Perceptions of failure in foreign relations ruined the Carter presidency in 1979 and 1980. A seeming incapacity to respond effectively to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created impressions of incompetence and impotence, and the overthrow of dictatorial but pro-U.S. regimes by revolutionary forces in Iran and Nicaragua reinforced the point. According to the distinction established by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the United States possessed a responsibility to support and sustain less-than-perfect authoritarian rulers as bulwarks against more insidious forms of totalitarian communism. Under Reagan in the 1980s, the United States sought to correct the failure to do so through the exercise of determination and strength.
In Latin America, Jimmy Carter’s attempt to affirm a more valid combination of morality, reason, and power obtained a kind of vindication in the Panama Canal treaties. As Walter LaFeber notes, those agreements actually constituted a “diplomatic triumph” for the United States. By agreeing to give up control of the Canal Zone after a period of twenty-five years, the Carter administration successfully eliminated what had become a constant irritant in Latin American relations and, at the same time, John Coatsworth observes, secured from Panama an agreement to permit unilateral intervention “in perpetuity.” Although the United States gave up military bases in Panama, it retained the right for its warships and commercial vessels to have top priority in case of an emergency.1 Nevertheless, clamorous outrage among political rightists in the United States exacted a political cost. Chief among the critics, Ronald Reagan, a presidential aspirant in 1980, excoriated Carter for giving away the canal.2
Other conspicuous difficulties in Central America emanated to an extent from economic conditions. Unlike the 1960s, a time of booming exports for coffee and bananas, the 1970s saw trade contractions that caused instability and political polarization. The rise in oil prices during the shock of 1973 also hit Central America hard. The combined effects increased popular discontent “to levels unprecedented in Central American history.” As Coatsworth explains, organizational efforts among workers and peasants seeking amelioration led to protests and demonstrations. In Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama, conciliation on the part of political leaders headed off full-scale crises, but in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the traditional elites responded with ruthless repression. The result was chronic violence and conflict that reached a peak late in the 1970s.
None of Carter’s advisers, who had viewed Central America as a region in which to press for human rights, anticipated the actual extent of the turmoil. In El Salvador, widespread discontent over a fraudulent election in 1977 encouraged the government of general Carlos Humberto Romero to employ terror against the opposition, using government-sanctioned death squads. Such methods ignited a civil war. Similarly, rigged elections in Guatemala brought into power the military governments of general Kjell Laugerud in 1974 and general Romeo Lucas García in 1978. Each used armed force indiscriminately against a growing guerrilla movement in the countryside, wreaking havoc among rural people. Many of the 200,000 to 300,000 Guatemalans who lost their lives for political reasons after 1954 did so during the crackdown between 1977 and 1983.3 In fact, one of the more nefarious periods in contemporary Latin American history is associated with the Efraín Ríos Montt administration in Guatemala. General Ríos Montt took power in a military coup in 1982 and remained in power until another coup removed him a year later. However, during his short tenure in office, the general and his supporters conducted a scorched earth campaign designed to eliminate all communists from Guatemala. The campaign was supported with military equipment from the United States and the approbation of President Reagan in Washington.
Guatemala’s rich indigenous heritage was viewed as an obstacle to the Ríos Montt regime, and as many as 600 villages were destroyed by the military. These villages were viewed as safe havens for “subversives”; for orchestrating this brutal campaign, the general was convicted of genocide in a Guatemalan court in 2013. The conviction was overturned, however, by the Guatemalan constitutional court (Corte de Constitucionalidad). After his ouster, the war raged on for another thirteen years until peace accords were signed in 1996, ending a thirty-six year civil war that killed perhaps a quarter-million Guatemalans.
Two years after the accords were signed, in April 1998, the “Recovery of Historical Memory Project” (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica—REMHI) released its report titled “Guatemala: Nunca Más!”; two days later, Juan José Gerardi, the Catholic bishop who had served on the National Reconciliation Commission—a man respected for his deep, long-standing commitment to human rights—was bludgeoned to death in his garage. This crime seemed almost like magic—black magic—and the investigation of the murder was written up in an extraordinary book that is a sort of hybrid between murder-mystery and journalism, by Guatemalan writer Francisco Goldman, titled The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?
At the height of the Ríos Montt military campaign in Guatemala, a young indigenous woman named Rigoberta Menchú Tum published a book that would earn her worldwide fame and a Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. Ms. Menchú revealed her story, orally, to a French anthropologist, Elisabeth Burgos, and the book that emerged in 1983, Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, shocked people in Europe and the United States for its clear, unsentimental account of the atrocities being committed in Guatemala, a place most people didn’t even know existed. The book was translated to English in 1984 as I, Rigoberta Menchú.
In Nicaragua, by contrast, a broad-based revolutionary movement actually succeeded in taking power by ousting the right-wing regime of Anastasio Somoza. Named for Augusto César Sandino, the revolutionary hero assassinated in 1934, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), or Sandinista National Liberation Front, encompassed a range of political views affirmed through a collective leadership. The group asserted strong nationalism, Marxist convictions, and Christian religious fervor by embracing a form of liberation theology. This shift in Roman Catholic thinking weakened the traditional association between the church hierarchy and the conservative elites of Latin America. Based on Pope John XXIII’s encyclicals of 1961 and 1963, liberation theology stressed the importance of human rights and decent living standards for all people. Without these, the pope warned, a deluge of violence and revolution could engulf the Christian world. At the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965), he encouraged studies of economic development through the use of the social sciences. One effect was to expose Roman Catholic clergy to dependency theory as a means of explaining the stagnation of Latin American economies and the gap between the rich and the poor.
At the Second General Conference of Latin American Bishops at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, church officials went on record in support of social justice and condemned the prevalence of “institutionalized violence.” This term referred to structural inequalities presumably built into political, economic, and social systems, the effects of which were poverty and powerlessness for millions of people. As a means of alleviating inequities, the bishops called upon poor people to assume greater responsibility for their own well-being by joining in positive action to ensure a fairer distribution of freedom, justice, and opportunity. Seeking to avoid the extremes of capitalism and communism, they hoped to locate a third and independent option. Just where it might reside, no one knew for sure.
To its detractors, liberation theology was seen as a Marxist takeover of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II, elected to the papacy in 1978, was strongly against priests committing to political work and believed priests and bishops should stay out of temporal affairs and focus on spiritual questions related to the church’s sacraments and institutional traditions. Karol Wojtyla witnessed the extremes of politics in his native Poland during the Second World War and, later, with the Soviet Union’s domination; thus, his agenda was eminently conservative and he had little patience for politicized priests.
Wojtyla was able to undo much of the “liberationist” work of the late 1960s by removing or appointing bishops and cardinals who reflected his thinking. Cardinal Paolo Evaristo Arns, for example, in Brazil, a leading proponent of the poor and a supporter of liberation theology, saw his archdiocese reduced to the center city of São Paulo. Yet, Colombian Alfonso López Trujillo, a strict conservative cleric, was elevated to cardinal in 1983, under John Paul II, and became president of the Pontifical Council for the Family in Rome. There, he advocated hierarchical, conservative programs that stressed the traditional teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
Priests motivated by the 1968 Medellín meeting lived throughout the Latin American region, and the leading proponents of this “new” theology and theoreticians were: Peruvian Gustavo Gutiérrez; Brazilians Dom Helder Câmara, Clodovis and Leonardo Boff; Chilean Manuel Larraín; and Panamanian Marcos McGrath. Not surprisingly, many of the important practitioners of liberation theology lived in Central America. Five priests, in fact, rose to prominence in the 1979 Sandinista government in Nicaragua; Fernando Cardenal became Minister of Education, Ernesto Cardenál—a well-known poet—was appointed Minister of Culture, and Miguel D’Escoto became the Foreign Minister in the new revolutionary government. These priests, and others, were committed to working with and helping the poor in a nation that had been ravaged by a single family—the Somozas—who collectively had lorded over that land since the 1930s. It is estimated that, at the time of his departure for Paraguay (where he was later killed), Anastasio Somoza and family controlled between 33 and 50 percent of the entire Nicaraguan economy.
