A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977-1990

National Interest, The, Summer, 1996 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The new assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, Viron Vaky, argued that the United States should promote a viable noncommunist alternative to Somoza. But he was opposed by Anthony Lake, then the State Department's director of policy planning, one of the stalwarts of the "non-intervention" moralists. As the drift went on through the turbulent year of 1978, the Sandinista Front seized the initiative with a stunning commando raid on the Nicaraguan National Palace. It catapulted the guerrillas into the forefront of Nicaraguan politics. Analysts at the Pentagon and CIA were always behind the curve as the FSLN prepared for insurrection. They discounted the "hit-and-run type" strikes because the Sandinistas were unable to capture and hold towns. General Dennis McAuliffe, commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, told Congress just weeks before the revolution that Somoza's forces were "entirely capable of dealing with the threat." Lulled into a false sense of security, President Carter continued to refuse Somoza's requests for arms. When the White House made a Past half-baked effort to stop the creation of a "Castroite" regime in Nicaragua, it was already too late.

It is an article of faith on the Left that the Sandinistas were forced into the arms of the Soviet Union, against their wishes, in order to save the revolution from the implacable aggression of the United States. This view dominates the literature on Central America, and it is more or less embedded in the universities of the United States and Europe. Kagan has performed an invaluable service by correcting the record once and for all, before an important chunk of history is permanently disfigured.

"The Sandinistas were eager suitors of Soviet patronage - more eager, in fact, than the Soviets were to act as patrons", he writes. By March of 1980 they had signed a party-to-party agreement with the Soviet Communist Party, as well as secret military protocols to begin receiving arms from the Soviet bloc. "Remember, this was the strong Soviet Union. We thought it would last", Humberto Ortega confided to Kagan. "We thought the Soviet Union was as rich as the United States. We truly believed that the utopia existed."

There was a good deal of naivete in Washington about the character of Sandinismo. Kagan takes the New York Times to task for propagating the myth that "committed Marxists" had been forced to break away from the movement, and that the FSLN was planning to call free elections. It was all eye-wash. The Sandinistas saw themselves as a Leninist vanguard party, and Kagan describes how they moved with impressive dispatch to eliminate anybody in their way. Within three months of the revolution on July 19, 1979, the new police and army had launched "Operation Sandinista Fist", arresting hundreds and perhaps thousands throughout the country. Left-wing groups that were not under Sandinista control were crushed. The leader of the Socialist Party was arrested. The offices of the "ultra-left" newspaper El Pueblo were raided, and several of its staff were imprisoned. "Journalism has a right to be free", declared Joaquin Cuadra, the army chief of staff, "but it does not have the right to attack this process, even indirectly." The non-Sandinista elements in the Junta were kept as window-dressing, but exercised no real power. Within a year the most popular leader of the conservative opposition, Jorge Salazar, had been assassinated by Tomas Borge's security police.