Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Map of the Caribbean Basin area
- Part I The problem at the interstate level
- Part II The problem at the state level
- 5 Cuba: a client state
- 6 Nicaraguan security perceptions
- 7 The security of small Caribbean states: a case-study of Jamaican experiences in the 1970s
- 8 United States' security perceptions
- Part III Solutions
- Index
6 - Nicaraguan security perceptions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Preface
- Map of the Caribbean Basin area
- Part I The problem at the interstate level
- Part II The problem at the state level
- 5 Cuba: a client state
- 6 Nicaraguan security perceptions
- 7 The security of small Caribbean states: a case-study of Jamaican experiences in the 1970s
- 8 United States' security perceptions
- Part III Solutions
- Index
Summary
There was [in 1979] a powerful reason which demanded that the vanguard [the FSLN] should grant priority to the prompt organisation of its military apparatus: the perception that the main danger the revolutionary process would have to confront was a direct aggression from the United States … Two potential enemies were identified: North American imperialism and the reactionary forces of the region; and also, though as a lesser danger, the incipient counter-revolution which was beginning to manifest itself in the bands of ex-somocista guards operating out of Honduras.
This description of Nicaraguan security perceptions in the very early days of the revolution was published in mid-1986 by the Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales (CRIES), an independent but openly pro-Sandinista think-tank based in Managua, as part of one of the most comprehensive surveys of the war in that country. It reflects a widely held view of what the Sandinistas had expected from the outset – and it is completely inaccurate.
In 1979, when the Sandinistas took power, Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Ronald Reagan had not yet emerged clearly as a winning candidate committed to rolling back the ‘Red tide’ in the Caribbean Basin, and the term ‘contra’ had not even been coined.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Central American Security SystemNorth-South or East-West?, pp. 92 - 103Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988