Political activists in Central America and throughout Latin America found hope in the idea of working directly with poor people. As one means of doing so, priests and nuns in various localities established base communities from which to advance the interests of peasants and workers in a kind of grassroots operation. Though usually nonviolent in intent, such forms of engagement and agitation exposed priests, nuns, and other dissidents to retaliation, sometimes in the form of torture and murder. In El Salvador a vigilante group known as the White Warriors circulated pamphlets that exhorted: “Be a patriot! Kill a priest!” In response, some clerics subordinated commitment to nonviolence in favor of direct political action. Consequently, by the time the Third General Conference of Latin American Bishops met at Puebla, Mexico in 1979, many priests and nuns at the parish level had undergone a process of radicalization that marked a growing political distance between them and their more conservative superiors. At Puebla the bishops struggled with the difficulty of achieving social justice. They condemned both capitalist and communist systems for tending to abuse human beings; at the same time, they opposed the violence perpetrated by guerrilla forces and by government thugs. They also criticized the selfishness of multinational corporations, affirmed the irrelevancy for most Third World countries of Walt Rostow’s “stages of economic growth” theories, and endorsed broad definitions of human rights for all peoples. Church leaders paid the price; according to one source, about 850 priests, nuns, and other officials in Latin America, during the 1970s, experienced intimidation, harassment, torture, or murder. As LaFeber remarks, the Roman Catholic Church had moved onto “the firing line.”4
The advocates of change in Central America won a significant victory on July 19, 1979, when the FSLN took over the government in Nicaragua. Founded in 1961, the movement had been fighting the Somoza dictatorship for eighteen years. President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, son of the founder of the dynasty, had withstood Sandinista guerrilla actions in the 1960s and early 1970s, usually with the aid and assistance of the United States. But his power had waned significantly after the earthquake of December 23, 1972. In response to the devastation in the capital city, Managua, his government’s display of corruption and incompetency alienated and offended even former loyalists in the business community and elsewhere. Consequently, as Coatsworth explains, “widespread popular discontent” developed among workers, peasants, and students who reacted to deteriorating wages and landlessness with demands for democracy and justice. Meanwhile, strong denunciations of Somoza’s rule appeared in the newspaper La Prensa and among the intellectual and political leaders of the opposition.
As the country descended into civil war, the FSLN emerged as a major force among Somoza’s enemies. The Sandinistas had tried unsuccessfully to coordinate a major military effort against Somoza in October 1977, but they benefited politically on January 10, 1978, when unknown assailants assassinated a journalist, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the anti-Somoza publisher of La Prensa. This event triggered a series of strikes lasting three weeks and further unsettled the nation’s economy. In 1978 and 1979, the anti-Somoza agitation increased and the guerrilla movement escalated. To the surprise of many observers, Somoza’s military force, the National Guard, could not ensure victory against the insurgents and Somoza, as a consequence, conceded defeat. On July 17, 1979, he fled to Paraguay. Coatsworth sums up the outcome with these words: “Support for the revolution was so widespread among all social classes and political organizations in the country that the survival of the Somoza regime, with or without Somoza at the helm, could not have been guaranteed without a foreign occupation.”
When the Carter administration took office in January 1977, U.S. officials displayed a tendency to overestimate Somoza’s staying power. For more than two years, Carter officials followed a consistent strategy seeking, simultaneously, Somoza’s departure from office and a takeover by political moderates instead of the FSLM. Conceivably, free elections could do the trick, but Somoza’s term would not end until 1981. U.S. officials therefore indulged in a double game; on the one hand, allowing the FSLN to put pressure on Somoza, and, on the other, looking for a more moderate alternative. They hoped to achieve a political transition in which the traditional political parties and the business community could play a major role. Meanwhile, Somoza attempted to save himself through obstruction and delay, seeking to prevent the emergence of a moderate alternative.
Neither strategy had the desired effect. For the United States, no workable means for locating a moderate alternative ever materialized, and Somoza was unable to save his regime. During the spring and summer of 1978, the intensification of the guerrilla war reinforced the view in the Carter administration that Somoza would have to go. The stabilization of the country presumably depended upon it, for a protracted struggle might produce such polarization that moderation could not exist. The efforts of the OAS to mediate a settlement met with failure, largely because of Somoza’s resistance, and the idea of holding a national referendum, favored by other Latin Americans, also came to nothing. The United States, meanwhile, chose to wait until military setbacks forced Somoza into negotiations.
By the summer of 1979, the FSLN stood on the verge of a victory unless the United States intervened in some dramatic way to alter the outcome. U.S. leaders at this point wanted to encourage Somoza’s resignation but hoped to avoid a full-scale defeat of the National Guard in order to retain some leverage for picking a successor. That aim eluded fulfillment. On June 17, 1979, the opposition established an interim government by creating a Council of National Reconstruction, a process in which the Carter administration had no say. The group consisted of Daniel Ortega, Sergio Ramírez, and Moisés Hassan—all representatives of the FSLN—plus Violeta Chamorro, the widow of the murdered newspaper editor, and Alfonso Robelo, a businessman. This fairly broad-based collectivity attracted support from all the anti-Somoza organizations in Nicaragua and U.S. ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo failed in his efforts to expand the presence of political moderates. Meanwhile, units of Somoza’s National Guard disintegrated completely. On July 19, 1979, the Sandinistas announced a victory.5
Bitter recriminations quickly followed. When the Sandinistas endorsed Marxist principles and accepted aid and support from Cuba, Carter’s critics in the United States rushed to the microphones. Ranking high among them, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a political scientist from Georgetown University, assailed Carter’s shortcomings in the November 1979 issue of Commentary, a journal of neoconservative opinion. Her essay, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” argued that Carter’s “lack of realism” rather than “deep historical forces” had accounted for recent disasters in foreign affairs, typified by the overthrow of Somoza and the Iranian Shah whom Kirkpatrick described as old friends of the United States. In her view, Carter had erred by failing to appreciate the distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian rulers. To be sure, corrupt authoritarian governments in Latin America, including the defunct regimes of Trujillo and Batista, had committed acts of oppression and thievery against their own people. But their leaders had affirmed friendship for the United States and respect for its interests; moreover, sometimes they had moved toward democracy. For such reasons, they deserved support from the United States. In contrast, totalitarians such as Hitler or Stalin deserved none because of the immensity of their crimes and atrocities; moreover, they had never moved toward democracy.6
Such theoretical formulations established no basis for predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later but did provide effective grounds for attacking Jimmy Carter. In the Nicaraguan case, Kirkpatrick criticized Carter for selling out a sympathetic and friendly authoritarian, whose ouster opened the way for a takeover by supposedly hostile totalitarians. Instead of under-cutting Somoza with criticism and pressure, she asserted, the United States should have sustained him against his enemies. Ronald Reagan agreed with this assessment and later, as president, named Kirkpatrick U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Subsequently, when Reagan left office and a team of ghostwriters assembled his autobiography under the title An American Life, the nuances of Kirkpatrick’s analysis escaped them completely. In fact, they reversed the distinction by describing venal Latin American despots as totalitarians and absolute rulers in the Kremlin as authoritarians.7
The question of whether Carter ever possessed the means to preserve Somoza in power or to prevent a Sandinista victory has inspired a polemical debate. His critics have claimed that wiser policies could have altered the outcome: He should have followed precedents by accepting Somoza on his terms and defending him against his enemies; or he should have headed off a Sandinista victory by getting rid of Somoza earlier; or perhaps he should have stabilized the situation by intervening with U.S. troops.
Coatsworth finds no reason for thinking that any such proposals could have succeeded. Carter officials reduced their own room to maneuver by consistently overrating Somoza’s ability to remain in power. Although they hoped for his resignation, they regarded the pressure on him primarily as a means of diverting political unrest into peaceful channels through reform. Moreover, they lacked the means to shut down the anti-Somoza opposition in Nicaragua or to muzzle shows of sympathy and support for the Sandinistas all around the world. Any attempt to displace the dictator at an earlier time, in favor of Nicaraguan moderates, surely would have failed because of Somoza’s intransigence. Finally, a U.S. military intervention would have culminated in disaster. Because of Vietnam, no support for military action existed in the United States; critics everywhere in Latin America would have opposed it; and almost certainly an intervention would have transformed Nicaragua’s civil struggle into a war against foreign occupation.
As one way to limit the damage, it seemed imperative to contain the trouble by preventing an expansion of revolutionary turmoil into Guatemala and El Salvador, where rising levels of discontent entailed the possibility of civil war. During the 1970s the military-dominated governments in Guatemala responded with repression and terror, paying scant heed to Carter’s emphasis on human rights. In El Salvador, however, the administration located a more effective means of exercising influence by taking advantage of divisions, within the dominant military and political elites, and playing them off against one another.
