Download Heirs of Sandino The Nicaraguan Revolution and the

Heirs of Sandino
The Nicaraguan Revolution
and the U.S.-Nicaragua Solidarity Movement
by
Héctor Perla Jr.
The 1979 triumph of the Sandinista Revolution and the Sandinista National
Liberation Front’s resistance of U.S. efforts to oust it from power inspired thousands of
individuals from all over the world to support Nicaragua’s struggle for self-determination.
One of the most important constituencies to take up the Sandinista cause was a significant portion of the U.S. public. What moved this collection of individuals and organizations to join a movement to oppose their own government’s policy and often even identify
with the Sandinista cause? To date Latin Americanists have neglected this movement
and the role that Nicaraguans, both in their home country and in the United States,
played in its rise and success. A transnational approach to the movement’s origins and
its relationship to Nicaraguan revolutionary social forces allows one to understand it as
it really was: a transnational social movement in which U.S. and Nicaraguan citizens
acted together for a common purpose.
Keywords: Nicaragua, Transnational social movements, Solidarity, U.S. foreign policy
Since the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine, U.S. politicians have justified their nation’s policy toward Latin America using the discourse of liberty,
but in practice its policies have been quite different. This is especially true
in Nicaragua, a country that stands out for the number of times it has been
invaded, the length of time that it has spent under direct U.S. occupation, and
the fierce resistance to these occupations that it has generated (Walker, 2003).
Starting with the resistance against the filibusterer William Walker and continuing with Augusto César Sandino’s resistance to the U.S. invasion force in
the 1930s, Nicaraguans’ dogged opposition to U.S. aggression has inspired a
great many non-Nicaraguans to take up their cause. Most recently, the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent resistance of
the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista Front for National
Liberation—FSLN) to U.S. efforts to oust it from power throughout the 1980s
inspired thousands of individuals from all over the world to join Nicaraguans
in their struggle for self-determination.
One of the most important constituencies to take up the Sandinista cause
was a significant portion of the U.S. public.1 In the United States, this movement became known as the Nicaragua solidarity movement.2 According to
Reagan administration officials and key congressional leaders of the time, the
grassroots pressure on Congress and the constant flow of information from
Héctor Perla Jr. is a professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 169, Vol. 36 No. 6, November 2009 80-100
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X09350765
© 2009 Latin American Perspectives
80
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 81
this movement to the public were the principal reasons the administration’s
Central America policy was constrained (Sobel, 1993; 2001). What moved
these individuals and organizations to oppose their government’s policy and
often even identify with the Sandinista cause? Answering this question
requires adopting a transnational framework of analysis, which allows us to
take into account the participation of Nicaraguans both in their home country
and in the United States.
This paper is divided into six sections. The first section provides a brief review
of the literature on Latin American social movements. The second explores the
transnational origins of the Nicaragua solidarity movement, and the following section documents the movement’s diffusion around the United States.
The fourth section traces the strategies and objectives for which the movement
mobilized. The fifth section briefly describes the Nicaragua solidarity movement’s development during the postrevolutionary period. The final section
offers an analysis of the movement’s achievements.
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES
Because of the region’s long history under oppressive, dictatorial, and exclusionary regimes, Latin Americanists have a strong tradition of studying the
region’s popular movement activism outside the realm of formal politics.
These investigations have ranged from studies of union strikes, student protests, and religious activism to struggles for women’s and indigenous rights
and armed revolutions. Latin Americanists have sought to answer questions
such as why peasants rebel and what kind of peasant is most likely to rebel
(Wolf, 1969; Paige, 1975; Diskin, 1983; Seligson, 1996; Wood, 2003) and to
explain the role of women in revolutions and the development of the women’s
rights movement (Jelin, 1990; Bayard de Volo, 2001; Kampwirth, 2002).
Additionally, they have studied the role of religion in revolution, the rise
of liberation theology, and the impact of that movement on revolutionary
mobilization (Norget, 1997; Bonpane, 2000; Martin, 2003). Scholars have also
explored why some revolutionary movements are successful while others are
not and attempted to uncover the causes of revolution (Booth, 1991; WickhamCrowley, 1992; Brockett, 2005; Booth and Walker, 1993; Selbin, 1993). In sum,
Latin Americanists have studied various cases of contentious political mobilization by marginalized social groups.3
However, until recently Latin Americanists have not explored the roles
played by Latin Americans—either in their home countries or as migrants
residing in the United States—in the transnational solidarity movements that
arose in opposition to dictatorships or in support of Latin American revolutionary struggles (see Green, 2003, and Perla, 2008, for exceptions). As a result,
the U.S.–Central American peace and solidarity movement has not been
understood as a Latin American movement, nor has it been studied by Latin
Americanists in spite of its significance and the potential wealth of information and insight it offers. In fact, the few studies that have explored the movement have been conducted by U.S. social movement scholars who have
focused almost exclusively on the role of North Americans in the creation of
the movement (Smith, 1996; Erickson-Nepstad, 2004). Indeed, Latin Americanists
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82 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
have ignored it, failing to confront the myths that the Nicaraguans controlled
the movement and that they were simply its beneficiaries rather than
active protagonists in its creation and growth. In this article I challenge both
these myths by delineating a middle ground between them. I contend that the
Nicaragua solidarity movement was neither controlled by Nicaraguan (much
less Soviet or Cuban) revolutionaries nor solely a U.S. domestic movement.4
Rather, it was a transnational social movement in which U.S. and Central
American citizens acted together for a common purpose.5
ORIGINS OF THE NICARAGUA SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT
How can we best understand the origins of the solidarity movement with
Nicaragua? To date right-wing politicians and pundits have labeled it a
Sandinista front and its participants as naïve dupes of astute communist manipulators (Hoffman, 1986; Reagan, 1989; see also comments by Abrams, Reich,
and Fox in Sobel, 1993). Serious historical research on the movement has
shown that this is inaccurate (Gosse, 1988; 1996). At the same time, social scientists who have studied the movement have erred on the other side, describing it as if it were solely a domestic movement (Smith, 1996).6 As a result, they
have neglected the purposeful role that Nicaraguans played in the movement’s rise and success. Instead of trying to understand the Nicaragua solidarity movement through the lens of a nation-state-centered paradigm, I propose
a transnational framework of analysis that takes the nexus between U.S. and
Nicaraguan civil and political societies as the unit of analysis. This shift enables
us to see the movement’s origins and its relations with revolutionary social
forces in Nicaragua and to treat it as what it really was—a transnational social
movement in which U.S. and Central American citizens acted together synergistically to challenge U.S. policy.
