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 designed to force the Sandinistas to commit the Nicaraguan armed forces to domestic defense and to create a climate of political instability that would erode popular support and encourage revolt. The Contras were instructed to bomb industrial and other economic targets, but excerpts of a CIA training manual later published in the press revealed that they were also trained in kidnapping and murder.26 By 1983, the CIA itself was directly engaged in sabotage—bombing Nicaraguan oil reserves and mining harbors, for example—in clear violation of international law and the United States' own Boland Amendment, which prohibited assisting or using the Contras to overthrow the Nicaraguan government or to provoke conflict between Nicaragua and Honduras.27 Congress responded with the second Boland Amendment in 1984, which severed lethal aid to the Contras once and for all. Nicaragua filed a complaint against the United States in the World Court for the mining of its harbors, and two years later the court officially condemned the United States. However, neither domestic pressure nor international sanction deterred the Reagan administration from its foreign policy objectives: the administration turned to the illegal sale of arms to Iran in order to redirect the profits to its Contra protégés.28
The Reagan administration's policy in Nicaragua drew criticism at home and abroad. Critics argued that US policy only served to increase poverty and homelessness in Nicaragua, destabilize neighboring countries and producing a large-scale regional migration. NGOs such as Amnesty International, Americas Watch, Church World Service, and the International Red Cross documented the human toll produced by the militarization of Central America. While public opinion polls showed that most Americans could not locate Nicaragua on a map,29 a vocal and influential minority protested US policy and ultimately forced Congress to monitor the administration's support of the Contras. Not since the Watergate scandal had Americans taken so passionate an interest in the activities of their government, and the administration received thousands of letters from Americans who warned that Central America would become another Vietnam.30 Such popular pressure undoubtedly influenced the congressional and judicial scrutiny that followed the discovery of the illegal sale of arms to Iran.
In the years following the Iran-Contra hearings, the Bush administration