort to break with the traditional habit of U.S. policymakers to view Third World conflicts through the prism of the Cold War. With the East-West conflict dampened by detente, he sought a policy more sensitive to North-South issues and more cognizant of the regional forces shaping the Third World independently of superpower machinations. In a major foreign policy address at Notre Dame University just a few months after taking office, Carter promised that the inordinate fear of Communism that had been the hallmark of past policy would be replaced by a tolerance for ideological diversity and a heightened concern for human rights.¹⁹

From the outset, Carter presented his human rights policy in moral terms: it was an approach to the world as good and honest and decent as the American people themselves. In the international arena, Carter sought to repair the damage done to the image of the United States by the ferocity of the war in Vietnam, while simultaneously posing a sharp moral contrast between the United States and the Soviet Union. At home, Carter hoped to reconstruct bipartisan domestic support for foreign policy by grounding it in principles to which no one could easily object.²⁰

Yet the Carter administration never saw its human rights policy in exclusively moral terms. It was also intended to distance the United States from the brutal excesses of decaying autocracies. Right-wing dictatorships bent on preserving anachronistic social orders were regarded as bad security risks. The more they relied upon force to sustain themselves, the more rapidly they mobilized and radicalized their opponents, hastening their own demise. For the United States to enlist in support of such regimes would endanger national security, for ultimately they would collapse and an angry populace would not soon forget that the United States had sided with the tyrants.²¹

Though global in scope, Carter’s human rights policy found its most consistent expression in Latin America. In 1977, there appeared to be no immediate security threats in the hemisphere, so the policy was not diluted by fears of political instability, as it was in Iran and South Korea. The few guerrilla movements still active in Central America appeared to be little more than feeble remnants from the 1960s, incapable of posing a serious challenge to existing regimes.

Carter’s human rights policy was applied full force in Central America, where the four nations of the northern tier—Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—were all ruled by military dictatorships, most of them notorious for their systematic and brutal repression. Rather than submit to U.S. scrutiny on human rights, Guatemala and El Salvador preempted Washington in 1977 by refusing to accept further military assistance.²²

Nicaragua constituted a near-perfect showcase for Carter’s human rights policy. The long history of Somoza’s ties to the United States suggested that he might prove especially malleable to U.S. influence. In addition, Nicaragua appeared to be a relatively safe laboratory in which to experiment since repression had apparently eliminated the Sandinistas.²³

During Gerald Ford’s brief tenure in the White House, the United States had already begun to gently distance itself from Somoza, partly as an antidote to Richard Nixon’s close embrace of the dictator and the sycophancy of his ambassador, Turner Shelton.²⁴ But no real sanctions were imposed against Somoza until the advent of Jimmy Carter. Carter withheld economic and military aid on human rights grounds, and although the material effect was insignificant, the symbolic impact was enormous. Historically, Somoza’s moderate opponents had been paralyzed by the unflagging U.S. support he enjoyed. With the power of Washington behind him, Somoza seemed unassailable, and he was a clever enough politician to actively foster this perception. By suspending aid, the Carter administration galvanized the moderates into active opposition by suggesting that Somoza’s support in Washington was no longer secure.²⁵

The Nicaraguan situation became more complicated for U.S. policymakers in October 1977, when the supposedly defunct FSLN launched a series of small-scale attacks on National Guard garrisons in five cities. Although the attackers were easily driven off, the assaults shattered the myth of Somoza’s invulnerability. Coincident with the attacks, twelve prominent Nicaraguan professionals in exile (el Grupo de Los Doce) praised the Sandinistas’ political maturity and asserted that the FSLN would have to play a role in any permanent solution to Nicaragua’s problems.²⁶

The willingness of moderate progressive forces to open a dialogue with the Sandinistas was due both to their exasperation over the ineffectiveness of electoral opposition and to a significant shift in strategy by the FSLN. Ideological differences emerged within the guerrilla movement in 1975. After the FSLN’s founder, Carlos Fonseca Amador, was killed in combat in 1976, the Sandinistas split into three factions. The traditional strategy of rural-based guerrilla warfare was upheld by the Prolonged People’s War Tendency (Guerra Popular Prolongada), while the Proletarian Tendency (Tendencia Proletaria) advocated a shift to political work among the urban proletariat. Both groups agreed, however, that the time was not ripe for major military actions, and both rejected extensive cooperation with bourgeois elements.

