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The Nicaraguan Question: Contadora and the Latin American Response to US Intervention Against the Sandinistas, 1982–86
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2021
Abstract
While much has been written about the United States’ efforts to undermine Nicaragua's Sandinista government (1979–90), historians have paid little attention to Latin American state perspectives on the only successful armed revolution in the region since Cuba. In fact, the war that subsequently emerged between Sandinista armed forces and US-backed contras was a thoroughly regionalized affair: at least 12 Latin American countries—including the five largest—became directly involved in efforts to broker peace by the mid 1980s. How and why did they become involved? What can Latin American diplomacy vis-à-vis the Sandinista Revolution tell us about the shape of inter-American relations in the twilight years of the Cold War?
To answer these questions, this article uses diplomatic archival sources and oral history interviews from Nicaragua, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Panama to trace Latin American state responses to US intervention against the Sandinista government between 1982 and 1986. While the Reagan administration viewed Nicaragua as the place where it would begin to roll back Soviet-sponsored communism in the Third World, a bloc of Latin American governments—especially those associated with the Contadora peace process—saw Central America as the site where they would push back against US unilateralism and the threat it posed to their real interests and shared hopes for regional sovereignty. In stark contrast with the earlier reaction to the Cuban Revolution, most Latin American states rejected US intervention and sought to legitimize Managua's left-wing government. The regional dimensions of Nicaragua's civil war therefore show how the political fault lines of Latin America's Cold War shifted over time.
Keywords
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- Information
- The Americas , Volume 78 , Special Issue 4: Internationalizing Revolution , October 2021 , pp. 581 - 608
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History
Footnotes
I wish to thank Kirsten Weld and Odd Arne Westad for their advice on this research project, which was made possible by generous grants from Harvard University's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). I also thank Tanya Harmer, Eline van Ommen, the anonymous reviewers at The Americas, and my colleagues in the Clio Reading Group at Chapman University's Department of History for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
References
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18. Quoted in a report from the Mexican embassy in Managua: “Comentario sobre las declaraciones del Presidente de Venezuela relativas a la política interna de Nicaragua,” Managua, September 24, 1982 AG SRE III-3490-1. See also René Herrera and Mario Ojeda, “La política de México en la región de Centroamérica,” Foro Internacional 23:4 (1983): 432–433.
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36. Quoted in “La difícil herencia de Vinicio Cerezo,” El País, December 11, 1985.
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39. De la Madrid, quoted in foreword to Relación de Contadora, 7.
40. Because Washington pursued policies that militarized the region and “would inevitably lead to regime change in Nicaragua,” its “interests were not reconcilable with Contadora's political project.” Bernardo Sepúlveda Amor, interview with the author, Mexico City, October 10, 2016.
41. Quoted in Gutman, Banana Diplomacy, 226.
42. Márquez, “Nobel Lecture.”
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44. Declaración de Cancún para la paz en Centroamérica,” July 17, 1983, in Relación de Contadora, 361.
45. Caracas Declaration of Solidarity for the Preservation of the Political Integrity of the American States against International Communist Intervention Adopted by the Tenth Inter-American Conference, March 28, 1954, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale University: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/intam10.asp, accessed August 26, 2021.
46. A year prior, following the Cancún Declaration, Contadora had published a 21-point “Document of Objectives.” Relación de Contadora, 376.
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48. Alma Guillermoprieto, “Torpedoing Latin Interests,” Washington Post, November 11, 1984.
49. Most notably, Resolution 562 at the UN Security Council reaffirmed “the sovereignty and inalienable right of Nicaragua and other States to freely decide” their own government and called upon all states “to refrain from carrying out, supporting or promoting political, economic or military actions of any kind against any State in the region which might impede the peace objectives of the Contadora group.” United Nations Security Council Resolution 562, May 10, 1985: http://unscr.com/en/resolutions/562, accessed August 26, 2021. Previously, Resolution 702 at the OAS General Assembly urged Central American countries to sign Contadora. Additionally, Contadora won awards from UNESCO (May 1985) and the Spanish government's Prince of Asturias Prize (October 1984).
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65. Quoted in “Now That Contadora is Dead,” New York Times, January 8, 1986.
66. Jorge G. Castañeda, “Don't Corner Mexico!”
67. José León Talavera, interview with the author, Managua, August 23, 2016.
68. The Reagan administration's “conceptualization, which pretends to explain the region's crisis as part of the East-West conflict, is incorrect, because the peoples of Central America have rebelled against this situation throughout history, long before the existence of the Russian and Cuban revolutions.” Posición de Nicaragua ante la Crisis Centroaméricana—Documento de Base,” Archivo Bendaña, Box 4.
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