The Nicaragua solidarity movement was a heterogeneous collection of
groups ranging from nonprofit, campus, church, and community-based organizations, foundations, and ad hoc committees to national-level organizations
and transnational advocacy networks. By 1986 organizations challenging U.S.
policy toward Central America numbered more than 2,000 and were located
throughout the United States (Smith, 1996: 387).7 What unified them was that
they all challenged President Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy in at
least one of three ways: (1) opposing that policy, especially the financing of the
Nicaraguan Contras,8 (2) providing material, monetary, technical, and personal aid to the people negatively affected by the policy, and (3) challenging
and refuting the administration’s framing of the problems and U.S. participation in Central America.
The evolution of the grassroots movement opposing U.S. policy toward
Nicaragua took place in three stages. The movement’s first phase lasted from
the early 1970s until the early 1980s. It was dominated by grassroots efforts
to build opposition to the Somoza regime and support for the social forces
organized to bring an end to the dictatorship, specifically the FSLN. It also
included the movement’s effort to get the U.S. administration to isolate the
dictator and, after the revolutionary triumph, to encourage amicable relations
between Nicaragua and the United States. The movement’s second phase
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 83
began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and ended in 1990
with the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat. This phase coincided with the U.S.
government’s increasing hostility to the FSLN’s revolutionary process, beginning with economic and political pressures and culminating in the Contra
War. It was also characterized by increased social movement activism and the
growth of public opposition to U.S. Central American policy. The third phase
began in 1990 and continues to the present.9
The roots of what came to be called the Nicaragua solidarity movement lie
in the political activism of Central American immigrants in the United States.
The role of these Nicaraguan immigrant-organizers was fundamental to the
initial growth of the movement. In the Nicaraguan case, many of these early
members of the Central American diaspora came to the United States fleeing
the repressive Somoza regime. Beginning immediately after the December 1972
Managua earthquake and continuing throughout the 1970s and early 1980s,
Nicaraguan exiles mobilized to protest against the corruption and brutality of
the Somoza regime and to oppose U.S. support of the dictatorship. The earliest
of these organizations was the Comité Cívico Latinoamericano Pro-Nicaragua
en los Estados Unidos (Comité Cívico), which formed in San Francisco. Because
many of its founders were poets and artists, much of its early organizing had
a strong cultural dimension. Its activities included helping found the historic
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, which was inaugurated by Nicaragua’s
revolutionary poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal and would go on to play an important role as a counterpublic space for the Nicaragua solidarity movement
(Murguia, 2002). Among the other early organizations formed by the Nicaraguan
immigrant community were Casa Nicaragua (various chapters), NICA (various chapters), the Washington Area Nicaragua Solidarity Organization, the
Committee in Solidarity with the People of Nicaragua, and Los Muchachos de
DC (Hamilton and Chinchilla, 2001: 129–130; Hoyt, 2003). Originally, these
activists organized locally within the Nicaraguan and Latina/o communities,
seeking to generate awareness of the deteriorating political climate in their
home country and the negative impact of U.S support for Somoza on the
Nicaraguan people. However, they quickly began attracting the support of
progressive North Americans (Gosse, 1988: 19–20).
By the late 1970s, these activists had organized various local Nicaraguan
committees around the United States, most of which had relations with the
FSLN. An example of this was the National Solidarity Week for Nicaragua
and El Salvador that took place in Washington, DC, in February 1980. The
week’s activities culminated with visits from two representatives of the
Sandinista government, Noel González from the foreign ministry and Sayda
Hernández from the Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda
Espinoza (Lusia Amanda Espino-za National Association of Nicaraguan
Women—AMNLAE) (Valente, 1980). After the Sandinista triumph, many progressive Nicaraguans returned home to help build the revolution, but those
who remained active in the United States worked to raise money and support
for the revolution and its literacy campaign. They also began trying to get North
Americans to travel to Nicaragua to observe and participate and then return to
the United States to share with others what they had seen (Gosse, 1988).
The first nationwide solidarity organization to incorporate North Americans
at the national level was the National Network in Solidarity with the Nicaraguan
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84 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
People (later renamed the Nicaragua Network). It was formed shortly before
the triumph of the revolution. According to the Nicaragua Network’s national
co-coordinator, Katherine Hoyt, not only were a number of the organization’s
founding member committees made up of Nicaraguans living in the United
States but its founding conference was held in direct response to an appeal for
help from the Nicaraguan social movement (Hoyt, 2003): “In February of 1979,
the Network was founded to support the popular struggle to overthrow the
45 year U.S.-supported Somoza family dictatorship, and after the July 19 victory, to support the efforts of the Sandinista Revolution to provide a better life
for the nation’s people.”10 By 1980, the Nicaragua Network had grown to incorporate about 50 member committees, eventually growing to over 350 committees across the United States (Chuck Kaufman, personal communication,
October 10, 2006). During this time, the Nicaragua Network’s major projects
included supporting Nicaragua’s literacy campaign and organizing national
speaking tours for Sandinista representatives (Gosse, 1988: 20–22).
The movement’s second phase coincided with the hardening of U.S. policy
against the Sandinistas. Since early 1982, the Reagan administration launched
efforts to organize, fund, and train a rebel force with the objective of overthrowing the FSLN government.11 While the Contras, as this rebel force came
to be called, could not directly defeat the Ejército Popular Sandinista (Sandinista
People’s Army), they could and did inflict great suffering on the Nicaraguan
people. In this context, a renewed call went out from Nicaragua informing
North Americans of the tragic impact of their government’s policy and asking
them to come and observe the reality for themselves and to take a stand against
intervention. At a 1982 solidarity conference in Managua, Sandinista Vice
President Sergio Ramírez urged the country’s intellectuals to “make contact
with U.S. writers, scientists, artists, and academics at once and urge them to
protest any kind of intervention in Central America or the Caribbean” (Ramírez,
1985: 7). The FSLN leadership hoped that allowing U.S. citizens to witness
firsthand the effects of U.S. policy on the average Nicaraguan would move
them to return home to denounce its negative impact (Griffin-Nolan, 1991:
27–28). In this regard, Sandinista efforts were extremely successful, with more
than 100,000 U.S. citizens traveling to Nicaragua by 1986 (Smith, 1996: 158).
