Guard.9 Rank-and-file members of the Guard were left to protect what remained of the government, but without leadership the Guard easily crumbled. Many of the soldiers fled to neighboring countries, especially Honduras, to avoid the retribution that would inevitably follow. On July 19, a coalition of moderates and leftists took control of Nicaragua's government. Calling itself the Government of National Reconstruction, the coalition debated ways to rebuild the wartorn country, provide desperately needed social services, and encourage the consumer and investor confidence needed for economic growth.
The ideological cleavages among the coalition members proved difficult to overcome. While all were committed to agrarian reform and basic social welfare programs such as universal health care, literacy, and free public education, they disagreed on the roles that the private sector and the multiparty political system would play in the new Nicaragua—if any. The more radical members of the FSLN saw no role for such institutions in their socialist state. As this segment assumed control of the national directorate and the armed forces, moderates in the coalition, such as Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (the widow of the slain newspaper editor) and Alfonso Robelo (the founder of the Nicaraguan Democratic Movement), felt increasingly silenced and shut out of the decision making. Particularly disturbing to the moderates was a series of measures taken to consolidate the government's authority and protect against counterrevolution: the suspension of elections for six years; restrictions on the press, free speech, free association, and other civil liberties; the strengthening of the internal security apparatus; increased defense spending; the arrival of Cuban and East European advisers and Soviet arms shipments; and the export of arms to Salvadoran rebels.10 By 1982 several moderates had resigned from the coalition or gone into exile, including former Sandinista Edén Pastora Gomez, the famed “Comandante Zero” who had led a spectacular and much publicized attack on the National Palace.11 Many middle-and upper-class Nicaraguans also chose to exile themselves to the United States, Costa Rica, and other countries during this transitional period rather than live in what they perceived as an evolving communist state.
Most nations in the hemisphere, with the notable exception of Central American neighbors Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, cautiously welcomed the change in Nicaragua's government. Despite its thirty-plus years of assistance to the Somoza government, in the final year of the revolution Mexico offered the Sandinistas tactical support and then recognized the new government almost immediately. In the 1980s, Mexico became one of Nicaragua's principal trade partners, providing Nicaragua with most of its oil even though that strained Mexican relations with the United States and potentially sabotaged Mexico's own economic relationship with its northern neighbor. With a long history of challenging the United States and supporting leftist movements in Latin America,12 Mexico became the region's most vocal critic of US policy in Nicaragua, but it also viewed itself as a “middle power” that could negotiate an easing of tensions in the region.13
Since the 1960s, Mexico's evolving status as a major oil producer had increased its diplomatic clout, and the Central American crisis provided an opportunity for asserting a new status in the hemisphere. As early as 1981, José López Portillo (president, 1976-1982) tried to arrange talks between the Sandinistas and the Reagan administration to discuss a nonaggression pact but failed to convince Washington.14 López Portillo's successor, Miguel de la Madrid (president, 1982-1988), later launched the regional peace initiative known as Contadora. Mexico's philosophical position was best summarized by de la Madrid: “Every country in the continent must do its utmost to restore peace and avoid war by respecting and upholding the sovereign right of its people to decide their own destiny and by rejecting interventionist solutions of any kind.”15
Canada's response, on the other hand, was substantively different. Ottawa officially welcomed the end of the Somoza era and even prohibited Somoza's entry into the country when he asked to relocate there, but postponed recognition of the Sandinista government.16 Throughout the 1980s Canadian policymakers opposed US policy in Nicaragua and criticized the militarization of the region, but avoided any official condemnation of the United States that might strain US-Canadian relations, especially in trade and commerce.17 Instead, they tried to use their diplomatic influence behind closed doors, with limited success.
As the most powerful nation in the hemisphere, the United States shaped the tone and content of the political debate over Nicaragua throughout the next decade.With billions of dollars in regional investments and a moral commitment to the expansion of democratic institutions, the United States had a geopolitical interest in containing revolution in the Americas. However, US policy shifted dramatically in a relatively short period of time. Immediately following his inauguration in January 1977, President Jimmy Carter declared US aid to individual Latin American countries contingent upon their human rights policies, and thus withdrew economic and military aid from the Somoza dictatorship.18 Although his administration would have preferred—and tried to negotiate—a more centrist government in Nicaragua, Carter officially recognized the Sandinista government and hoped that it would offer its country peace, security, and basic civil liberties. The United States granted Nicaragua close to a hundred million dollars in emergency aid during 1979-1980; helped to restructure Nicaragua's massive international debt (estimated at 582 million dollars); and facilitated over two hundred million dollars in new loans and grants, all with the goal of maintaining positive relations and avoiding the mistakes the United States had made with Cuba twenty years earlier.19
The symbolic significance of such actions was considerable given the role the United States had played in supporting the Somozas and their National Guard during the previous forty-five years. However, in light of this history, the Sandinistas were understandably suspicious of any US involvement—a suspicion that was not completely unwarranted. Key figures in the Carter administration, among them National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, were equally suspicious of the Sandinistas and the role Nicaragua might play in exporting revolution in Central America. They worked to steer US policy away from this more accommodationist position, and it was this philosophical perspective that ultimately dominated in the Carter administration. By the end of 1980, the administration had been forced to shift its attention to the Middle East and the hostage crisis in Iran, but the CIA worked behind the scenes in Nicaragua, funding a variety of anti-Sandinista organizations with the goal of eroding the Sandinistas' popular support.20 Shortly before leaving office, Carter canceled the remaining aid promised the Sandinistas in protest over the shipment of arms to Salvadoran rebels.
US-Nicaraguan relations collapsed after Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in January 1981. The Reagan administration, particularly hard-liners such as Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and William Casey, acknowledged that the Sandinista revolution and the conflicts in Central America began as nationalist struggles for socioeconomic and political justice.21 However, the Cold War framed the gathering of intelligence, the interpretation of the data, and ultimately the policymaking in this administration. They were determined not to let post-Vietnam guilt interfere with the containment of what they saw as a growing Cuban—Soviet—East European presence in the region. Congress accepted the administration's evidence that Nicaragua had become a base for exporting communism in the region and appropriated the funds that the administration needed to carry out its policy of containment. They supported the economic embargo on Nicaragua and redirected aid to the “Contras”: contra-revolucionarios on the Honduras-Nicaragua border, whom the Reagan administration directed to stop the flow of arms from the Sandinista government to the leftist guerrillas of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) in El Salvador.22
By the end of Reagan's first term it was clear that the administration was interested in more than just containing the flow of arms in Central America: it was using the Contras to destabilize—and overthrow—the Nicaraguan government.23 Honduras and Costa Rica were critical to this campaign, and by the mid-1980s the United States had directed millions of dollars to both these countries for the establishment of camps and safe houses from which the Contra operatives could conduct their operations.24 As in the CIA-sponsored raids in Cuba in the 1960s,25 the Contras' military maneuvers were
