Sandinista Revolution and the Contra War in Nicaragua
The Sandinistas took Nicaragua in July 1979 and spent the following decade fighting an insurgency financed from Washington. The Somoza family had governed for forty-three years, the founder having been installed by the American-trained National Guard after a marines occupation, and by the 1970s the family owned a substantial share of the country's arable land and its principal businesses. The looting of international relief after the Managua earthquake of 1972 and the murder of a newspaper editor in 1978 finished it. The Sandinista National Liberation Front, founded in 1961, took power at the head of a broad coalition and inherited a ruined economy and a large debt, and its programme was a literacy campaign that reached hundreds of thousands, a health service, land redistribution, and an alignment with Cuba that guaranteed American hostility. The Reagan administration organised the Contras from 1981, largely from former National Guardsmen, funded them through the CIA, mined Nicaraguan harbours, and continued after Congress prohibited it by the Boland amendments — which produced the Iran-Contra affair, in which missiles were sold to Iran and the proceeds diverted. The International Court of Justice found the United States in breach of international law in 1986 and was ignored. Some 30,000 people died, the economy was destroyed by the war and the embargo, and the Sandinistas introduced conscription, which cost them the countryside. They lost an election in 1990 and handed over power, which is the part nobody expected. Daniel Ortega returned in 2007 and has not left. The pattern is the standard one for the region in the period, and Nicaragua is where it is documented most fully because of the congressional hearings. The literacy campaign and the war are both part of the record, and Nicaraguan politics is still argued in the terms both sides used in 1985.
- Year: 1979 CE
- Category: Military