Carter officials initially criticized the Salvadoran regime of Carlos Humberto Romero for abusing human rights, hoping to encourage a transition to democratic rule. In 1979, seeking to avoid another Nicaragua, they shifted their ground by placing more importance on maintaining the integrity of the Salvadoran armed forces. For them, this goal required the creation of a pro-U.S. government under civilian control but willing to work with the military in support of pacification. Within the Salvadoran military the officers debated whether to pursue the goal by means of conciliation or suppression. Divisions over this issue ran deep. Meanwhile, violence mounted in rural areas. Mainly the work of right-wing elements, it centered on peasants, agitators, dissidents, and other people suspected of political infractions.
On October 15, 1979, junior officers in favor of reform carried out a takeover. A ruling council, or junta, consisted of two military men and three civilians. They promised free elections, the rule of law, and other changes to improve the agrarian, banking, and tax systems. Subsequently, as the worst forms of repression lifted, discontented groups took advantage by engaging in strikes, demonstrations, and protests. Sometimes these acts were disruptive or violent, but according to Coatsworth, “the vast majority were relatively peaceful expressions of pent-up frustration over falling real wages, declining living conditions, the lack of basic public services, and the abusive treatment of the police and the military.” Nevertheless, conservative military elements reacted with “a wave of brutal attacks on popular organizations, including death-squad kidnappings and executions.” The junta’s orders to stop such murderous outrages proved futile. Early in January 1980, the civilian members resigned their positions, claiming that the military’s behavior had destroyed a historic opportunity for a peaceful and democratic solution in El Salvador. At the insistence of the United States, the army then asked the Salvadoran Christian Democratic party to represent the civilian sector in a new junta, but the party split over the issue of whether to cooperate with military officers. As an incentive in January 1980, the Carter administration restored programs of aid and assistance and tried to supervise the day-to-day activities of the Salvadoran government. Consequently, the middle-of-the-road Christian Democrats, now regarded as objects of political disdain by both extremes, became dependent on U.S. support to remain in power. Meanwhile, out-of-control security forces operating independently of the government’s authority killed more than nine thousand people in 1980, most of them unarmed civilians.
The Christian Democrats cracked under the pressure and divided into factions. Only the most conservative, led by José Napoleón Duarte, agreed to remain in the government. The army instituted a state of siege and developed plans to relocate into strategic hamlets, or concentration camps, the peasant peoples suspected of aiding the guerrillas. On March 24, 1980, a death squad consisting of army officers assassinated Óscar Romero, the peace-promoting archbishop of El Salvador who had criticized the military. At the time of his murder, he was saying Mass. At his funeral, army contingents fired on the mourners, killing fifty and wounding six hundred.
Later that same year, in an event which galvanized the American public in the period after the election of Ronald Reagan but before he assumed office, four American churchwomen were brutally abducted, raped, and murdered in El Salvador. Sisters Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and lay worker Jean Donovan died senselessly in El Salvador. They were motivated and energized by their work with the nation’s poorest people and, for committing to such work, were labeled “subversives” and killed. The crime was a sort of precursor to the Reagan era which drew a black/white distinction in Central America between our allies, who were fighting communism and receiving U.S. military aid, and the rest of the people. As such, people died—violently—by the tens of thousands in Central America during the 1980s.
Against high levels of repression, the battered opposition parties fought to preserve political viability. On April 18, they founded the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR) as an umbrella organization. It became one of the largest political movements in the nation’s history by including liberal and left-wing parties, trade unions, professionals, and Roman Catholic activists. More radical guerrilla groups formed a joint political-military structure called the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN—Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), named for the communist martyr killed during the great massacre of thirty thousand peasants by the government of general Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in 1932. Subsequently, the FDR and the FMLN, though distinct political groups, engaged in cooperative endeavors to advance common causes.
The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 encouraged Salvadoran elites to anticipate the abandonment of human rights issues. More murder and mayhem followed in response to the FMLN’s planned “final offensive.” The rebels wanted this effort to coincide with Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981, but failed to accomplish much, lacking the requisite firepower.
When Carter left office, his administration could claim the accomplishment of two of its goals in El Salvador. The Salvadoran army remained a functioning military force and a pro-U.S. government with a civilian front retained authority in the capital. But the costs of such “successes” were substantial, taking the form of a full-scale civil war. Tensions also abounded in relations with Nicaragua during the remainder of Carter’s tenure. After the Sandinista victory, the administration tried to uphold proprieties by maintaining formal relations while encouraging moderates in the governing coalition. By making aid and loans available and avoiding shows of hostility, U.S. leaders hoped to sidestep a confrontation. They wanted no repeat of the experience with Castro’s Cuba two decades earlier. Ultimately, they sought some sort of accommodation. In contrast, the Sandinistas intended to consolidate their political authority, to establish sufficient military capability to safeguard their regime, and to keep U.S. influence in Nicaragua at a minimum. While pursuing these goals the collective leadership, increasingly under FSLN control, shifted leftward and announced a postponement of elections until 1985. By the end of 1980, FSLN dominance in the Nicaraguan government was almost complete.
Relations deteriorated further during the acrimonious U.S. presidential campaign of 1980. The agreement with Nicaragua then in effect contained an important provision stipulated by Congress: It required a halt to U.S. aid and assistance if credible evidence showed signs of Sandinista support for guerrilla insurgencies in other countries. Suspicions centered on El Salvador. By January 1981, the U.S. government possessed what it described as proof of arms shipments and other forms of support for Salvadoran guerrillas.8 But Carter officials refrained from cutting off the aid, leaving that decision for the new administration. Under Reagan, the goals and methods of U.S. foreign policy shifted significantly.
President Ronald Reagan, a former sportscaster, movie actor, and television announcer, lacked experience in and, according to critics, understanding of foreign relations. His two terms as governor of California in the 1960s provided a grounding in the operations of government, but as president he often displayed a flimsy grasp of the details and implications of public issues. On one occasion, he expressed the erroneous view that intercontinental ballistic missiles could return to base after launch. On another, he was astonished to learn that the U.S. Air Force lacked the means for shooting down incoming Soviet rockets.9
No intellectual, Reagan won the hearts of voters and enjoyed two landslide victories in 1980 and 1984 for other reasons. His amiability, his down-to-earth homespun manner, his apparent sincerity of purpose, and his self-deprecating humor all helped to deflect criticism. Representative Patricia Schroeder, a Democrat from Colorado, called the Reagan presidency “Teflon-coated”: No matter how big the mess, nothing seemed to stick to it. As Reagan once remarked, “Being a good actor pays off.”
Dubbed “the great communicator,” Reagan espoused simple, presumably self-evident truths. For him the federal government was the problem, not the solution, and in foreign affairs the Soviet Union was the source of most wrongdoing in the world. To combat it, Reagan assigned to his administration a conscious mission to revive U.S. hegemony. To do so, he would have to shake the country free from the effects of “the Vietnam syndrome,” a debilitation supposedly suffered by the Carter administration and manifested in diplomatic impotency. Reagan embarked upon a different course; he promised to rearm the United States and to act with boldness and initiative in defense of vital interests. To confront the “evil empire”—a reference to the movie Star Wars, typical of Reagan’s style—he mounted the greatest military buildup in the history of the world. It cost over $2 trillion. To overcome “self-doubt,” he wanted a “national reawakening” based on traditional religious, patriotic, and capitalist beliefs in God, country, and enterprise. Proclaiming his own election in 1980 a portentous event, he affirmed, “We’ve closed the door on a long, dark period of failure.” Reagan’s policies differed from Jimmy Carter’s in many ways. The leaders in the new administration attached less importance to the defense of human rights and to North-South issues than to the East-West collision between the United States and the Soviet Union. For them, the Cold War assumed the highest priority, Moreover, they embraced the Kirkpatrick distinction, seeking to avoid Jimmy Carter’s error by sustaining friendly authoritarians and opposing unfriendly totalitarians. In a phrase, they would allow no more Nicaraguas.