By the mid-1980s Witness for Peace, a large national organization, had
begun working to influence U.S. policy toward Nicaragua. At the same time,
two new nationwide coalitions, the Pledge of Resistance and Quest for Peace,
had also been created to challenge Reagan’s Central American policy.12 The
Pledge of Resistance was a network designed to put out an immediate and
massive call for civil disobedience in case of an escalation of the Central
American conflict by the Reagan administration. Quest for Peace was a coalition aimed at providing material support directly to the victims of U.S. Contra
policy. These organizations became among the most effective vehicles for creating opposition to the administration’s Nicaragua policy.
However, they differed from previous organizations in that they did not
work directly with the FSLN. Witness for Peace coordinated its efforts with
progressive Nicaraguan religious organizations such as the Comité Evangélico
para Ayuda al Desarrollo (Evangelical Committee for Aid to Development—
CEPAD). Similarly, Quest for Peace worked with the John XXIII Institute for
Social Justice, based at the Central American University in Managua, which
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 85
provided assistance to rural victims of Contra attacks (Griffin-Nolan, 1991: 28).13
Beyond this, these organizations differed from earlier ones in that they were
not explicitly solidarity but rather peace or anti-intervention organizations. In
other words, they did not support the Sandinistas but simply opposed U.S.
Nicaraguan policy (Griffin-Nolan, 2000: 289).
GROWTH AND SPREAD OF THE MOVEMENT
Several factors facilitated the Nicaragua solidarity movement’s dynamic
growth. The first was the Sandinistas’ domestic legitimacy and international
credibility, the result of the open and democratic nature of the political system
implemented by the Sandinistas, the brutal violence of the Contras against
civilians, and the FSLN’s revolutionary mística (mystique) (Judson, 1987;
Mojica, 2007). As the political scientist Marco Mojica (2007: 8–9) explains,
“mística reflected a ‘saintly’ ethical and moral idea and practice that rejected
all of the vices produced by the dictatorship and capitalism: corruption, false
morality, exploitation, opportunism, individualism. . . . The ‘militante’ must,
above all, have a selfless commitment to others, surrendering his life if necessary.”14 When combined with the brutal repression and violence first by
Somoza’s National Guard and subsequently by the Contras, the new morality
gave the Nicaraguan Revolution credibility in a large and important sector of
the U.S. populace and inspired fierce loyalty among a smaller number.15
Second, the movement’s growth was helped by the high level of media
coverage, which, while not always accurate or fair, kept the political situation
and U.S. involvement in Central America in the public eye and on people’s
minds. Finally, the movement was greatly facilitated by the direct people-topeople links that were established between Nicaraguan civil-society organizations and North American solidarity, peace, religious, and human rights
organizations. These linkages were made possible by the geographic and cultural proximity that allowed travel and understanding between nations to
remain relatively fluid throughout the conflict. Most important, they were
created and strengthened by the Nicaraguan revolutionaries’ commitment
to maintaining meaningful communication with the North American people.
The Sandinistas believed that only the North Americans could stop their government’s aggression and that they would do so if they were exposed to
the real effects of U.S. policy on the average Nicaraguan (Ramírez, 1985: 7). As
noted by a U.S.-born Nicaraguan who returned to Nicaragua after Somoza’s
overthrow and became a high-ranking member of the FSLN’s Directorate of
International Relations (interview, New York, September 5, 2008), “The solidarity movement was an integral part of our multifaceted resistance strategy,
which allowed us to overcome our [material resource] limitations.”
SANDINISTA MÍSTICA VERSUS REACTIONARY VIOLENCE
The Somoza regime’s and subsequently the Contras’ propensity to commit
human rights violations not only inflicted great harm on the Nicaraguan people but also caused the solidarity movement to grow internationally. While the
Contras’ political repression imposed great suffering on the Nicaraguan people
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86 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
domestically, it also made them vulnerable to international criticism. An early
example of this came with the assassination by Somoza’s National Guardsmen
of the ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart on June 20, 1979. Stewart and
other reporters were in the country covering the fighting between the FSLN
and the National Guard, during which Somoza’s air force bombed many of
Nicaragua’s major cities while civilians were still present (Guillermoprieto,
1979; DeYoung, 1979a; DeYoung and Kinzer, 1979). Stewart was forced to lie
down in the street and shot in the back of the head. The cold-blooded murder
was captured on tape by Stewart’s camera crew and broadcast internationally
almost instantly (DeYoung, 1979b; 1979c; Riding, 1979). Similarly, in the mid1980s the Contras were heavily criticized not only for human rights violations
against countless Nicaraguans but also for the murder of the U.S. engineer
Benjamin Linder, who was in Nicaragua helping to develop hydroelectric systems for poor rural communities, and the kidnapping of 29 U.S. citizens from
a Witness for Peace delegation (AP, 1985; McGrory, 1987; Walsh, 1987; McCarthy,
1987; Lantigua, 1987).
U.S. activists judged the Sandinistas to be much less repressive and more
democratic than contemporary Central American governments and previous
Nicaraguan regimes and genuinely concerned with improving the plight of
their poorest people. These characteristics combined to give the Sandinistas a
revolutionary mystique that translated into credibility and broad support
within Nicaragua and internationally. As a result, they achieved legitimacy
not only among progressive and liberal U.S. constituencies but also among
mainstream U.S. religious organizations. The FSLN’s positive relationship
with this latter group was particularly important in that it allowed the movement to reach a broader audience (see Smith, 1996; Erickson-Nepstad, 2004).
By the middle of the decade, Nicaragua solidarity movement organizations
were operating in almost every state and generating substantial amounts of
grassroots pressure on Congress (Chuck Kaufman, personal communication,
October 10, 2006).
MEDIA COVERAGE
During the 1980s, the conflict in Central America and Nicaragua in particular
was among the news stories most covered by the mainstream U.S. media (see
Figure 1). At its peak in 1987, coverage by five leading U.S. newspapers
amounted to more than 3,500 articles. Accordingly, the Reagan administration
launched a broad public diplomacy campaign design to portray the Sandinista
government as illegitimate, undemocratic, repressive, and, most important, a
communist proxy for the Soviet Union that posed a direct threat to U.S. national
security (Perla, 2005: 168). The administration also sought to discredit the
Nicaragua solidarity movement as an agent or puppet of the FSLN. To a significant degree, this strategy worked. As the Nicaragua Network national cocoordinator Kathy Hoyt (personal communication, October 10, 2006) explains,
While we got tens of thousands of people to come to Washington for demonstrations and got thousands of people to do civil disobedience at the local level over
aid to the Contras, never were any of these actions covered in the national media.
