The Nicaraguan Question: Contadora and the Latin American Response to US Intervention Against the Sandinistas, 1982–86

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.

The First R2P

This chapter explores the role of international lawyers as enablers of military intervention. US lawyers frequently justified US intervention on behalf of private interests in Latin America. They did not ignore the law to do so. While agreeing with Latin Americans that international law frowned on violent debt collection, they contended that it permitted intervention to ‘protect’ citizens and property. When combined with discourses of civilization and barbarism, lawyers found it easy to justify interstate violence even on behalf of unscrupulous claimants: too easy, in fact. As a result, such interventions often lacked public legitimacy and required deft diplomacy to limit political blowback. Just as contemporary debates over the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ have offered legal justification while stirring political controversies, so too the assertion of a ‘Right to Protect’ citizens and investments a century ago demonstrates the importance of legal expertise in shaping the contours of interstate violence.

Late Spanish Empire

After the Seven Years’ War, the Spanish Empire entered into a quickening spiral of internal and external changes. International rivalries accelerated internal adjustments in the relationship between society and an increasingly bureaucratic, intrusive, and demanding state. Internal and international conflicts resulting from the late-eighteenth-century wars and the Napoleonic invasion culminated with the crisis of the American empire and the emergence of independent republics all over the Spanish America. It was in those decades that the system of three colonies that would survive until the end of the Nineteenth century—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—was established. In the following decades, the three remaining overseas possessions would be sites of enormous changes. The Spanish monarchy put renewed emphasis on military might, giving its authorities a praetorian standing and skirting the edges of the liberal constitutionalism that ruled the Peninsula since 1836–1837. Cuba became critically important as the world’s greatest sugar-producing region, whose wealth was the result of vast plantations worked by slaves and indentured laborers imported (despite abolition) by British, French US and Spanish vessels. Meanwhile, In parallel, the Philippines became a major tobacco grower, the center of commerce with Asia, China in particular . The crisis of slavery in the Antilles after three wars of independence (1868-1898) and the subsequent political paralysis owing to the lack of reforms weakened Spain’s position as a colonial power in the last third of the nineteenth century. The US intervention of 1898, which coincided with anti-imperialist revolutions in Cuba and the Philippines, forced Spain to definitively withdraw, putting an end to its transatlantic nexus and to the Spanish nation’s identity as an American and Asian country.

Drivers

This chapter explains the phenomenon as vicarious warfare confronts us today, and studies the multiple factors driving its modern adoption. It argues that vicarious warfare has come to dominate US strategic practice over the last decade, but in its contemporary form, it emerged out of developments apparent since at least the early 1990s, and in certain areas well before that. The chapter begins by considering some of the underlying factors that make proactive, forceful US intervention appear to policymakers as both essential and feasible. These should be understood as necessary but not sufficient factors because they do not necessarily preclude alternative military approaches more in line with the prescriptions of the other traditions of conventional battle or small wars. Why predominantly vicarious methods have come to the fore will become apparent as the chapter progresses to consider more specific and circumstantial factors associated with core sections of US society: namely, the military, the wider public and the media. The chapter concludes by bringing the analysis together to explain how, due to the confluence of developments in these various spheres, vicarious warfare emerges as an especially appealing solution for defence officials and political leaders facing multiple competing pressures and exigencies.

Cold War and American Intervention in Malvinas (1982)

This article analyzes the Malvinas war from a global perspective, understanding the direction that it took on as intertwined with the international context of the Cold War. To this end, the emphasis is placed on the analysis of the United States policy, first a diplomatic one and then an interventionist one, as an ally of Great Britain. Analyzing the bilateral conversations between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan together with official statements and publications of different US state agencies, it can be seen the way in which the development of the Malvinas war, beyond the regional particularities that triggered it, was inserted within the anti-Soviet logic of the second Cold War. Added to this is a global context of the imposition of neoliberal policies that radicalized the US intervention in Latin America in favor of the imposition of its capitalist imperialist model.

The Systems Perspective on the Transformation Towards Sustainability

From the systems perspective, the ultimate ‘Angst’ of societies is the occurrence of ‘dystopian’ system rupture, which can be the outcome not only of unexpected events leading to the elimination of principles that bind actors together (e.g., identity), but also by purported solutions that create further ‘horrendous’ events. System ruptures are not only linked with natural hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and pandemics (such as the Ebola outbreak), but also with collapsing national governments and regimes, for example following the outbreak of a popular revolt after a state-sanctioned escalation of violence (e.g., Mubarak’s Egypt and Ghadafi’s Libya) or an outside intervention (e.g., Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq following the US intervention). Assuming that transformation can be either a response to a collapsed system or a preventive effort to avert collapse, this chapter starts by looking at the cognitive aspects of transformation in terms of experiences.