In public, administration leaders tried to present a solid phalanx of ideological unity, but behind the scenes they squabbled in fierce bureaucratic conflicts over questions of power, prerogative, and privilege. The president often seemed aloof and oblivious. His first secretary of state, general Alexander M. Haig, Jr., an aggressive professional soldier with a propensity for mixing metaphors and giving offense, conducted a sequence of feuds with officials around him. In a light moment, Reagan joked about it, saying, “Sometimes our right hand doesn’t know what our far-right hand is doing.” In June 1982, Haig resigned his position, frustrated, he claimed, by the absence of centralized leadership. Indeed, he said the Reagan White House was “as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which one of the crew was at the helm?” Haig’s successor, secretary of state George P. Shultz, carried on the tradition by dueling bureaucratically over various issues with secretary of defense Caspar W. Weinberger. Among other things, Shultz criticized Weinberger, a big military spender presiding over a massive buildup, for his hesitation to employ military force in support of foreign policy objectives. Nevertheless, as Thomas G. Paterson notes, “Unlike Haig, Shultz accepted his role as the president’s servant and team player” and retained Reagan’s favor.10
In Latin America, the Reagan administration disfavored those regimes defined as hostile to the United States because of reformist or revolutionary enthusiasms and tried to cultivate improved relations with military rulers. The preferred security doctrines attached special importance to Central America and the Caribbean. As UN ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick explained, those regions have become “the most important place in the world for us,” because the ability of the United States to wield global influence and to face down Soviet challenges depended on “not having to devote the lion’s share of our attention and our resources to the defense of ourselves in our own hemisphere.” Other officials spoke ominously of a “Moscow-Havana” axis threatening to spread revolution. Reagan warned specifically of enemy plans to choke off the U.S. “lifeline to the outside world” and to promote destabilization by encouraging tides of unassimilable immigrants into the country. He also described Nicaragua under the Sandinistas as a “Soviet ally in the American mainland.” When in an imaginative leap he envisioned an advance guard of Sandinistas driving a convoy of armed pickup trucks to attack the border town of Harlingen, Texas, Garry Trudeau, a political philosopher and satirist, resorted to parody in his comic strip Doonesbury. Trudeau had a group of “good ole” Texas boys with big hats and hunting rifles going out to repel the invaders.11
The Reagan effort to revive U.S. hegemony introduced some significant changes. The president outlined the economic component in an address before the OAS on January 24, 1982. Called the Caribbean Basin Initiative, it invoked free market models as the best guarantee of economic growth. The program offered modest aid and lower tariffs on exports to the United States as rewards for those Caribbean countries willing to implement free market economic reforms, but to other Latin American countries featuring pro-U.S. military regimes the president offered no equivalent. Politically, he moved toward a tougher stance. In Nicaragua, U.S. leaders stood strong in opposition to the Sandinistas and eventually tried to overthrow them. In El Salvador, they called for strong U.S. support of the military in order to suppress the guerrillas.
Viewed in retrospect, Reagan’s policies in Central America, despite herculean efforts, failed to achieve the primary goals. When Reagan left office early in 1989, deteriorating economic conditions around the Caribbean had produced decreases in trade and investment; the Sandinistas still held power in Nicaragua; and the FMLN still waged guerrilla war in El Salvador. According to observers such as John Coatsworth, the United States had lost some of its hegemonic capability to dominate the politics of the region. Yet, U.S. policies still exerted a huge impact on Central America. During the 1980s, a large-scale mobilization of the region’s resources took place either for or against U.S. objectives. Estimated military expenditures increased from $140 million to $600 million, and the number of soldiers employed by Central American governments expanded from 48,000 to 207,000. In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, at least two hundred thousand people died as a consequence of political violence, and as many as two million became refugees or immigrants to other countries, sometimes the United States. As Coatsworth observes, “The carnage and dislocation had profound effects on Central American society, politics, and culture,” effects that might persist well into the future.
The leaders in the new Reagan administration established El Salvador as a top priority. Fearing an insurgent victory, they asked for the Pentagon’s assistance in preparing a strategy to defeat the guerrillas. U.S. leaders also boosted economic and military aid, mainly in the form of outright grants. From 1980 to 1984, the military share expanded from $5.9 million to $196.6 million. Such increases, favored by the administration, required congressional approval—a potential obstacle, since leaders in the House and the Senate had grown skittish over reports of human rights violations by the armed forces. Some of them probably wanted to bring about the defeat of the insurgents but also wanted the Salvadoran government to promote reform as a means of attracting popular support. Others preferred some kind of negotiated settlement. The Reagan administration initially responded with allegations of conspiracy, depicting the Salvadoran guerrillas as creatures of a plot engineered by the Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans. To establish the point, the administration issued a White Paper on February 23, 1981, supposedly based on FMLN documents, but this move failed to win over the skeptics and doubters. The Congress later sanctioned an aid package for El Salvador but attached an important condition: Every six months the president would have to certify that the Salvadoran government was making progress in defense of human rights; otherwise, the aid would stop.
On July 16, 1981, Thomas Enders, the new assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, delivered a speech intended to reassure members of Congress. He promised U.S. support for human rights, democratic procedures, agrarian reform, and a negotiated end to the civil war. At the same time, administration leaders sought a military victory and wanted to provide the Salvadoran army with the means for winning the war. Military advisers encouraged the adoption of smaller-scale, more fluid tactics, in part because they would inflict less collateral damage on innocent civilians than large-scale, more indiscriminate operations.
To advance at least the appearance of political authenticity, the Reagan administration facilitated the election of a constituent assembly in 1982, even though the liberal-left parties associated with the FDR (Frente Democrático Revolucionario) refused to take part. The major players were the Christian Democrats, a party of the political center, and two new parties of the right, both pro-military: the Partido de Conciliación Nacional (PCN) and the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (NRA). The new constitution completed in 1983 required a presidential election the following year. To head off right-wing candidates and to maintain congressional support, the leaders in the Reagan administration championed the candidacy of José Napoleón Duarte, a Christian Socialist. His reputation as an honorable politician with democratic commitments made the policy workable, and the Congress continued the flow of U.S. aid into El Salvador during Reagan’s second term. Nevertheless, Duarte’s mixed record as president included significant failures. He never succeeded in curbing the excesses of the Salvadoran military, in implementing programs of agrarian reform, or in negotiating a compromise settlement with the FDR-FMLN. Yet he did manage to pull off a significant accomplishment. Ironically, according to some observers, Duarte’s tenure in office resulted in the creation of a complex, hybrid regime which, though certainly not a democracy in any conventional sense, established a set of political arrangements that had the effect of expanding the limits of political activity in the country. Meanwhile, the Salvadoran civil war turned into a stalemate between the army and the guerrillas. By the time President Reagan left office the number of deaths had passed seventy thousand.
In the parallel case of Nicaragua, U.S. policy under Reagan never strayed very far from the basic goal of overthrowing the Sandinista regime by supporting its enemies. At the same time, shifting domestic and international pressures required various forms of accommodation and subterfuge, some of which bordered on illegality. During Reagan’s years in office, as Coatsworth explains, U.S. policy toward Nicaragua moved through four phases, in the course of which administration tactics shifted depending on circumstances. But the main objective remained the same: getting rid of the Sandinistas through limited forms of intervention.
During the first phase, from Reagan’s inauguration on January 20, 1981, until early in December 1983, the administration increased the pressure, resulting in a steady escalation of tensions in relations with Nicaragua. More specifically, the leaders employed a variety of military measures against the Sandinistas, including the organization and funding of a counterrevolutionary military group called the contras, an abbreviation of the Spanish contrarevolucionarios. Led by former military officers in Somoza’s National Guard, they initially mounted raids into Nicaragua out of bases in Honduras and Costa Rica. During this phase, Reagan officials rejected Nicaraguan proposals for negotiations, spurned West European and Latin American calls for mediation, employed CIA agents to mine harbors and attack other targets in Nicaragua, sponsored large-scale and intimidating military exercises from outposts in Honduras, and asked the Pentagon to investigate the workability of direct military intervention. The administration also suspended the economic aid program initiated by President Carter, pressured the West Europeans to scale back their assistance, and reduced the Nicaraguan sugar quota in the United States by 90 percent. This phase ended late in 1983 when, as a political choice, the president decided to downplay the Nicaraguan issue in preparation for his bid for reelection.
In the second phase, extending until the presidential election on November 6, 1984, the administration shifted ground, making a show of seeking accommodation. The administration publicly accepted a congressional ban on aid to the contras but secretly attempted to circumvent it. They also claimed readiness to open negotiations with Nicaragua and to support mediation by the so-called Contadora Group, named for Panama’s Contadora Island which was the location of a meeting between representatives of the governments of Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela. Unexpectedly, the group’s efforts nearly succeeded when the Nicaraguans surprised everyone by agreeing to sign a proposed peace agreement—but not one that the Reagan leadership really wanted. Hoisted by its own petard, the administration had a problem based on its own rhetoric, having created a false impression that mediation actually could bring about an acceptable agreement.