Never was there an article in Newsweek or Time or the New York Times about 2,000
people being arrested in 50 cities coast to coast, for example. There was an
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 87
4000
3500
No. of Articles
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1971 1974 1977 1980 1983 1986 1989 1992 1995 1998 2001 2004
Year
Figure 1. Nicaragua Coverage in the Mainstream U.S. Press (Based on coverage in five major
U.S. newspapers—the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Miami Herald,
and the Washington Post—as reported)
understanding among them, evidently, not to report on these actions. When we
did get local media they twisted what we said, took it out of context, etc., etc.
At the same time, the administration sought to portray the Contras as freedom
fighters, going so far as to call them “the moral equivalent of our founding
fathers” (Cannon, 1985).
This framing was countered by Reagan’s opponents and contradicted by
the news stories from the region. Much of U.S. media’s coverage focused on
domestic Nicaraguan causes for the war that were completely unrelated to
Reagan’s alleged Soviet threat (Perla, 2005: 167–198) and on the human suffering caused by the Contras’ efforts to overthrow the FSLN by punishing
Nicaragua’s civilian population through both economic sabotage and military
actions (Dickey, 1985).
DIRECT PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE LINKS
The crucial factor facilitating the growth of the movement was the direct
people-to-people links created between Nicaragua and the United States. This
capability allowed the movement to thwart the administration’s attempts to
control the information that the U.S. public received about the conflict. Two
types of linkages in Nicaragua were vital to the movement’s success: governmental and nongovernmental.
The governmental links were mediated by the FSLN, its mass organizations,
and the Consejo Nicaragüense para la Amistad, Solidaridad, y Paz (Nicaraguan
Council for Peace, Solidarity, and Friendship—CNASP), the government agency
in charge of receiving and coordinating efforts with international solidarity
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88 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
groups. As the Contra War intensified and fear of a U.S. invasion increased,
the FSLN undertook the creation and cultivation of links that would generate
a grassroots movement of U.S. citizens to oppose Reagan’s policy. To this end,
it established direct relations with many of these U.S. organizations and sent
many of its most effective cadres and supporters on speaking tours of the
United States. Organizations like the Nicaragua Network took full advantage
of these openings to develop strong working relations with the FSLN and
Sandinista mass organizations. One of the most significant examples was
the Nicaragua Network’s “Let Nicaragua Live” campaign, the U.S. branch of
the international campaign “Nicaragua Debe Sobrevivir.” As part of this campaign the Nicaragua Network participated in an initiative called “Oats for
Peace,” contracting with Southern black family farmers to grow oats that it
bought at fair-trade prices and then shipped to Nicaragua for processing. This
initiative not only created jobs but also helped supplement the diets of children in hospitals and orphanages. In this way, the Nicaragua Network was
able to use channels made available by the Sandinistas to link disparate socialjustice efforts for mutual benefit in the United States and Nicaragua (Chuck
Kaufman, personal communication, October 10, 2006).
Among the most effective Nicaraguan revolutionary organizations at creating people-to-people links was an organization called the Mothers of the
Heroes and Martyrs. Started by AMNLAE, in 1979, it was made up mostly
of poor women who had lost children to the Somoza dictatorship and the
Contras. Its most powerful means of creating international solidarity was its
ability to frame the impact of U.S.-Nicaraguan policy in starkly human terms
through the personal narratives of its members. Mothers told the stories of
their children’s deaths to anyone who would listen, speaking to international
delegations visiting Nicaragua and to audiences across the United States and
around the world. Their stories of maternal grief evoked emotions that transcended national, cultural, and political divides. Direct contact with the mothers and their narratives was extremely effective in contradicting the U.S.
administration’s description of the Contras as freedom fighters (Bayard de
Volo, 2001, 127–145).
At the same time, nongovernmental linkages were sponsored by progressive Nicaraguan religious organizations such as CEPAD and the John XXIII
Institute for Social Justice. CEPAD came into existence in 1972, shortly after
the Managua earthquake, and beginning in the 1980s started developing a
strong relationship with religious North Americans interested in stopping the
Contra War. The idea behind Witness for Peace emerged in 1983 from a delegation of church people to Nicaragua, coordinated through CEPAD. The delegation visited a farm on the Nicaraguan border with Honduras that had just
been attacked by the Contras. The delegates were struck by the victims’ suffering (Griffin-Nolan, 2000: 280):
A young mother stood trembling in shock inside. Her three children and her
mother had been taken away in an ambulance that morning. An infant, two toddlers, and their grandmother were all injured in the overnight attack. She didn’t
know if they were dead or alive. The fear and anguish on her face told the delegation more about the war in Nicaragua than a week of meetings or years of
reading.
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 89
They were also struck by the fact that the Contras seemingly declined to attack
while North Americans were present. Upon returning to Managua, they talked
with religious leaders from CEPAD about the possibility of bringing 1,500
North Americans to hold a prayer vigil on the border. Sixto Ulloa, responsible
for CEPAD’s international relations, then arranged for the group to meet with
various high-ranking Sandinistas, among them President Daniel Ortega himself. At the meeting, Ortega encouraged and supported the idea of bringing
ever-larger delegations of North Americans to Nicaragua’s war zones (GriffinNolan, 2000: 282).
With CEPAD’s support, Witness for Peace developed one of its most effective strategies for building opposition to U.S. policy.16 They encouraged delegations of U.S. citizens to visit or work in the border region between Honduras
and Nicaragua, where fighting with the Contras was most intense. It was successful not only in getting North Americans to witness the destructive impact
of U.S. policy on Nicaraguans but also in getting them to return home to
oppose it and encourage others to do so (Griffin-Nolan, 2000: 27–28). Shortterm volunteers would visit for a few weeks, and long-term volunteers would
stay for a year. During that time, they would be exposed to the human suffering of Nicaraguan peasants at the hands of the U.S.-funded and -trained
Contras. Following their stays, they would return to their communities to
share what they had seen with others. Without the support of CEPAD and at
minimum the acquiescence of the FSLN, this strategy would not have been
possible. The former DRI member mentioned earlier (interview, New York,
September 5, 2008) explained, “We took the strategic decision to maintain a
permanent presence of North Americans in the country to prevent a U.S. invasion, to neutralize it militarily.”
