Washington's War on Nicaragua

Washington's War on Nicaragua PDF Author: Holly Sklar
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896082953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
An account of U.S. policy from the Sandinista revolution through the Iran-contra scandal and beyond. Sklar shows how the White House sabotaged peace negoatiations and sustained the deadly contra war despite public opposition, with secret U.S. special forces and an auxiliary arm of dictators, drug smugglers and death squad godfathers, and illuminates an alternative policy rooted in law and democracy.

Washington's War on Nicaragua

Washington's War on Nicaragua PDF Author: Holly Sklar
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896082953
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
An account of U.S. policy from the Sandinista revolution through the Iran-contra scandal and beyond. Sklar shows how the White House sabotaged peace negoatiations and sustained the deadly contra war despite public opposition, with secret U.S. special forces and an auxiliary arm of dictators, drug smugglers and death squad godfathers, and illuminates an alternative policy rooted in law and democracy.

The Civil War in Nicaragua

The Civil War in Nicaragua PDF Author: Roger Miranda
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412819688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
"The conflict in Nicaragua is one of the leastunderstood struggles of the Cold War. . . . This account clarifies the central issue and dispelsmany lingering myths." --Zbigniew Breinski,National Security Advisor during the Carter administration

Reagan's War on Terrorism in Nicaragua

Reagan's War on Terrorism in Nicaragua PDF Author: Philip W. Travis
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498537189
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
During the first two years of Ronald Reagan’s second term the United States developed an offensive strategy for dealing with conflict in the developing world. Nicaragua was a primary target of this policy. Scholars refer to this as the Reagan offensive: the first time that the United States eschewed the norms of containment and sought to “roll-back” the gains of communism. However, the Reagan offensive was also significantly driven by a response to the emergent threat of international terrorism. Terrorism provided a vehicle that justified its use of aggressive proxy war and pursuit of regime change in Central America. U.S. policy with Nicaragua demonstrates the importance of terrorism to the development of a more aggressive United States in the post-Cold War world. This book examines the influence of the U.S.-Contra War in establishing a precedent for the use of overt pre-emptive force against sovereign nations in the name of counterterrorism. In the 21st century, the United States undertook a policy with the world based on a broad definition of self-defense that called for an array of actions that often violated traditional norms of international law and recognition of sovereign rights. This book demonstrates that the precedent for this change occurred in the late Cold War as the United States sought to respond to an escalation of global terrorism. The emergent problem of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s transformed how and when the United States applied force in the world.

Unfinished Revolution

Unfinished Revolution PDF Author: Kenneth E. Morris
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
ISBN: 1569767564
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Together with his brother Humberto, Daniel Ortega Saavedra masterminded the only victorious Latin American revolution since Fidel Castro's in Cuba. Following the triumphant 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, Ortega was named coordinator of the governing junta, and then in 1984 was elected president by a landslide in the country's first free presidential election. The future was full of promise. Yet the United States was soon training, equipping, and financing a counterrevolutionary force inside Nicaragua while sabotaging its crippled economy. The result was a decade-long civil war. By 1990, Nicaraguans dutifully voted Ortega out and the preferred candidate of the United States in. And Nicaraguans grew poorer and sicker. Then, in 2006, Daniel Ortega was reelected president. He was still defiantly left-wing and deeply committed to reclaiming the lost promise of the Revolution. Only time will tell if he succeeds, but he has positioned himself as an ally of Castro and Hugo Ch&ávez, while life for many Nicaraguans is finally improving. Unfinished Revolution is the first full-length biography of Daniel Ortega in any language. Drawing from a wealth of untapped sources, it tells the story of Nicaragua's continuing struggle for liberation through the prism of the Revolution's most emblematic yet enigmatic hero.