During the third phase, lasting until November 1986, Reagan’s second administration escalated the conflict with Nicaragua. The leaders suspended negotiations, imposed a full economic embargo, refused to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice over Central American matters, and persuaded Congress to vote military aid to the contras for the first time. Other endeavors sought to isolate Nicaragua from international sources of aid and assistance—activities constituting a form of intervention but stopping short of outright military action. In any case, the latter became unfeasible after November 4, 1984, when the Republicans lost control of the Senate to the Democrats in the midterm elections. Two weeks later, troubles deepened for the Reagan administration because of the Iran-contra scandal.
During the fourth phase, from November 1986 until the inauguration of George H. W. Bush in January 1989, the Reagan administration displayed less and less capacity to exercise control of events in Central America. As a proposed means of working toward peace, the so-called Arias Plan generated a great deal of interest, despite administration opposition, by obtaining endorsements from the Contadora Group, other South American countries, and the Soviet bloc. The U.S. Congress also extended support, significantly, while rejecting appeals for more military aid to the contras. By January 1989, the peace process in full swing had isolated the contras politically and enabled the Nicaraguan government to begin planning for elections. Again, according to Coatsworth, “U.S. policy toward Nicaragua had virtually collapsed.”12
The Reagan administration had opposed the Sandinistas from the beginning, arguing that, under them, Nicaragua would become a Marxist-Leninist bastion and an agency for extending Soviet influence—another Cuba in the New World. Academic specialists and journalists called the claim into question. Many doubted the relevance of communist models for Nicaragua. According to Coatsworth, the Sandinistas “never abandoned [their] public commitment to ‘pluralist democracy’ and a mixed economy,” never carried out large-scale programs of nationalization, and never imposed “a single-party monopoly on political power.” They, of course, did “consolidate their authority as the country’s dominant political party, mobilize domestic support through a diverse array of mass organizations, create a new security apparatus impervious to U.S. influence, and seek closer relations, including economic and military aid, from a wide range of foreign governments”—among them, countries from the Soviet bloc. Nevertheless, Coatsworth speculates that the Sandinista regime, if left to its own devices, might have developed according to “a populist variant of the Mexican model,” resulting in “a relatively open political system.” Similarly, in economics, the regime probably would have embraced “a state-centered development model” in which investors and entrepreneurs would have had to accept high levels of supervision and regulation. At the same time, Nicaragua’s dependence on trade would have functioned as a powerful incentive for assigning some autonomy to the private sector.13
Sandinista foreign policies favored nonalignment, admittedly with a tilt away from the United States. The leaders preferred caution both in dealings with the United States and in exporting the revolution to other countries. No doubt the regime extended some aid to the Salvadoran FMLN in 1980–1981, hoping, perhaps, to deflect the Reagan administration from concentrating too exclusively on Nicaragua. Sandinista leaders never made a secret of their sympathy for the Salvadoran rebels but hesitated to engage in large-scale efforts in their support.
The Reagan administration nevertheless accused the Sandinistas of totalitarian proclivities and shifted U.S. support away from political moderates, mainly businessmen and politicians, in favor of the more extreme right-wing contras. In the ensuing diplomatic tug-of-war, Sandinista leaders tried to show Washington their willingness to lift restrictions on civil liberties if, in return, Reagan officials would call off the contras. But administration leaders, though engaged in various forms of subterfuge for public relations purposes, remained committed to the ouster of the FSLN by military means.
During the contra war, the Sandinistas refrained from systematic repression of the opposition but not from periodic harassment. Their government compiled a mixed record: It censored the main opposition newspaper, La Prensa, and also radio broadcasts put on by the Roman Catholic Church, yet opposition parties ran candidates in the 1984 elections and also participated in writing the new constitution. Still, their wartime restrictions on civil liberties never resulted in the wholesale abuses so common in El Salvador, Guatemala, and, previously, in Somoza’s Nicaragua.14
Soon after the Sandinistas took over, the contras initiated raids into Nicaragua from along the Honduran border. Such practices had the sanction of Honduran officials who wanted to contain the revolution in Nicaragua. The contras also won support from the Argentines, whose right-wing, military government, under general Leopoldo Galtieri, provided military training for them as a favor to the Reagan administration. This association, as it turned out, conveyed false impressions to Argentine leaders. Because of delusionary notions about the existence of intimate ties with the United States, the Argentine government, in 1982, indulged in the colossal miscalculation of allowing the armed forces to settle an old issue by challenging Great Britain for control of the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas). The Argentines premised this undertaking on a mistaken supposition that the United States would stand with them against Great Britain, in defense of the Monroe Doctrine. The magnitude of their error became evident in a short war, beginning in April 1982, in which Argentine military and naval forces took a drubbing. Contrary to their expectation, the United States provided neither assistance nor solace. On the bright side, the defeat discredited the Argentine generals and accelerated a process toward democratization, ending the “dirty war” against alleged radicals and subversives.15
Reagan officials had advised members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in March 1981 of their intentions to create a paramilitary force of five hundred men, supposedly for the purpose of stopping the flow of military supplies from Nicaragua to the guerrillas in El Salvador; they later committed nearly $20 million in support of the plan. The CIA assisted in the creation of the Nicaraguan Democratic Front to take political charge. The contra forces had expanded to about fifteen thousand by the late 1980s, mainly through the recruitment of peasant boys from remote regions. Fighting capabilities depended upon arms and supplies provided by the U.S. government, either directly or through intermediaries. Early on, the funding came from the CIA. In 1983, the U.S. Congress voted in favor of continuing it, but in the following year a series of damaging revelations undermined congressional resolve to support the administration. Reports indicated that CIA operatives had carried out terrorist attacks and mined Nicaraguan harbors; other sources of information attributed corruption, human rights abuses, and possibly drug trafficking to the contras.16 Consequently, congressional support, especially among Democrats, became sporadic and unreliable.
From the administration’s viewpoint, Congress was indulging in obstructionism. In December 1982, the so-called Boland Amendment, the first of two named for representative Edward P. Boland, a Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Select Committee on Intelligence, forbade any U.S. expenditure for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista government. The Reagan administration responded with evasion, claiming no intent to force out the Sandinistas but only to interdict the flow of military supplies into El Salvador. Congress reacted by imposing the same restriction a second time but without much effect. In 1984, it passed another Boland Amendment, this one flatly banning any aid by U.S. intelligence agencies to the contras. The Reagan administration then permitted an elaborate deception, under the conduct of colonel Oliver North, a Marine Corps officer on loan to the National Security Council. Taking the form of clandestine operations, North’s illicit activities provided more than $50 million in arms and supplies to the contras between 1984 and 1986, and precipitated what came to be known as the Iran-contra scandal, a major episode during the second Reagan administration.
The funds came from various sources, including private donors and foreign countries—among them, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Israel, Panama, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan—and moved through complicated networks organized by North and other U.S. military and intelligence officials. The most blatant of these undertakings, the one tying Iran to the ensuing scandal, actually engaged the administration in violations of its own policy banning the sale of weapons to alleged terrorists. Under such terms, Iranian leaders—that is, the Islamic fundamentalists who had taken power in 1979 while denouncing the United States as “the great Satan”—did not qualify. But North’s deal provided a loophole: They could buy antitank missiles and weapons parts if, in return, they provided assistance in seeking freedom for a group of U.S. hostages held by other alleged terrorists in Lebanon. The proceeds from the sales may have run as high $30 million. When the news broke during the fall of 1986 amid great public outrage, congressional support for the Reagan administration’s policies in Central America collapsed.
Even with arms and supplies provided by these dubious methods, the contras lacked the capacity to throw the Sandinistas out of office. Successes on the battlefield eluded them in confrontations with the Nicaraguan Army. In addition, they never developed enough political credibility; too many of Somoza’s former National Guard officers occupied positions of authority. Together, military incapacity and political weakness rendered the contra stand against the Sandinista revolution futile.
Meanwhile, the Reagan administration reiterated its willingness to accept a negotiated settlement but never seriously attempted one. In 1981, for example, assistant secretary of state Thomas Enders suggested the possibility of improving relations if the Sandinistas would sever ties with the Soviets, stop their aid to the FMLN in El Salvador, and scale back the size of their armed forces. The Sandinistas expressed some interest in the plan but had their own expectations. In particular, the Reagan administration would have to halt its aid to the contras. The proposed negotiations went nowhere. The same held true for another such attempt in 1984. No subsequent efforts took place. In a bitter characterization of the U.S. position, Nicaraguan foreign minister Miguel D’Escoto complained, “What President Reagan has said is: ‘You drop dead or I will kill you.’”
