cold war history: nicaragua and the sandinistas

A look back at the Latin American intervention that bedeviled the Reagan administration

Were they fighting to dominate the Western hemisphere for the USSR or just get rid of Somoza?

In a geopolitically significant yet small country, American interventionists spoke of the Wilsonian rule of law and sent troops to maintain economic order. To keep the peace, the US supported a stable strongman, whose autocracy, over time, fueled a leftist uprising. Consequently, what might have been a struggle for self-determination transformed into yet another Cold War battlefield.

            If the story feels familiar, it’s because it is, with parallels to Cuba and Vietnam. Yet Nicaragua is arguably the most instructive regional conflict due to its timing near the Cold War’s end and its long American relationship. It also reflects US foreign policy missteps in the 1980s, when the US failed to apply the lessons from Cuba and Vietnam.

            In the early twentieth century, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson treated Nicaragua as a project of “Manifest Destiny,” geopolitically relevant for the creation of an inter-ocean canal.  Taft first sought to stabilize American involvement in Nicaragua through “Dollar Diplomacy,” which was supposed to smooth customs arrangements and settle raucous political upheavals across Central America.  The financial treaty also boxed out Europe and created trading partners that American banks could back.[1]  In 1909, when Nicaraguan President Zelaya actively courted British lenders, Taft tacitly supported his removal.  After Zelaya’s overthrow, American emissaries advised a constitutional convention and promised public works for development loans. However, Congress balked at the arrangement, and Nicaragua fell into chaos.

On the heels of the disorder, Nicaragua’s nascent government requested the US to “guarantee with its forces security for the property of American citizens and to extend protection to all inhabitants of the Republic.”  Marines landed in Nicaragua in 1912 and occupied the country to restore stability for the next twenty years, often subduing guerrilla movements.  The US finally withdrew under FDR’s “Good Neighborism” policy and entrusted leadership to the American-trained National Guard under the command of the Somoza family.

            By the early 1970s, Anastasio Somoza held nearly all of Nicaragua’s material wealth and ruled with an iron fist.  A fracture in his control occurred with a 1972 earthquake that showcased a pitiful Somoza response, sparking popular revolt.  While moderates sought US support for regime change, the Carter administration honored a self-imposed hemispheric nonintervention policy and eventually praised Somoza’s human rights record.  By the end of the decade, Carter’s insouciance and Somoza’s cruelty had led to a militarized uprising through the FSLN (Sandinistas).[2] Trained by Cuba, the FSLN gained enough battlefield success and popular momentum to force Somoza into exile in Miami. As Somoza fled, he complained that Carter and the US had let him down after his “decades of fighting communism.”[3]

            Was the FSLN a Marxist-Leninist group bent on Leninist expansion or an organized resistance seeking self-determination? “They always wanted to say we were communist, but we just wanted freedom,” said an FSLN commander in 2018.[4]  As in Cuba, having broken the yoke of an autocrat, the FSLN established a government that the US immediately punished through a trade embargo, exacerbating conditions and motivating the rebels to ally with the Soviets.

Nicaragua was classified as one of the “falls” of the 1970s, along with Iran and Afghanistan, and the Reagan administration sought to right those wrongs. Reagan pushed for a counterrevolution through the Contras, painting the fight against the Sandinistas in stark Cold War terms: “The Sandinistas describe themselves as the vanguard of a revolution that would sweep Central America.” In the same address, he went on to describe pending Soviet air and submarine bases in Nicaragua.[5] Congress opposed the bulk of Reagan’s request to fund the Contras. His administration tried to equip the counterrevolutionaries through alternate means, which sparked the Iran-Contra scandal shortly before the Cold War’s end.

            Ironically, with the Cold War over, the FSLN won legitimate elections in 1990 and 2006, demonstrating a drive to self-determination. Sadly, the FSLN’s leader, Ortega, is now considered an autocrat by former FSLN leaders who seek to revolt again. Overall, the US erred in its interpretation of the Somoza-FSLN clash as a Cold War ideological struggle, repeating the mistakes of Cuba.

[1] Dana Munro, “Dollar Diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1909-1913,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 38, no. 2 (May 1958): 209–34.

[2] FSNL: Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, better known as “the Sandinistas.”

[3] William LeoGrande, “The Revolution in Nicaragua: Another Cuba?,” Foreign Affairs 58, no. 1 (Fall 1979): 28–50.

[4] Las Sandanistas, Documentary, 2018, https://www.lassandinistas.com/about-the-film.

[5] “Address to the Nation on the Situation in Nicaragua,” Oval Office Address, March 16, 1986, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/address-nation-situation-nicaragua.