Eisenhower, Somoza, and the Cold War in Nicaragua

Eisenhower, Somoza, and the Cold War in Nicaragua PDF Author: Michael D. Gambone
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 9780275959432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
During the Cold War era, the United States faced the prospect of expanding its power in Central America. But we miscalculated—grievously. After 1945, Central America teemed with leaders willing to alter the region's quasi-colonial status. Some, like Fidel Castro, sought out revolution to shatter the status quo. Others, like Anastasio Somoza Garcia, attempted to seek out new directions along more subtle paths. Nicaragua subsequently challenged American hegemony in a manner at once more deliberate and more dangerous than any other effort in the hemisphere. The Somoza regime, unlike its contemporaries, chose to utilize American institutions and American preferences to subvert the latter's power rather than reinforce it. American arrogance, combined with a complacent approach to policy in its global backyard, offered a myriad of political, military, and economic opportunities to a leader willing to take risks. In the years after 1945, Somoza was thus able to peel away layers of clientage until, at certain moments, he could act as a partner of his northern neighbor.

The Death of Ben Linder

The Death of Ben Linder PDF Author: Joan Kruckewitt
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
In 1987, the death of Ben Linder, the first American killed by President Reagan's "freedom fighters" -- the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras -- ignited a firestorm of protest and debate. In this landmark first biography of Linder, investigative journalist Joan Kruckewitt tells his story. In the summer of 1983, a 23-year-old American named Ben Linder arrived in Managua with a unicycle and a newly earned degree in engineering. In 1986, Linder moved from Managua to El Cuá, a village in the Nicaraguan war zone, where he helped form a team to build a hydroplant to bring electricity to the town. He was ambushed and killed by the Contras the following year while surveying a stream for a possible hydroplant. In 1993, Kruckewitt traveled to the Nicaraguan mountains to investigate Linder's death. In July 1995. she finally located and interviewed one of the men who killed Ben Linder, a story that became the basis for a New Yorker feature on Linder's death. Linder's story is a portrait of one idealist who died for his beliefs, as well as a picture of a failed foreign policy, vividly exposing the true dimensions of a war that forever marked the lives of both Nicaraguans and Americans.

Sandinistas

Sandinistas PDF Author: Robert J. Sierakowski
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268106916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime’s moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski’s innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.

A Twilight Struggle

A Twilight Struggle PDF Author: Robert Kagan
Publisher: VNR AG
ISBN: 9780028740577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 942

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Book Description
"Kagan contends that the Carter administration's halfhearted intervention in Nicaragua was in response to American feelings of guilt for Washington's longtime support of the Somoza dynasty. The Reagan-era intervention, on the other hand, originated in American anxiety over Soviet encroachment in the Western hemisphere. Kagan recounts how American popular aversion to the employment of U.S. military muscle in Central America led to the administration's covert support of the contras and goes on to explain how the clash between the Reagan White House and Congress over "freedom fighter" funding led to the Iran-contra affair in 1987. Although the surprising electoral victory of Violeta Chamorro over the Sandinistas was widely recognized as a success for American policy, the U.S. remains caught in a continuous cycle of intervention and withdrawal in Nicaragua, according to Kagan. As a member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, Kagan was a direct participant in many of the events described in this authoritative and definitive account of U.S."--Publisher's description.

The Ends of Modernization

The Ends of Modernization PDF Author: David Johnson Lee
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501756230
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
The Ends of Modernization studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. David Johnson Lee charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. Using archival material, newspapers, literature, and interviews with historical actors in countries across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Lee demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War. In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revolution incited radical changes that challenged the frankly ideological and economic motivations of modernization. In response to threats to its ideological dominance regionally and globally, the United States began to promote new paradigms of development built around human rights, entrepreneurial internationalism, indigenous rights, and sustainable development. Lee traces the ways Nicaraguans made their country central to the contest over development ideals beginning in the 1960s, transforming how political and economic development were imagined worldwide. By illustrating how ideas about ecology and sustainable development became linked to geopolitical conflict during and after the Cold War, The Ends of Modernization provides a history of the late Cold War that connects the contest between the two then-prevailing superpowers to trends that shape our present, globalized, multipolar world.

A Faustian Bargain

A Faustian Bargain PDF Author: William I Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429722605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
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