GOALS AND STRATEGIES
Throughout its existence the Nicaragua solidarity movement pursued two
main goals: to draw U.S. citizens’ attention to the suffering resulting from U.S.
policy toward Nicaragua and to promote a sustained social movement by U.S.
citizens against their government’s Nicaragua policy.17 To achieve these objectives, the movement implemented a strategy designed to shape the U.S. public’s understanding of U.S. Nicaragua policy by presenting an alternative
frame that contested the U.S. government’s official version.
ATTRACTING U.S. CITIZENS’ ATTENTION
The growth of opposition to U.S. Contra policy was a function of the
movement’s ability to reach the U.S. public with an alternative explanation.
This alternative was diffused in various ways. The first mechanism was public
outreach, educational campaigns, and speaking tours, often by Nicaraguan
revolutionaries, as well as by physically taking delegations and brigades of
North Americans to Nicaragua—in other words, grassroots transnational activism. This was quite effective and reached many within or close to what can
be called the U.S.–Central American counterpublic18 (churches, unions, universities, and peace, justice, human rights, immigrant rights, leftist, and liberal
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90 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
organizations). The second mechanism was the use of the mainstream media,19
and a third was the activities of the solidarity organizations themselves.
At the grassroots level and among sympathetic audiences, the stories of
Nicaraguan victims of Contra violence had a deep resonance and were profoundly moving. Conversely, in the mainstream U.S. media, reports of the
massacre of “anonymous” Nicaraguans captured national attention for only
an instant. Thus, while most of the Contra War’s victims were Nicaraguans,
the few North American victims received disproportionate media attention.
One of best-known of these cases was the Contra murders of Sergio Hernández,
Pablo Rosales, and Benjamin Linder (Kruckewitt, 2001). Hernández and Rosales
were young Nicaraguan Sandinistas, and in typical fashion U.S. media coverage barely mentioned them. In contrast, because Linder was a U.S. engineer
volunteering his skills in war-torn Nicaragua, his murder received significant
coverage.20
Although most activists would undoubtedly deplore the implicit ethnocentrism or even racism at play in this dynamic, the movement vindicated the
young men’s deaths by describing Benjamin Linder as a martyr. In doing so it
sought to build opposition to the Contra policy that had caused not only his
death but also the deaths of thousands of Nicaraguans like Sergio Hernández
and Pablo Rosales. In this way the movement carried on the fallen activists’
struggle.
However, the most effective way information about what was happening
on the ground in Nicaragua was channeled to the North American people was
via the national solidarity organizations. Serving a function analogous to that
played by the Internet or blogs today, many of these organizations maintained
phone-tree networks to disseminate emergency action alerts.21 They also
maintained regular weekly, biweekly, or monthly publications (such as the
Nicaragua Network’s Nicaragua Monitor and Witness for Peace’s newsletter)
that provided their supporters with up-to-date information. Likewise, the
official Sandinista newspaper was translated into English for dissemination in
the United States as Barricada Internacional. These newsletters, bulletins, informational mailings, and emergency action alerts were circulated to thousands
of North Americans. Not only did they provide detailed information directly
from the Nicaraguans about the latest events and atrocities in the region but
also they kept people informed about U.S. policy debates and upcoming votes
in Congress. Most important, they provided a constant flow of alternative
framings of the Reagan administration’s policy and its impact on the people
of Central America (Perla, 2005).
PROMOTING SUSTAINED COLLECTIVE ACTION
By the mid-1980s much of the public opposition to U.S. Central American
policy was focused on stopping U.S. efforts in Nicaragua. This can largely be
attributed to the success of the large nationwide organizations and coalitions,
which together mobilized well over 100,000 North Americans. Moreover, with
these large organizations’ help, local church and student groups, community
organizations, foundations, and solidarity organizations had proliferated, many
of them with the express purpose of changing U.S. policy toward Nicaragua.
By mid-decade thousands of groups were operating throughout the country,
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 91
bringing hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens into direct opposition to U.S.
Contra policy (Smith, 1996: 387–388). As the sociologist Christian Smith’s
(1996: 60) study of the Nicaragua solidarity movement has documented, it was
these national-level organizations that formed the backbone of the movement.
Largely as a result of their efforts, huge nationwide demonstrations were held
throughout the 1980s to protest the Reagan administration’s policy in Nicaragua.
As Holly Sklar (1988: 354) explains,
An invasion of Nicaragua would also trigger mass protest in the United States
like nothing this country has seen since the civil rights and Vietnam War-era
peace movements. About 2000 people were arrested in Pledge of Resistance protests following the imposition of the U.S. trade embargo on Nicaragua in May
1985. . . . An estimated 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington in the April
1987 National Mobilization for Peace and Justice in Central America and South
Africa. . . . More than 500 people were arrested while attempting to block the
gates at CIA headquarters. Tens of thousands of Americans demonstrated across
the country in response to the March 1988 deployment of U.S. troops to
Honduras, providing only a glimmer of the protest that would meet a direct
invasion of Nicaragua.
Simultaneously, various organizations shipped large quantities of direct
assistance and sent large numbers of U.S. volunteers to Nicaragua to try to
offset the costs of the Contra War. Specifically, Quest for Peace sought to pay
highly visible reparations to Nicaragua by annually raising the same amount
of money from U.S. citizens that the administration provided to the Contras.
When Congress authorized $27 million to the Contras in August 1985, a Quest
for Peace campaign raised the same amount in humanitarian assistance for
the Nicaraguan people in a little over a year. Again, when Congress approved
$100 million for the Contras in October 1986, Quest for Peace repeated its
campaign and reached its goal by December 1987. Other documented efforts
include hundreds of thousands of dollars sent by the American Friends Service
Committee and Oxfam, more than 70 sister-city projects providing direct
aid, thousands of volunteers providing their time and skill in Nicaragua, and
various national and international campaigns (Peace, 1991: 87–90; McGinnis,
1985: 136).
