Revolutionaries and reformers from Chile to Nicaragua

Neither the Alliance for Progress nor the return to gunboat diplomacy could, however, dampen the growth of anti-Americanism or the spread of revolutionary ideas. Throughout much of Latin America the United States was still perceived as the chief obstacle to true independence, either because the Americans supported the ruling elites and effectively sanctioned their repressive policies or simply because change did not come rapidly enough to answer the demands of a growing population.

The reluctance to use American troops was clear in the case of Chile where Salvador Allende, the leader of the Unidad Popular movement that was supported by both communists and socialists, was elected as president in 1970. The election itself was extremely tight. In the popular vote Allende, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency six years earlier, won a narrow plurality of the votes — 36.6 per cent in contrast to the right-wing National Party's Jorge Alessandro's 34.9 per cent and the centrist Christian Democrats’ Radomiro Tomic's 27.8 per cent — but did not have the majority needed to make him president automatically. The decision was thus transferred to the Chilean National Congress, which, in previous cases of this kind, had always favoured the candidate that had won the most votes. True to this established civic tradition, in late October 1970 the Congress confirmed Allende as the president of Chile.

The Nixon administration was duly outraged. Between the September popular vote and Allende’s confirmation as president, the so-called Forty Committee (headed by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger with representatives from the CIA, State and Defense Departments) had tried to prevent an Allende presidency through a series of schemes that involved bribes and various clandestine manoeuvres.

It is worth pondering why a democratically elected government in the furthest corner of Latin America should have made the Nixon administration so anxious. After all, although Chile hosted two American intelligence stations that monitored the movements of the Soviet Pacific fleet, the country had limited strategic significance; as Kissinger is known to have quipped, Chile was ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica’. However, American economic interests in Chile were substantial: American companies had approximately $1 billion worth of investment there in 1970, and fears of nationalization did prompt conglomerates such as International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) to offer the CIA $1 million to prevent an Allende presidency. Yet, it is unlikely that either the strategic or the economic considerations weighed heavily in the American administration’s deter­mination to bring Allende down. What seems to have concerned Nixon, Kissinger and others was the prospect that a democratically elected socialist government would prove itself a viable political alternative in the Western Hemisphere.

As in the case of Guatemala in the 1950s, however, the overthrow of Allende did little to solve the structural flaws in inter-American relations. The Chilean president — who either committed suicide on 11 September 1973 (as the new military junta announced) or was killed — became another martyr for those political forces within Latin America that considered the pervasive presence of the United States to be the major source of their economic and social ills. There was a certain historical irony in all this. For the reality was that while the absolute figures (or dollar amounts) for American investment in and trade with Latin American countries grew throughout the Cold War, the region's relative economic importance to the United States was clearly in decline. For example, in 1950 Latin America had received roughly 37 per cent of all American direct investment abroad, but by 1970 this figure had declined to 18 per cent and by 1990 was about 10 per cent. Similarly, in 1950 American exports to Latin America had amounted to 28 per cent of the total, but by the mid-1970s the figure was down to 15 per cent (where it would remain through the 1980s).

In the 1970s and 1980s the decreasing economic significance of Latin America to the United States did not have any discernible positive consequences for the continent. Lacking any other obvious external outlets, the continent's economic growth rates in fact declined in the late 1970s and became negative in the early 1980s.

see Chapter 13

While numerous guerrilla movements challenged governmental authority in South America, including the Nineteenth April Movement in Colombia and the Shining Path in Peru, the ones that caught Washington's attention were based in Central America. In El Salvador several groups joined forces in the late 1970s to form the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which challenged the ruling civilian-military junta throughout the 1980s. More than 80,000 lives were lost in the protracted conflict. In Guatemala various guerrilla groups continued a similar struggle. However, it was the 1979 victory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua that truly provoked the United States and led to a protracted, albeit mostly secret, war.

The July 1979 victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, headed by Daniel Ortega, brought down one of the longest-standing dictatorships in Latin America. The Somoza family had ruled the country since the 1930s with consistent backing from the United States. By the 1970s, however, the ruling family had lost the support of the local oligarchy as well as that of the general population. The Americans, however, continued to support the Somozas almost to the bitter end. Even the Carter administration refused to talk with the Sandinistas until they were poised to seize power.

non-alignment

A state policy of avoiding involvement in ‘Great Power conflicts’, most notably the Cold War. It was first espoused by India on its becoming independent in 1947.

As was the case with Castro’s Cuba, the Sandinistas were able to take power because of fortuitous local and external circumstances. Also, following the Fidelistas’ example, the Sandinistas did not initially show much interest in join­ing the Soviet bloc. Instead, they opted, ultimately in vain, to pursue non­alignment in their foreign policy while proclaiming social justice and a mixed economy as their major internal goals. Between 1979 and 1982 Nicaragua looked for and received aid from a number of different sources: other Latin American countries provided more than 30 per cent, while the Soviet bloc’s aid package and its share of Nicaragua’s foreign trade remained at roughly 20 per cent (in the same period Mexico gave twice as much aid as the Soviet Union). Based on such figures, it is fairly clear that in the early 1980s Nicaragua was hardly ‘another Cuba’. The Sandinistas were instead merely looking for a way to avoid renewed dependency upon the United States by diversifying their external ties.

