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

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

There was no real plan to create the Contra resistance. "In the end", Alexander Haig recalled, "the decision to go covert was a decision almost by default." He regarded it as a failure of the foreign policy-making apparatus. The Nicaraguans were plotting and scheming in exile, and the Argentines were already training some ex-Guardia in Honduras. The United States was offered a chance to buy into an existing operation. Interestingly, President Reagan "was profoundly averse to violence" and doubted that a covert operation would do much to influence the course of Nicaragua's revolution. One official told Kagan that "Reagan has the reputation of being a gunslinger, but he was the most cautious, conservative guy in those meetings."

Once the die was cast, however, there was no turning back. The Contra forces mushroomed into the biggest guerrilla insurgency in Latin America, much to the astonishment of their handlers at Langley. In hindsight it has to be asked whether the whole endeavor was worth it. On the one hand, the Contra war scared the wits out of the Sandinista leadership. The comandantes felt compelled to curtail the supply of arms to their Salvadoran comrades in order to appease swing voters (mostly Democrats) in the U.S. Congress. El Salvador and Guatemala did not fall to Marxist revolutions - though they came very close to doing so - and that fact alone was of critical importance in the psychology of the late stages of the Cold War. On the other hand, the imperatives of the Contra policy ultimately led to Iran-Contra, crippling President Reagan so badly that his domestic policy was all but paralyzed for the last two years of his second term. The fevered efforts to keep the Contras alive after Congress cut off aid had serious collateral effects. The supply efforts were subcontracted to drug smugglers, creating an impression that the U.S. government was mixed up with cocaine trafficking. It may be false, or it may be closer to the truth than officials from the Reagan administration care to admit to themselves, but whatever happened there are now large numbers of people in the United States who believe that CIA and the Pentagon are suspect. Trust has been lost.

On balance, Kagan seems to argue that it was worth it. The redeeming achievement is the establishment of democracy in Nicaragua. I do not want to quibble with this, because the country is obviously a much freer place today. But was democracy really established? The Sandinistas may have lost the presidency but they did not lose control of the military, the police, or the apparatus of state security (even though the latter was abolished in theory). General Humberto Ortega continued as head of the armed forces. Many of the same enforcers from the Sandinista Interior Ministry accused of death squad abuses were still holding sway in the small towns of central and northern Nicaragua years later. After the Contras laid down their arms and returned to civilian life a large number were killed. Some were picked off in the middle of the night; some, like Contra commander Enrique Bermudez, were assassinated in the open. The Contras were betrayed. Not perhaps the well-heeled Contra politicians that Kagan dealt with at the State Department; they landed on their feet, of course. But the campesinos who fought the hard battle: they were hunted down by a Sandinista military now being funded indirectly by the United States. Doubtless, it was naive to expect anything else.