OFFERING AN ALTERNATIVE FRAME
When the United States began supporting the Contra rebels and menacing
Nicaragua in 1982, the Reagan administration sought to portray its policy as
a defensive reaction to Soviet aggression in the hemisphere (Omang, 1985). In
response, Nicaraguan revolutionaries sought to influence the U.S. public perception of the conflict by offering an alternative frame in terms of which U.S.
public opposition could grow. While innumerable specific narratives were
used to counter the administration’s policy, they were unified by the fact that
they offered a complete reframing of the problem by focusing on how the
Nicaraguan revolutionaries perceived the issue: as an act of aggression against
Nicaragua. Consequently, their narratives focused on the effects of the Contra
War on innocent Nicaraguans, the struggle of a poor nation against a powerful
one, Nicaraguan youth being killed while defending against Contra attacks,
the U.S. government’s role in supporting corrupt actors or exacerbating a
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92 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
bloody conflict with countless human rights violations, and the injustices
committed by the Contras on innocent victims (Smith, 1996: 237–279; Perla, 2005:
167–198; n.d.).
The Nicaraguans’ ability to disseminate an alternative frame that would
resonate with the U.S. public was essential to their strategy of defeating U.S.
foreign policy. There is perhaps no better example of this strategy’s effectiveness than the Pledge of Resistance. The Pledge was born a week after the U.S.
invasion of Grenada in 1983 at a meeting of 53 Christian peace and justice
activists “who were in close communication with alarmed Nicaraguan church
leaders” (Smith, 1996: 78). The fear of the Nicaraguan religious leaders that the
Grenada invasion was merely the prelude to Reagan’s true goal, the invasion
of Nicaragua, was transmitted directly to the North Americans present at the
meeting, and the Pledge of Resistance was the result.22 By the end of 1986, the
Nicaraguans’ cry for help that had motivated those first 53 activists had produced a pledge by at least 80,000 U.S. citizens to protest legally or through
civil disobedience in the event of a major U.S. escalation in Central America
(Peace, 1991: 88). During his fast to draw attention to and denounce U.S. policy toward Nicaragua, Sandinista Foreign Minister Father Miguel d’Escoto
explained the Pledge’s importance as follows:23
Reagan needs to create internal conditions in the US to launch an invasion . . .
but he has not yet succeeded in convincing the US people. The President has not
persuaded his people, nor will he be able to. Here we have a gap that needs
to be widened. In this gap are the people of the United States. They are the ones
who can and should stop Reagan. To achieve this, the most effective actions are
those which they themselves are carrying out with courage, patience and constancy, those thousands of women and men who have made a “pledge of resistance” against the aggressiveness of US government leaders. They are “resisting”
the policy of violence and terrorism with non-violent actions. They have to
become more, they have to resist more, they have to widen the gap through this
resistance. Achieving peace will depend in large part on their non-violent actions
and on the conviction that they are essential.
POSTREVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENTS AND MOVEMENT RESTRUCTURING
By the early 1990s, the Nicaraguan-focused organizations of the Central
American peace and solidarity movement had begun to decline. They were
particularly hard-hit by several developments on the ground in Nicaragua.
The electoral defeat of the FSLN in 1990 was followed shortly thereafter by
allegations of corruption aimed at long-time party leaders and subsequently
by sexual abuse allegations against Daniel Ortega. Nicaraguan solidarity
organizations were also deeply affected by the purge and/or defection of a
large percentage of the Sandinistas’ most internationally effective, best-known,
and most respected cadres. This string of negative allegations and political
developments took a heavy toll on international support for the FSLN. As a
consequence, support for the movement associated with the Sandinista revolution dwindled. The effects of these events and allegations on the Nicaragua
solidarity movement clearly illustrate how intertwined and interdependent
the movement was with on-the-ground politics and actors in Nicaragua.
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 93
ADAPTING TO A NEW REALITY
To deal with these developments, organizations such as the Nicaragua
Network, Witness for Peace, and Quest for Peace (the Pledge of Resistance no
longer exists) have for the most part had to make changes in the way they
operate. The most significant change was to broaden the scope of their solidarity, justice, and anti-intervention work. Witness for Peace has gone the farthest
in adopting this model. It currently has programs in Colombia, Mexico,
Nicaragua, and Cuba and has begun leading delegations to Venezuela and
Bolivia.24 Quest for Peace has been able to maintain its exclusive focus on
Nicaragua, but it has become part of a larger organization, the Quixote Center,
which has several other domestic and international programs.25
The Nicaragua Network has also been able to keep its primary focus on
Nicaragua, but at considerable expense and through substantial hardship. The
organization no longer maintains a staff person in Nicaragua, and there are
only two full-time staff people in the national office. It has collaborated with
Nicaraguan organizations such as the Asociación Kairos para la Formación to
handle its in-country logistics, as well as working with incipient groups that
are focused on hot topics and slightly broadening the vision and focus of its
mission. For example, the Nicaragua Network has been extremely active in
the formation of the 50 Years Is Enough Campaign, the Alliance for Global
Justice, the Mexico Solidarity Network, the Campaign for Labor Rights, the
Chiapas Media Project, the Answer Coalition, and the anti-CAFTA movement.
As the national co-coordinator Chuck Kaufman (interview, Managua, June 23,
2006) explained, “Today we do antiglobalization work, but we do it through
the lens of Nicaragua and by supporting the struggle of the Nicaraguan people against the injustices of globalization.”26
CONTINUING THE STRUGGLE
Despite the challenges that the Nicaraguan solidarity movement has faced in
the years since the end of the revolutionary government, it continues working
on many of the same problems that plagued Nicaragua during the 1980s and
1990s. Foremost among these are the lack of economic justice (severe inequality
and grinding poverty), limited rights for women, and lingering rural underdevelopment. However, one of the most pressing problems facing the country
continues to be U.S. embassy and administration officials’ violations of
Nicaragua’s political sovereignty through illegal interference in elections.
By adapting to the changing global context and forms of U.S. intervention
through creative innovations Nicaragua solidarity movement organizations
have been able to maintain a significant number of activists and organizations
working in solidarity with Nicaragua. As Chuck Kaufmann (personal communication, October 10, 2006) explains, the Nicaragua Network alone continues to maintain “200 local committees that identify with us in one way or
another, such as paying dues, taking tours, mobilizing on alerts, etc. There are
still 64 sister cities. Granted, most committees are much older and smaller
than they were in the ‘80s . . . but we’re not dead yet!”
One of the most successful strategies has been the adoption of “election
interference monitoring delegations,” pioneered by the Nicaragua Network.
