The United States Intervention Policy In Nicaragua

As President Carter?s ambassador to Nicaragua from 1977?1979, Mauricio Sola£n witnessed a critical moment in Central American history. In U.S. Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua, Sola£n outlines the role of U.S. foreign policy during the Carter administration and explains how this policy with respect to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 not only failed but helped impede the institutionalization of democracy there. Late in the 1970s, the United States took issue with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Moral suasion, economic sanctions, and other peaceful instruments from Washington led to violent revolution in Nicaragua and bolstered a new dictatorial government. A U.S.-supported counterrevolution formed, and Sola£n argues that the United States attempts to this day to determine who rules Nicaragua. Sola£n explores the mechanisms that kept Somoza?s poorly legitimized regime in power for decades, making it the most enduring Latin American authoritarian regime of the twentieth century. Sola£n argues that continual shifts in U.S. international policy have been made in response to previous policies that failed to produce U.S.- friendly international environments. His historical survey of these policy shifts provides a window on the working of U.S. diplomacy and lessons for future policy-making.

As President Carter's ambassador to Nicaragua from 1977-1979, Mauricio Solaún witnessed a critical moment in Central American history. In U.S. Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua, Solaún outlines the role of U.S. foreign policy during the Carter administration and explains how this policy with respect to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 not only failed but helped impede the institutionalization of democracy there. Late in the 1970s, the United States took issue with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Moral suasion, economic sanctions, and other peaceful instruments from Washington led to violent revolution in Nicaragua and bolstered a new dictatorial government. A U.S.-supported counterrevolution formed, and Solaún argues that the United States attempts to this day to determine who rules Nicaragua. Solaún explores the mechanisms that kept Somoza's poorly legitimized regime in power for decades, making it the most enduring Latin American authoritarian regime of the twentieth century. Solaún argues that continual shifts in U.S. international policy have been made in response to previous policies that failed to produce U.S.- friendly international environments. His historical survey of these policy shifts provides a window on the working of U.S. diplomacy and lessons for future policy-making.

A penetrating analysis of the controversial U.S. role in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections-the most closely monitored in history-this book exposes the intervention in the electoral process of a sovereign nation by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of State, the National Endowment for Democracy, and private U.S.-based organizations. Robins

Experts and historians have explored and narrated U.S. interventions from different viewpoints. These academics have relied almost exclusively on documents from the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department. These studies have often generalized the events leading to the intervention, failing to discuss in detail the British, U.S., and Nicaraguan conflict and the decision-making and policy formulation processes that caused the U.S. to become drawn into the Nicaraguan conflict. Furthermore, they have discounted the basis of the conflict: how it developed from a clash between Spain and Britain over the control of the Rio San Juan, into a long struggle between Spain, Great Britain and the U.S. in Nicaragua that lasted more than 500 years; and how and why the U.S. allowed itself, within its own conflict with Great Britain, to be brought into the canal debate and into military interventions in Nicaragua. Although U.S. interventions in Nicaragua have been the subject of works and case studies in Latin American Studies, this dissertation unlike past studies, draws from unpublished sources: personal letters, diaries, telegrams and officials documents between generals/admirals at the war front that uniquely showcase a breakdown of the events and political implications that propelled the U.S. involvement in the region. This manuscript analyzes not only the British and U.S. interventions themselves, but also the circumstances and catastrophic events that shaped Nicaragua's socio-economic policies influencing the development of a particular submissive political culture in Nicaragua. With the purpose of filling in necessary and essential gaps in history and for a thorough analysis, I gathered and discuss in detail a large comprehensive amount of documents from sources. For example, I conducted research and gathered primary documents and ancillary data from the general archive of Indies in Seville, Spain, the general archive of Simancas in Valladolid, Spain, the general archive of the nation in Mexico, the general archive of Central America in Guatemala, the archive of the nation of Costa Rica, the National Archive of Nicaragua, British Foreign Office Archives, British National Archives, U.S. National Archives, U.S. Department of State Foreign Relations Papers, U.S. Marine Corps historical archives and U.S. military and navy intelligence archives and declassified documents, UC Berkeley Bancroft Library archives, U.S. and Nicaraguan personal archives. Through the analysis of the research data and documents discussed above, I introduce a key character in the conflict, Dr. and General Benjamin Francisco Zeledón Rodríguez, the Supreme Chief of Government of Nicaragua in 1912. For reasons touched only in this work, Zeledón has often been left out of the history books and not given the recognition he deserves. I therefore, not only honor Zeledón in my dissertation, but also contribute to and fill in an essential and necessary part of Nicaraguan history.

Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.