That, though, was apparently enough to alarm the Reagan administration in the United States. Bent on reinstating America’s influence, the administra­tion that came to power in early 1981 moved, at least rhetorically, towards a policy of global containment. The danger of ‘communist infiltration’ was, accord­ing to Reagan and his foreign policy team, particularly pervasive in America’s backyard, where the so-called ‘Moscow-Havana axis’ was busily promoting the creation of ‘Cuba-model states’. Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, put it in simple, gangster-like terms: the Soviets, he maintained in March 1981, had a ‘hit list’ of Central American states with Nicaragua and El Salvador at the top.

The perception that Moscow had targeted Central America for revolution led the Reagan administration to pursue a policy not of containment but of eradication. In El Salvador, while the Reagan administration may not have created the civil war conditions, it certainly provided strong support for the right-wing opposition to the left-wing FMLN rebels, including assistance to the infamous death squads. Moreover, in time-honoured fashion, in 1984 the CIA distributed funds to ensure that the Christian Democratic Party leader, Jose Napoleon Duarte (who was a graduate of Notre Dame University in Indiana), was elected in the presidential election. On taking office, Duarte entered into talks with the FMLN, but these soon collapsed and the civil war erupted anew, continuing through to the late 1980s. The 1989 election of Alfredo Cristiani, leader of the right-wing ARENA party, to the presidency did nothing immediately to restore peace in El Salvador, but in 1991 his government, with help from the United Nations, renewed negotiations with the FMLN. In early 1992, a peace treaty with the rebels was signed, ending the bloody twelve-year conflict. The FMLN demobilized and participated in the 1994 elections, although the ARENA party continued to hold the presidency through the 1990s. Yet, while terrorism and violence, by both Left and Right, greatly decreased, El Salvador’s land redistribution programme, which was one of the government’s concessions in the 1992 peace accord, was implemented slowly and the country's economy continued to pay the price of decades of turmoil.

While trying to tilt the Salvadoran civil war in the ‘right' direction, the Reagan administration also worked hard to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. All foreign aid was cut off in 1981 and in 1985 the administration imposed an economic embargo. Nicaraguans responded by inviting Cuban medical specialists and teachers, as well as military advisers. A 1982 Congressional resolution for­bade the Reagan administration to try to overthrow the Sandinistas, but the CIA attempted to get round it by providing extensive funding to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista force based in Honduras and Costa Rica. By the mid-1980s the Contras were conducting extensive raids into Nicaragua, sabotaging the infrastructure, destroying crops and spreading terror. The American link to the Contras soon became apparent, but although the World Court condemned CIA involvement in activities that included the mining of three Nicaraguan harbours and Congress suspended all aid in 1984, the Reagan administration continued to channel money to the rebels via private organizations. In 1985—86, in a most spectacular and bizarre case that almost led to impeachment hearings against Reagan, Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, an officer on the staff of the National Security Council, funnelled profits from a secret arms deal with Iran to the Contras.

Against this background, it was no wonder that in the 1980s the Sandinistas looked increasingly towards Cuba and the Soviet Union for help. However, the results were hardly comforting, for, once clear links were established between Managua, Havana and Moscow, Reagan was able to get $100 million from the Congress to fund ‘humanitarian' aid to the Contras. Meanwhile a number of Latin American countries launched peace initiatives that were effectively snubbed by the United States. In 1987, for example, the Costa Rican president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, offered a plan providing for a cease-fire and national reconciliation.

Relative peace returned to Nicaragua only after the Reagan administration left office and the collapse of the Soviet bloc indicated how inflated the fears of a communist conspiracy to seize Central America had been. Building on the foundations of the Arias Plan, a meeting of five Central American presidents in February 1989 produced the so-called ‘Tesoro Beach Accord', which called for free elections and the disbanding of the Contras. In February of the following year, after the Sandinistas agreed to allow opposition groups to operate and the Bush administration began to distance itself from the Contras, an extensively monitored election resulted in two surprises. First, the National Opposition Union headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, whose husband had been killed in 1978 by the Somoza forces, soundly defeated the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Second, Ortega, who had served as president for the previous five years, accepted the result. Thus, after a prolonged civil war that had claimed at least 30,000 lives, fighting finally ceased in Nicaragua.

A similar series of events transpired in Guatemala, which had been plagued by intermittent civil war between the government and leftist opposition groups since the 1954 overthrow of the Arbenz government. In 1986 a civilian government headed by Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo took office, which in 1991 was suc­ceeded by one led by Jorge Serrano Elias. Ironically, a peace agreement was only signed in 1996, after the Guatemalan military had deposed Serrano and allowed the inauguration of de Leon Carpio, the former attorney general for human rights, in 1993. Thus ended the longest civil war in Latin American history, which had left approximately 200,000 Guatemalans dead over three-and-a-half decades. Echoing general hopes for a more peaceful future, in 1997 UNESCO awarded the new Guatemalan president, Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen, and the guerrilla movement leader, Ricardo Ramirez, the Houphouet-Boigny Peace Prize. In short, as the Cold War ended, a number of Central American countries moved towards the difficult, but far less violent, phase of national reconciliation.