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94 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
Unlike traditional election observer delegations, which arrive to monitor the
actual voting process, the Nicaragua Network’s delegations observe the leadup to elections. These delegations are made up of U.S. citizens and are designed
to monitor and denounce any U.S. government efforts during the campaign
period to influence the electoral outcome by (1) supporting its preferred candidate or (2) intimidating those considering voting for other parties. The first
delegation went to Nicaragua in June 2006, five months before the elections,
and was followed up with another one (this one in conjunction with Quest for
Peace) two months before the elections. This was done at the behest of progressive Nicaraguan social movement organizations and the FSLN but also
as a result of the blatant political interference that U.S. Ambassador Paul
Trivelli was conducting through the Nicaraguan press. These efforts at polyarchy promotion had contributed to the FSLN’s defeat in the 1990, 1996, and
2001 Nicaraguan elections.27
But in 2006 the fear campaign was partly negated by the Nicaragua solidarity organizations’ efforts, which culminated in press conference denunciations
that received wide coverage by the Nicaraguan media and resulted in the issuance of a report that was subsequently sent to all U.S. congressional representatives (Lopez, 2006; Sandoval and Aguirre, 2006). The Nicaragua Network’s
election-interference monitoring delegations offer a useful new model by
which grassroots social movement organizations in the United States and Latin
America can challenge Washington’s efforts to enforce hegemony through
polyarchy promotion and electoral interference.28 This successful effort, combined with the resurgence of the FSLN, may also mark the beginning of a new
phase of renewed solidarity with Nicaragua to the degree that the FSLN governs the country progressively.29
CONCLUSION: ASSESSING THE MOVEMENT’S ACHIEVEMENTS
The Nicaragua solidarity movement had significant accomplishments
throughout the 1980s, and Nicaraguans played an important role in all of these
successes. I conclude by listing a few of them as an indication of how effective
a transnational grassroots movement for social justice can be when activists in
North and Latin America cooperate to achieve a shared objective.
The most obvious achievement is that the United States was unable to escalate its war on Nicaragua or to use the vastly more powerful weapons and
resources at its disposal against the revolutionary government.30 Most important, it never sent in troops, and accounts from administration insiders show
that the solidarity movement played an important role in making this option
“off-limits” (Sobel, 1993: 116).
Moreover, the case of U.S. policy toward Nicaragua is the only example of the
Reagan Doctrine in which the president did not get all the funds he requested
from Congress. In the other cases (Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia), he
was often given more money than requested, even though he was asking for
much larger amounts (Scott, 1996: 34–35). In addition, the movement was
instrumental in overcoming Congress’s traditional reluctance to take a strong
stance against a popular president’s foreign policy involving the use of force
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 95
for fear of negative electoral consequences. These are major accomplishments
in the U.S. foreign policy system that is historically skewed in favor of the
executive branch. By making this a priority issue and guaranteeing that people would know whether their congressperson was voting against Reagan’s
Nicaragua policy, the Nicaragua solidarity movement provided the necessary
incentives for Congress to take a stand (Sobel, 2001: 136). When Congress cut
off Contra aid, the administration had no choice but an end run around
Congress to continue funding its policy illegally—a move that nearly brought
about Reagan’s impeachment. In essence, the administration’s policy was effectively defeated within the formal realm of politics. This was an unprecedented
accomplishment given the president’s popularity, his intense commitment to
the policy, and the lack of U.S. casualties. This is something that has not been
thoroughly grasped, explored, or emphasized because of scholars’ focus on
understanding what went wrong with the Sandinista revolution.
Third, and even more remarkable, Reagan’s policy was defeated in
Nicaragua. The Contras were never able to overthrow the FSLN government
as the Mujahedin did in Afghanistan or even achieve a power-sharing scheme
as did the U.S.-backed rebels in Angola. In the end the FSLN was voted out of
power through the democratic process that it had inaugurated. Ironically, this
was the very same democratic process that the Reagan administration had
sought to prevent, undermine, delegitimize, and destroy, going so far as to call
it a “Soviet-style sham” (McCartney, 1984; Weisman, 1984). This was a defeat
for the Sandinistas only in a limited sense, given the context. They did not
suffer anything like the absolute defeat of the New Jewel Movement in
Grenada, Noriega in Panama, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the pro-Soviet Afghan
regime, or even the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Instead, they
remained the single largest opposition political force in Nicaragua. At the
same time, their electoral defeat was not a victory for Reagan’s policy, which
was designed not to vote the Sandinistas out of power but to overthrow the
FSLN militarily and to crush Sandinismo as a political force. Given the asymmetry of the conflict, preventing Reagan from achieving these objectives
was a major accomplishment. While the Sandinistas eventually lost the 1990
elections, it was largely because of the Nicaragua solidarity movement’s success in limiting the power that the United States could bring to bear against
Nicaragua that the Bush administration was forced to abandon Reagan’s tactics and settle for more limited objectives attainable through the promotion of
polyarchy (Perla, 2005: 4).
The literature on this issue has tended to view things in starkly dichotomous
terms of defeat or victory. To me the episode is more accurately described as a
draw in a situation in which the result, given the differences in power between
the United States and Nicaragua, should have been an easy victory for the
Reagan administration. What if the administration and the Contras had been
given a free hand instead of being limited by the Nicaragua solidarity movement? The U.S. military had vast potential to escalate the conflict, including
continuous mining of the country’s harbors, direct air strikes, bombings, and
missile attacks on Managua. The Contras could have received well over $100
million for several years, and U.S. troops could have invaded Nicaragua.
How much more painful would the punishment unleashed on the Nicaraguan
people have been under this scenario? The only real victory is that we will never
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96 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
know because this never happened, and the Nicaragua solidarity movement
had an important role in ensuring that it did not.
Finally, the outcome of the 1990 elections laid the groundwork for the peaceful transition of the military conflict to the political arena. As evidenced by
Daniel Ortega’s November 2006 electoral victory, despite Reagan and his successors’ best efforts, the FSLN continues to be a formidable political force in
Nicaragua. The Nicaragua solidarity movement has played an integral part
in all its victories and continues to do so. More important, from the beginning
Nicaraguans—both in the United States and in their home country—have
been an integral part of the movement’s success.
NOTES
1. The records of grassroots letters to President Ronald Reagan show that, during his terms
in office, no foreign-policy issue received more opposition over such an extended period of time
as U.S. policy toward Central America. See Major Issues Mail—Final Tallies, Boxes OA 5840
through 12212, Correspondence, Office of White House Records, Reagan Library.
2. The Nicaragua solidarity movement was part of a broader Central American peace and
solidarity movement that included solidarity and peace groups focusing on El Salvador and
Guatemala.