Documents released during the Iran-contra investigations show that administration leaders understood the inherent limitations of the contra movement. Why then did the United States embark upon a course of action bound to fail? The body of literature suggests various interpretations. The journalist Roy Gutman points to bureaucratic politics. According to him, Reagan’s uninvolved style of decision making invited competition among the policy makers and resulted in a failure to develop coherent diplomatic objectives. This circumstance supposedly favored hard-line contra supporters who exploited the president’s deficiencies for their own purposes. Another line of explanation places the responsibility on domestic politics: The administration could not abandon the contras without alienating the right wing of the Republican party upon whose vote the leaders depended to sustain them. A third explanation places Nicaraguan policy within a larger context. Though possibly irrational in a narrow sense, William LeoGrande has argued, the pro-contra commitment made sense as part of “the longer term goal of breaking the back of the domestic political opposition to Reagan’s aggressive use of military force to overthrow the government of Nicaragua.” In other words, the long-term intent sought “to create the political support necessary for a direct U.S. military intervention.” As Coatsworth remarks, Reagan officials never publicly proposed to employ U.S. military forces to overthrow the Sandinista government. On the other hand, they never ruled out the option. Indeed, by undertaking “Operation Urgent Fury” in October 1982, a military intervention against a government described as communist on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, the Reagan administration may have intended, among other things, to underscore the possible validity of similar measures elsewhere—for example, in Nicaragua.17
U.S. policies in Central America elicited a sequence of efforts by other countries to find political solutions. Early attempts by the Contadora Group—Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela—failed, but a subsequent effort in 1987 did succeed, once the Iran-contra scandal had sufficiently weakened faith in the administration’s position. The Arias Plan—named for its main sponsor, president Óscar Arias of Costa Rica—won support from the Contadora Group, the other countries of Central America, and the speaker of the house Jim Wright, a Democrat from Texas. Wright played a vital role in extracting from the Reagan administration a commitment to abandon its efforts to overthrow the Sandinistas in exchange for specific Nicaraguan concessions.
Fundamentally, the agreement contained these provisions. The Nicaraguan government and the contras would initiate a process aimed at a cease-fire, after which the United States would terminate military aid to the contras; similarly, the Soviet bloc would cease arms shipments to the Sandinistas. Humanitarian aid, in contrast, could continue in each instance. To round out the arrangements, Nicaragua would move away from the state of emergency, restore civil liberties, create an electoral commission with representation for all parties, and make plans for a national election. Support from many sources helped to clinch the deal, especially from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Uruguay (the four new South American democracies), the West European countries, the Soviet bloc, the United Nations, and the Organization of American States. If the Reagan administration counted on Nicaraguan opposition to defeat the Arias Plan, as was probably the case, the Sandinistas served up another surprise by endorsing it, even though acceptance required negotiation with the hated contras and subjected Nicaraguan politics to external supervision. According to Coatsworth, “The Sandinista leaders took a calculated risk: they traded sovereignty for peace, with the expectation that internationally supervised elections would, in the end, confirm the FSLN in power.” Economic necessity probably compelled it. The contra war, U.S. economic sanctions, and the Sandinistas’ own miscalculations had placed their country in an economic depression. By the time Reagan left office in January 1989, the Nicaraguans had complied with the peace accord and set a date for national elections on February 25, 1990. They did so in the expectation of winning the contest and then repairing the damage already done to their ravaged economy.18
The Reagan administration focused on other nations in Latin America outside of Central America. Peru, for example, presented some pressing challenges to the United States and the world with the emergence, in 1980, of a long-simmering regional guerrilla movement called “Sendero Luminoso”—the Shining Path. The organization was founded in a remote, poor, southwest region of the nation, the state of Ayacucho, which means “corner of death” in the Quechua language. An important agricultural region and center of Spanish power during the colonial period, the city’s thirty-three Roman Catholic churches reflect the power and influence of European culture in a remote corner of Latin America.
Peru has never successfully bridged the cultural, linguistic, and geographic divide that separates people in the countryside from those in the coastal cities, especially the powerful capital center at Lima. People living in the Andes have been culturally and economically marginalized, excluded from the economic gains brought from the nineteenth century guano boom, and later riches generated through mining, agriculture, and commercial fishing. An agrarian reform, imposed when a left-leaning military government took power in Lima in 1968, failed to resolve generational, endemic poverty in the country, especially in the remote highlands.
Ironically, 1968 is also the year professor Abimaél Guzmán founded the Sendero organization at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristobál de Huamanga in Ayacucho. An energetic, magnetic philosophy professor, Mr. Guzmán was influenced by Maoism and the Communist Party of Nepal. He adopted a sort of slow burn, popular war ideology that sought gradual control of the countryside followed by a surrounding and strangulation of the urban centers of power and government. Guzmán and his followers sought to return Peru to a pre-1532 platform, when the people of the Andes ruled themselves and the Europeans had not yet invaded. He sought a sort of Andean pachacuti, or total reordering of society. Peruvians living along the coast were cautiously optimistic in 1980 when democracy returned with the election of Fernando Belaúnde Terry, a stalwart of the political establishment—the man who had been overthrown in 1968—but discouraged by the 1980 pronouncements of a regional group from Ayacucho unwilling to play by the traditional political norms of engagement.
Peru scholar Cynthia McClintock offers a now-classic exploration of the rise of Sendero. In 1984, she explored the physical remoteness of the region from which Sendero emerged. Describing the economy there as “agricultural,” she noted that Sendero swept out of a geographic zone, “ill-suited for agriculture . . . most of the terrain is arid, stony, precipitous and wind-swept.”19 From that place, no one could have imagined the origins of a conflict and counterinsurgency that lasted about two decades (1980–2000) and produced 70,000 deaths, 54 percent of them attributed to Sendero, the other half attributed to Peruvian security forces and extrajudicial killings.
If the 1980s in Peru is defined by Sendero and Guzmán, the 1990s was shaped by the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, a man who was elected in 1990 and ruled until 2000, when he fled to Japan and, via the fax machine, sent in his resignation. In April 1992, Fujimori overthrew his own government in an autogolpe but emerged as a popular figure after capturing Sendero’s leader, Mr. Guzmán, later that same year. Fujimori was reelected to a second term in 1995. Widespread corruption charges and human rights abuses in the military campaign against the Shining Path led to his resignation from the presidency in 2000, after winning a third term that many considered unconstitutional.
The United States, with some initial hesitation, recognized the Fujimori regime after the 1992 coup. Military and economic aid flowed to Peru throughout the Fujimori years and now, much of the U.S. aid to Peru is part of the contemporary antinarcotics campaign. The Peruvian economy has grown recently due to the demand for minerals and other exports, but the cultural bifurcation that has long divided the nation continues unabated and is best described by a Peruvian writer, the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.20
In Colombia, the late 1980s and early 1990s represented a terrible time of violence and serious challenges to state autonomy. A sort of mini–coup d’état occurred, in a nation accustomed to constitutional procedure and civilian government, in November 1985 when leftist insurgents stormed the Palace of Justice and, essentially, held the Supreme Court hostage. The Colombian military counter-stormed the palace, using a lightweight Brazilian tank, and took back the building, with a terrible death toll. Some people inside the building, including auxiliary magistrate judge Carlos Horacio Urán were removed from the building and later “disappeared” by government security forces.
At about the same time, a small-time thug from Medellín, Pablo Escobar, was determined to corner the market for the production, sale, and distribution of illegal narcotics, mainly cocaine. When Colombian minister of justice Rodrigo Lara Bonilla decided to investigate and prosecute money laundering operations, he was killed (in 1984) on Escobar’s orders. Escobar also ordered the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, a man seeking the Colombian presidency with zero tolerance policies for the nation’s drug cartels. Mr. Galán was murdered during a campaign rally on the outskirts of Bogotá in August 1989.
When Escobar was finally killed in 1993 by an elite Colombian military unit, the drug exporting business did not end; it simply changed, becoming more decentralized and lower-key. There was money to be made in the production and distribution of narcotics—billions of U.S. dollars. Both the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which began operations in 1964, and a relatively new group called the AUC (the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia) moved to cash in. The AUC, paramilitary forces formed in the 1980s, were hired by the large landholders who were tired of paying bribes to the leftist FARC. The FARC made money through extortion, kidnapping and “protecting” the illegal narcotics operations. By the late 1990s, as almost surreal massacres were perpetrated in Colombia with nearly zero accountably or prosecution and as the number of FARC insurgents grew to perhaps 30,000, Colombia seemed to be spinning out of control.