A third group, the Insurrectional Tendency (Tendencia Insurreccional, known popularly as the Terceristas), shared neither of these views. Believing that opposition to Somoza had become nearly universal, they favored exemplary military action to spark popular insurrection. Most significant, they also advocated the unity of all opposition forces around a program of social reform and democracy.²⁷ It was the Terceristas who carried out the October 1977 attacks, and it was they who set about building links to the moderate opposition through Los Doce. Still, as 1978 began, the Sandinistas had neither the political nor the military strength to offer a serious challenge to the Somoza regime.

Sandino’s Revenge: The Revolution in Nicaragua

On January 10, 1978, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the popular opposition leader and editor of La Prensa, was assassinated in Managua. The city erupted in a paroxysm of outrage and spontaneous violence. After several weeks of riots, Nicaragua’s business leaders called a general strike with a single demand—Somoza’s resignation. The two-week strike was 90 percent effective. Midway through it, the Terceristas added their endorsement and launched military attacks in several cities. The insurrection against Somoza had begun.²⁸

For the next twelve months, the country was rocked by sporadic violence-strikes, demonstrations, and street fighting—most of it uncoordinated, organized by a widely disparate array of opposition groups. During this crucial period, the political initiative slipped inexorably from Somoza’s moderate opponents to the guerrillas. The Sandinistas spent those months gathering their forces, stockpiling arms, and organizing the urban and rural poor.²⁹ The moderates waited for the United States to push Somoza out of power. Paralyzed by their inability to bring down Somoza by themselves and by their fear of the Sandinistas’ radicalism, the moderates expected the United States to act for them. They were encouraged in this belief by the Carter administration’s earlier condemnation of Somoza’s human rights record and by the shared interest in avoiding a Sandinista victory. Yet Washington, too, seemed paralyzed during those crucial months. Its ambivalent response dashed the moderate’s hopes and drained their political strength, leaving them to play second fiddle to the FSLN’s military might.³⁰

As Nicaragua’s stability slipped away, U.S. policy was caught in the pull of opposing imperatives. The assassination laid bare the fragility of Somoza’s rule. Faced with the specter of political chaos, the administration’s desire to promote human rights was forced to compete with resurgent concerns about national security. Should the United States stand by its advocacy of human rights and democratic reform in the face of Somoza’s deteriorating political position? Or should human rights be relegated to second place behind political stability, long provided by a brutal but reliable U.S. ally?

Within the administration, conflicting evaluations of the situation reflected both bureaucratic divisions and differences in outlook between career professionals and political appointees. In the State Department’s Latin American Bureau, Assistant Secretary Terence Todman and his staff of foreign service officers were skeptical that much good could come of Carter’s human rights policy. Todman argued that it was largely responsible for Somoza’s difficulties and that the United States could ill afford to further undermine him. This view was echoed in the Pentagon, where the uniformed military was chagrined that Carter’s preferred punishment for human rights violators was to withdraw military aid.³¹ To these traditionalists, Somoza was a loyal ally and the most reliable bulwark against the Marxist guerrillas.

Carter’s political appointees, on the other hand, resisted any backsliding on the policy of distancing the United States from Somoza. At the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, Assistant Secretary Patricia Derian regarded the Latin American Bureau’s warnings about Nicaragua as little more than an excuse to abandon a human rights policy that the bureau had never really liked. Anthony Lake (the State Department’s director of policy planning), Richard Feinberg (Lake’s specialist on Latin America), and Robert Pastor (National Security Council staff specialist on Latin America) all opposed an active U.S. role in the growing Nicaraguan crisis. One reason was President Carter’s expressed commitment to nonintervention. They saw Nicaragua as a test of whether Washington could resist the traditional temptation to take charge whenever events in Latin America began to go awry. The other reason was more practical. If the administration became deeply involved in trying to resolve the