3. “Contentious political mobilization” is defined as “episodic, public, collective interaction
among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an
object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests
of at least one of the claimants” (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, 2001: 5). This is closely related to
Guidry and Sawyer’s (2003: 273) concept of “contentious pluralism,” which they define as the
way in which “marginalized groups use a variety of performative and subversive methods to
uproot the public sphere from its exclusionary history as they imagine, on their own terms,
democratic possibilities that did not previously exist. In so doing, they plant the seeds of a more
egalitarian public politics in new times and places.”
4. By “Nicaraguan revolutionaries” I mean FSLN cadres, their supporters in mass and social
movement organizations, and members of sympathetic civil society organizations in Nicaragua,
as well as their Nicaraguan cadres and sympathizers residing in the United States.
5. I refer to a movement as “transnational” when societal actors in at least two different
nation-states cooperate or coordinate efforts to achieve a shared political goal.
6. Alternatively, it is considered a transnational movement in a limited sense by Sharon
Erickson-Nepstad (2004), who tries to explain why U.S. citizens would become committed to a
distant struggle that did not directly affect them.
7. This figure includes organizations that worked on El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or
Central America more generally in the United States but not similar organizations in Central
America or other parts of the world.
8. The Contras were the U.S.-organized, -trained, and -financed rebels who sought to overthrow the FSLN government during the 1980s. Their name is derived from the shortened version
of the Spanish word contra-revolucionarios (counterrevolutionaries).
9. Although there are some indications that the FSLN’s 2006 electoral victory may lead to a
renewed phase of Nicaragua solidarity activism, it is too early to say definitively that this is the
case.
10. http://www.nicanet.org/#about (accessed September 11, 2006).
11. Evidence of Reagan administration complicity in the training of former Nicaraguan
National Guardsmen to overthrow the Sandinistas can be found even earlier (see, for instance,
Economist, 1981). Reagan signed the presidential finding authorizing the CIA to “support and
conduct paramilitary operations against Nicaragua” on December 1, 1981. http://nsarchive.
chadwyck.com/nsa/documents/IC/00041/all.pdf (accessed June 5, 2007).
12. As Chuck Kaufmann, co-coordinator of the Nicaragua Network (personal communication,
October 10, 2006) explains, “The Quest was originally a project including the Quixote Center,
Nicaragua Network, and pretty much all sectors of the movement. The Quixote Center offered
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Perla / HEIRS OF SANDINO 97
to keep track of the tally, which was the Quest. It wasn’t their project but rather a movementwide
project for which they kept the tally. Over time Quest for Peace took on an identity of its own
within the Quixote Center, but it didn’t start that way.”
13. See http://quest.quixote.org/ for an account of Quest for Peace’s current and historic
work with Nicaragua.
14. The international allure of the Sandinista mystique diminished significantly over time,
especially after their electoral loss in 1990.
15. See Major Issues Mail—Final Tallies, Boxes OA 5840 through 12212, Correspondence,
Office of White House Records, Reagan Library.
16. Analysis of letters from opponents of the president’s policy shows that the Central
American peace and solidarity movement was constituents’ primary motivator of opposition
(see Perla, 2005: 153–154).
17. A third goal, one not adopted by all movement organizations, was to raise support for the
Sandinista revolution.
18. According to Lee (2002: 33), “counterpublics” are issue-specific “institutionalized and
indigenous safe harbors that generate counter-valent political information and sustain oppositional political ideologies.”
19. The Sandinistas were aware of this and sought to develop good professional relations
with journalists working for major U.S. mainstream newspapers and television networks. For
evidence of the media’s effect see Iyengar (1987) and Krosnick and Kinder (1990).
20. However, it is worth noting that Republican supporters of the administration and officials
of the U.S. embassy in Nicaragua tried to blame Ben Linder for his death, and this smear campaign was carried in the media (New York Times, May 28, 1987; St. Petersburg Times, April 29, 1987).
21. This is also the way the Pledge of Resistance was mobilized (Kathy Hoyt, personal communication, May 16, 2007).
22. See also Ken Butigan’s slightly different account of its founding. http://paceebene.org/
pace/nvns/essays-on-nonviolence/a-journey-for-peace-and-justice (accessed September 19,
2006).
23. http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3403 (accessed April 7, 2009).
24. http://www.witnessforpeace.org/ (accessed September 19, 2006).
25. http://quest.quixote.org/ (accessed September 19, 2006).
26. Nicaragua Network, “List of interventions by the United States government in Nicaragua’s
democratic process.” http://www.nicanet.org/list_of_interventionist_statments.php (accessed
November 11, 2006). See also the letter from President Ortega. http://www.nicanet.org/Ortega_
letter.php (accessed November 11, 2006).
27. Robinson (1996) defines polyarchy promotion as an institutional “rearrangement of
political systems in the peripheral and semi-peripheral zones of the ‘world system’ so as to
secure the underlying objective of maintaining essentially undemocratic societies inserted into
an unjust international system. The promotion of ‘low-intensity democracy’ [polyarchy] is aimed
not only at mitigating the social and political tensions produced by elite-based and undemocratic status quos, but also at suppressing popular and mass aspirations for more thoroughgoing
democratization of social life in the twenty-first-century international order.” Robinson argues
that “polyarchy is a structural feature of the emergent global society. Just as ‘client regimes’ and
right-wing dictatorships installed into power or supported by the United States were characteristic of a whole era of U.S. foreign policy and intervention abroad in the post–World War II
period, promoting ‘low-intensity democracies’ in the Third World is emerging as a cornerstone
of a new era in U.S. foreign policy.”
28. This strategy was replicated by the SHARE Foundation and Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador (CISPES) before the 2009 Salvadoran legislative and municipal elections (January), as well as its March presidential elections.
29. See, for instance, the Nicaragua Network’s Nicaragua and U.S. Solidarity Conference,
held in Managua July 13–15, 2007. http://www.nicanet.org/meetings/solidarity_conf_2007.php
(accessed April 1, 2007).
30. One example of a possible escalation was to bomb Nicaragua as advocated by then deputy director of the CIA and current secretary of defense Robert Gates (see Julian E. Barnes, Los
Angeles Times, “Gates pushed for bombing of Sandinistas.” http://www.latimes.com/news/
nationworld/nation/la-na-gates25nov25,0,5508834.story (accessed November 28, 2006).
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98 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
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