The United States took an active interest in the Colombian crisis at this time. Partly as a result of the strong personal friendship between then president Andrés Pastrana Arango (1998–2002) and Bill Clinton (1993–2001), a “Plan Colombia” was designed to halt the spread of the insurgency and seek peace through diplomacy. The United States Congress—in 2000—authorized a massive amount of military aid for Colombia, about 1.35 billion dollars, and Plan Colombia was born. The military aid continued (and, as of this writing in early 2016, amounts to about ten billion dollars in the past fifteen years), but the Pastrana peace initiative crashed and burned in 2002, paving the way for a new, hard-liner approach via the election of a maverick politician to the presidency of Colombia, Mr. Álvaro Uribe Vélez. He took the oath of office on August 8, 2002.
The challenges in Peru and Colombia during the past twenty-five years or so seem isolated to internal structural and local historical/geographic realities, yet, from 1989 to 1993, a sequence of astonishing events transformed the structure of international relations for the entire world: After more than forty years, the Cold War suddenly came to an end. To the surprise of most observers, the Soviet Union precipitated the process by allowing the East European nations to declare independence and then itself dissolved and disappeared as the various constituent states of the USSR affirmed their sovereign rights.21
For Latin Americans, these world events had at least three main consequences: First, the end of the Cold War reduced the levels of rivalry and competition among the Great Powers in the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet Union, a principal player, no longer existed, and others—mainly the West Europeans and (during the 1990s) the Japanese—shifted their attention toward the new states emerging from the former Soviet Union. For Latin Americans, not all of the implications were positive. For example, what if these changes diverted the international flow of capital away from the south toward the east, thereby enhancing Latin American dependence on the United States? In response, Latin Americans engaged in maneuvers to enlarge political and economic relations with West Europeans and the emerging East Asian markets—notably China—and to structure dealings with the United States to benefit themselves, notably through the negotiation of free trade agreements.
Second, the presumed security threat posed to the United States in the Western Hemisphere by the Soviet Union and its allies simply ceased to exist. This shift altered the debate in the United States over Central America, specifically by undermining a principal argument in favor of interventionist activities. Seeking to place this matter in a proper context, Coatsworth argues that no significant U.S. security interests ever had been at stake in Central America during the 1980s. Rather, the region had taken on importance for the Reagan administration largely as a function of maintaining U.S. credibility in the East-West struggle. Consequently, when the Cold War ended, Central America ceased to have as much importance.
Third, the Soviet collapse shuffled political priorities in Latin America. Notably, it set back and confused various radical and populist movements traditionally looked upon by the United States as hostile to its interests. At the same time, it also undermined the position of right-wing, pro-military, and anticommunist groups whose status derived at least in part from U.S. support. In other words, the end of the Cold War played down the incentive for the United States to become involved in local politics. It also strengthened a trend toward democratization, the long-term consequences of which might favor social reform.
The George H. W. Bush administration (1989–1992) responded to these new conditions with diverse policies, some of which suggested continuity and others change. Bush built on the Caribbean Basin Initiative of the Reagan era by adding, in 1990, a new Free Enterprise Initiative for the Americas. Its promises included increases in U.S. aid and the negotiation of free trade agreements as rewards, if Latin American countries complied with U.S. policy preferences in economic affairs. On similar grounds, President Bush also encouraged new agreements on debts, allowing Latin Americans to reduce debt service obligations if they would accept austerity programs. Since relations with Mexico also required attention after some deterioration during the Reagan years, in part because of Mexican opposition to U.S. policies in Central America, in 1993 the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) for the purpose of obtaining closer political and economic ties among the three nations. These “trade” issues are taken up in greater detail in the next chapter.
As one of their top priorities, the leaders in the Bush administration wanted to eliminate Central America as a political issue and a cause of contention between the White House and Congress. Acting fast, they dealt with one trouble spot, Panama, by removing from power the head of state, general Manuel Antonio Noriega. Though once a CIA asset in the funneling of aid to the contras, he had become a liability as a notorious drug smuggler and a violator of human rights. In disregard of the OAS charter, U.S. military forces unilaterally invaded Panama on December 23, 1989, seized Noriega, and installed a new government. The former strongman ended up in a federal detention center in Miami where, in 1992, he was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to a long prison term. In explanation, Coatsworth argues that the Panama invasion “was not undertaken to defend traditional U.S. economic or security interests” but “in response to U.S. domestic political circumstances.” Noriega’s defiant involvement with drug smuggling threatened the Bush administration by jeopardizing its relations with Congress and its credibility in foreign affairs.
The Bush administration also responded favorably to the outcome of elections in Nicaragua. On February 25, 1990, Violeta Chamorro, widow of the murdered publisher of La Prensa and the candidate backed by a coalition of fourteen opposition parties, won a majority of the votes in an election supervised by international authorities. The defeat of president Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista nominee, came as a surprise to many observers and may have occurred in part because Nicaraguan voters anticipated a positive reaction from the United States, perhaps in the form of economic aid to help revive their sagging economy. Moreover, the intervention in Panama may have persuaded some Nicaraguans that their country might come next. Mr. Ortega, it should be noted, returned to the presidency in 2007 and remains president of Nicaragua as of this writing.
The conflict in El Salvador finally terminated on December 31, 1991, when the guerrillas and the government signed a peace agreement. According to its terms, the guerrillas had to lay down their arms. In return, the government would scale back the size of the armed forces, eliminate abuses by the military, and guarantee the exercise of political and human rights. In this case the George H. W. Bush administration, unlike its predecessor, came around to support the negotiation process as a viable means of solving the problem.22
As mentioned earlier, the Guatemalan war ended in 1996, but full peace, stability, and democracy has eluded the small Central American nation. In September 2015, the sitting Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina resigned and was sent to jail, where he now awaits trial on charges of corruption and kickbacks. About 54 percent of the population lives in poverty. The indigenous population makes up approximately 40 percent of the Guatemalan population and 73 percent of that population lives in poverty.
For the rest of Latin America, the end of the Cold War entailed, at the very least, uncertainty about what new kind of international order might emerge from the wreckage of the old and how it would affect the conduct of relations with the United States and the rest of the world. In Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations published in 1996, the political scientist Peter H. Smith provided some insight into a new “age of uncertainty.” He identified three fundamental effects. First, the end of the Cold War produced a new “multipolarity” that contrasted markedly with the “bipolar dominance” of the United States and the Soviet Union and meant a more even distribution of power and capability among the nations of the world. Second, it encouraged a process of “democratization,” that is, a “transition . . . from authoritarianism toward pluralism,” whose effects appeared prominently in East European countries (the former East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia) and in Latin America, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. Third, it reduced the blatant competition and hostility associated with the Cold War and offered the possibility of establishing new priorities for defining goals and allocating resources.23
Accounting for such momentous change immediately set off a polemical debate in which one side underscored the importance of indigenous causes within the Soviet Union and the other the significance of competitive pressures from the United States. The question of whether the Soviet Union collapsed primarily for internal or for external reasons will probably divide historians forever. According to Thomas G. Paterson, “The Cold War waned because the contest had undermined the power of its two main protagonists.” The costs had exceeded the gains in a cyclical process experienced by other Great Powers since the fifteenth century. To maintain themselves, the super-powers required “the restoration of their economic well-being and the preservation of their diminishing global positions.” Bringing an end to the Cold War became a matter of enlightened self-interest. To be sure, the Soviet Union took a far greater fall than the United States; nevertheless, “the implications of decline became unmistakable for both: The Cold War they made in the 1940s had to be unmade if the two nations were to remain prominent international superintendents.”24 In the process, the old Soviet Union ceased to exist.
How to measure the impact on U.S. relations with Latin America also poses many problems. According to some observers, the U.S. ability to exercise hegemony over Latin America declined gradually during the Cold War and dropped off even further after 1989. For example, the U.S. share of Latin American exports fell from 45 percent in 1958 to 34 percent in the late 1970s. The U.S. share of direct foreign investments went down—in Brazil’s case, from over 50 percent in 1965 to 30 percent in 1979—as did weapons sales. All during the 1980s, Central American difficulties functioned as public relations disasters for the United States in the rest of Latin America. And, in 1982, the Reagan administration could not head off an unwanted war over the Falkland Islands. Such outcomes suggested a reduced capacity to dominate the region.25 Still another argument in support of this claim depicts U.S. interventions in Latin America during the Cold War as manifestations of weakness. According to political scientist Abraham Lowenthal, for example, U.S. efforts to overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile were “anachronistic” since “U.S. preponderance in the Americas was already substantially diminished.” Similarly, according to Paterson, U.S. interventions in the 1970s and 1980s “attested not to U.S. strength but to the loosening of its imperial net.” This view implies that the survival of Castro’s regime in Cuba shows the limits of U.S. hegemonic capability.26
In a contradictory assessment, Peter H. Smith argues that “this notion of declining hegemony rests on dubious assumptions,” specifically, the erroneous notions that hegemony requires “near total control” over Latin America and that Latin American resistance became a bigger problem for the United States during the 1980s than it was before. Yet even in the 1950s, the refusal of most Latin American countries to send troops to Korea (Colombia did send in troops), the anti-Nixon riots in Caracas, and the Cuban Revolution all showed the limits of U.S. domination. Nevertheless, the United States, in his view, has exercised “a strong and continuous degree of hegemony over the Western Hemisphere from the 1950s to the 1990s.” If “within this overall pattern, U.S. hegemony suffered a slight decline from the 1960s to the 1980s,” it “climbed to an all-time high between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.” In other words, “the general trend has always been for the United States to exert a great degree of influence over Latin American countries,” even though “the level of this influence revealed some oscillation (up, down, up) from the mid-1950s to the present time.”
To substantiate the point, Smith presents an array of data concerning gross domestic product (GDP) and population size. As he argues, “The differences in demographic trajectories are startling.” In 1950, the number of people in all the Latin American countries and in the United States was about the same, 150 million. By 1990, the population of Latin America had exceeded that of the United States by a margin of 436 million to 250 million. Yet, the U.S. economy consistently outproduced the economies of Latin America. The GDP of the United States was more than seven times as large as Latin America’s in 1950, seven times as large in 1970, and five times as large in 1990. In 1950 the U.S. GDP was thirty times Argentina’s, thirty-three times Brazil’s, and thirty-seven times Mexico’s; in 1990, it was fifty-eight times Argentina’s, thirteen times Brazil’s, and twenty-three times Mexico’s. To underscore the implications, he claims, “Within the global arena, the United States lost a good deal of ground in relation to the other major powers between 1950 and 1990; within the Western Hemisphere, by contrast, the United States managed to retain its position of preponderance.”
Smith draws similar conclusions from the data on trade. In spite of gains by the West Europeans and the Japanese, the United States in 1990 ranked as the largest single trading partner for every country in the region. As for investments, from 1990 to 1992 the United States put about $22 billion into Latin America—nearly twice the amount from Western Europe and Japan—suggesting that it “thus asserted and affirmed its hemispheric position of economic supremacy.” Though the West Europeans and the Japanese improved their positions, “they did not begin to pose a political challenge to Washington’s preeminence in the Americas.”
Smith explains the circumstance by holding that “United States predominance resulted in large part from a systematic retreat by extrahemispheric rivals,” resulting in “hegemony by default” because “outside powers withdrew from the Americas and directed their attention elsewhere.” The West Europeans concentrated on Eastern Europe; the Russians disengaged to deal with matters at home; and the Japanese too had other priorities. Lacking much competition the United States retained its “supremacy,” characterized by Smith as “uncontested “ and “complete.”
What importance should the United States as a Great Power attach to Latin America in the post–Cold War era? The answer in many ways holds more significance for the people of Latin America than for the United States. In purely economic terms, Latin America has declined in significance for the United States. Its share of total U.S. trade worldwide declined from 28–35 percent in 1950 to 12–14 percent in the mid-1970s, where it has remained for the most part ever since. By the 1990s, Mexico accounted for half of the U.S. trade in Latin America, establishing the southern neighbor as the third-ranked trading partner, behind Canada and Japan. Trade elsewhere in the region amounted to less and less for the United States, certainly in comparison with the 1950s.
Patterns of investment reflected a similar decline in relative importance. In 1950, Latin America accounted for over one-third of U.S. direct overseas investments. By 1970, Latin America absorbed about 16 percent and by 1990, less than 10 percent; Western Europe, Canada, and Asia had become much more significant. To be sure, the absolute value of U.S. investments in Latin America and the Caribbean regions ran toward $71.6 billion, a substantial sum. Yet in the global context, Latin America had less importance to the United States than previously. As Smith states, such trends in trade and investment “meant that in comparison with previous periods the United States would have less at stake in its dealings with Latin America—at a time when Latin America would have more at stake in the United States.” Of course, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and FTA mania in general, would shift these numbers as Latin America, in fact, became very important and closely connected to the United States economy—especially after 1994. Notwithstanding NAFTA’s many critics, the trade agreement did push a significant amount of FDI—foreign direct investment—to Mexico. In 2007, the United States invested, via FDI, 173 billion dollars in Latin America, and about 50 percent of this total went to one nation: Mexico. That 2007 FDI figure represented 22.7 percent of the world FDI in Latin America. Most of this investment moved into the natural resources or mining sector of Latin America, a sector which turns significant profit for investors and employs relatively few local workers.
U.S. FDI in Latin America fell to 159 billion dollars in 2014, reflecting the world economic downturn of 2007–2009. However, it is important to note that profits on Latin American foreign-owned capital stock rose from about $20 billion in 2002 to $100 billion twelve years later. These numbers suggest the efficacy and profitability of investment in Latin America; the push during the late 1980s and 1990s to secure unfettered access to Latin American markets and materials, through “free” trade agreements, seems to have produced the desired effects for investors and friends of investors.27
1. Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 161; John H. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States: The Clients and the Colossus (New York: Twayne, 1994), 134.
2. Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 115.
3. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 132–33, 135–37.
4. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 219–26.
5. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 138–46; Thomas E. Leonard, Central America and the United States: The Search for Stability (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), chap. 9.
6. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” Commentary 68, no. 5 (November 1979): 34–45.
7. Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Pocket Books, 1990), 239, 360, 471.
8. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 144–47, 151–59.
9. Michael J. Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 122, 132; Thomas G. Paterson and J. Garry Clifford, America Ascendant: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1939 (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995), 260–64.
10. Paterson and Clifford, America Ascendant, 256–60.
11. Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan, 142, 149.
12. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 164–66, 170–71, 174–78.
13. Mark T. Gilderhus, “An Emerging Synthesis? U.S.-Latin American Relations since 1945,” in America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, ed. Michael J. Hogan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 456–58; Mark T. Berger, Under Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and U.S. Hegemony in the Americas, 1898–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), chaps. 4–5.
14. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 180–82.
15. Joseph S. Tulchin, Argentina and the United States: A Conflicted Relationship (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 154–58; Tulchin, “The Malvinas War of 1882: An Inevitable Conflict That Never Should Have Happened,” Latin American Research Review 22, no. 3 (1987): 123–41.
16. See Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), especially chap. 3.
17. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 181–87; Schaller, Reckoning with Reagan, chap. 6; Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Dynamics of U.S.-Latin American Relations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 176–80.
18. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 199–200, 202.
19. See Cynthia McClintock, “Why Peasants Rebel: The Case of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso,” World Politics 37, no. 1 (October 1984): 59.
20. See Mario Vargas Llosa, “Questions of Conquest: What Columbus Wrought, and What He Did Not,” Harper’s Magazine 281 (December 1990): 51. The piece is controversial, but compelling.
21. Michael J. Hogan, ed., The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lars Schoultz, ed., The United States and Latin America in the 1990s: Beyond the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
22. Coatsworth, Central America and the United States, 207–8, 210, 214–16. Michael L. Conniff, Panama and the United States: The Forced Alliance (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), chap. 9.
23. Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 218–19.
24. Robert J. McMahon, “Making Sense of American Foreign Policy during the Reagan Years,” Diplomatic History 19, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 367–84; Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making and Unmaking if the Cold War, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 192–93; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987, see chap. 8).
25. Smith, Talons of the Eagle, 223–24.
26. Abraham F. Lowenthal, Partners in Conflict: The United States and Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 32; Paterson, On Every Front, 32.
27. See Shannon K. O’Neil, “Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America,” June 4, 2015. Blogs, Council on Foreign Relations, Washington, DC. Online. Available: http://blogs.cfr.org/oneil/2015/06/04/foreign-direct-investment-in-latin-america/.