Revolution And Foreign Policy In Nicaragua

Mary Vanderlaan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000309997
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the revolution in 1979, Nicaragua has faced economic dislocation, a growing debt, chronic hard currency shortages, a counter-revolutionary war, economic and diplomatic pressure from the US, and regional isolation. In spite of these challenging problems, the Sandinista leadership, maintaining a broad array of international contacts, continues

Part 1
Introduction

Introduction

For many Nicaraguans the Sandinista-led "Triumph" over dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July, 1979 marked the beginning of a new chapter in the historic struggle against foreign domination and political-economic dependence. While the immediate object of hatred for a majority of Nicaraguans in the late 1970s was US-aligned President Somoza, the FSLN--the Sandinista Front for National Liberation--claimed its origin in the struggles of Agusto Cesar Sandino against US Marines in the 1920s and 1930s. The Frente Sandinista pledged to carry out a popular political and socioeconomic revolution in "Nicaragua Libre" which incorporated objectives of pluralistic politics, a mixed economy and international non-alignment. Rejecting the Somoza foreign policy model of facilitating the United States' regional initiatives and of bowing to assertions of a special US prerogative, the nationalist FSLN called for an end to US interference in Nicaragua and for international relations on the basis of mutual respect.

The Sandinista revolution was, among other things, a reaction to the history of United States-Nicaraguan relations. The US Marines--Sandino's "Yanquis"--figured prominantly in that history. Sent by Washington to impose its brand of "civility," to replace an uncooperative bourgeois faction with a more cooperative one or to crush popular revolts, the marines landed in Nicaragua in 1893, 1894, 1895, 1896, 1898, 1909, 1912, and 1925. In 1912 and up to 1925 a garrison of about 100 marines was stationed in Nicaragua. In 1925 many more marines occupied Nicaragua to quell a civil war after US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg warned of a threat of "Soviet Bolshevism" there. Popular guerrilla uprisings against US domination led by General Sandino thereafter were viewed as a threat to US interests--e.g. under the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1914 Nicaragua had ceded to the United States a long-term option to construct a canal through Nicaraguan territory. Nicaraguan territory also constituted the heartland of what the United States considered its "soft underbelly" region. Political conformity and stability there was assumed to be in the US national interest. The marines' struggles against Sandino's forces from 1927 to 1932, in fact, constituted the United States' first counterinsurgency war in Latin America. That war included the aerial bombardment of Ocatal in 1927, a battle in which 300 Nicaraguans died.

Before the marines were recalled from Nicaragua in 1934 under FDR's Good Neighbor Policy they trained and armed a surrogate force--the Nicaraguan National Guard, under the direction of General Anastasio Somoza Garcia. It was Somoza's Guardia which assassinated General Sandino in 1934 as he left a dinner meeting with Somoza, and, after he had laid down arms. And it was the Guardia which was to symbolize for Nicaraguans both the ruthlessness of the Somoza family and that family's link to the United States. For 46 years the Guardia was key to the Somozas' power. During that period the Untied States trained and equipped the military force which the Somozas used to silence political dissenters. Indeed, bolstered by US support the Somoza family dominated Nicaraguan politics until 1979.

Nicaragua's role in the informal alliance with the United States, meanwhile, was to play the reliable ally--in UN voting, in providing staging areas for CIA assaults against Guatemala (1954) and Cuba (1961); in operating as the backbone of the 1960s regional anti-communist alliance (CONDECA); in acting as the lynchpin in CONDECA's system of repressing regional popular movements; and the like. The United States' interests in Nicaragua historically were defined more by strategic than economic concerns.¹ Nicaragua nevertheless supplied raw materials and markets for the United States through the 1970s. Moreover, import/export and tax incentives, as well as the secrecy of economic operations there, both allowed US companies to control the bulk of all foreign enterprises in Nicaragua and allowed the Somoza clan to continue its own capital accumulation.

Yet, despite the United States' post-World War II emphasis on order and the Somoza government's attempts to eradicate the nationalist, anti-imperialist legacy of Sandino's early struggles, smaller-scale popular uprisings continued into the 1950s and 1960s.² In 1962, Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomas Borge Martinez and others created the FSLN in an attempt to present a coherent political and economic response to Somocismo. In 1969 the Frente distributed a political program which became a working basis for the broader FSLN political organization that emerged during the period of guerrilla struggle in the 1970s.³ More importantly, the anti-imperialist tradition of Sandino and Nicaragua's post-World War II role as facilitator of the United States' East-West-inspired policy for Latin America had become sources of an alternative vision for Nicaragua in the region and in the world.

At the same time that the new Sandinista government was introducing its alternative vision for Nicaragua's foreign and domestic policy, however, superpower tensions were also increasing. The Cold War was heating up. Not only had Soviet and Cuban activism in Africa in the mid-to-late 1970s convinced many in Washington that the Soviets had used detente to forward their own interests in the Third World, but the late 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan also spurred the emergence of both a newly viable conservative bloc on Capitol Hill and new suspicions about Soviet intentions. The resurgence of anti-communist, bipolar conservatism in Congress in the late 1970s, for example, was reflected in heated Senate debate over the Panama Canal Treaty, in Senate objections to the (ill-fated) SALT II Treaty and in significant Congressional resentment over the 1978 formal recognition of China. The fall of the Shah in Iran, the Carter Administration's sudden notice of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba and the Ogaden Desert war between Ethiopia and Somalia, among other things, contributed to the growing assessment after 1978 that detente was dead and a new Cold War had begun. Candidate Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party declared as much in 1980. The Nicaraguan revolution was portrayed as an example of expanding Soviet influence. President Carter himself, meanwhile, left behind his earlier regionalist worldview for the bipolar, globalist view of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Carter's rethinking and domestic political pressures from the right shaped a wary US reaction to the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua. But it was the election of conservative Reagan in 1980 that signalled a sharper turn in US foreign policy toward themes of bipolarism, anti-communism, and "rolling back" Soviet influence. (These issues are discussed in detail in Chapter 5.) Consistent with this worldview, the Reagan Administration in early 1981 declared events in Central America to be "textbook cases" of Soviet expansionism. It was in this superpower context, then, that the FSLN had to carry out its revolution. And it was this US posture which was to shape prospects for the survival of the Nicaraguan model of development.

The Book's Focus

In the chapters that follow I examine both the FSLN's alternative foreign policy vision and the critical contexts--domestic and foreign--within which the revolutionary government worked to devise and implement specific foreign policies. Following Coleman (1984), foreign policy is viewed as a state's attempts to cope with its international environment. It does so either by influencing the environment in a positive way so that the environment can be used to pursue the state's national goals, or, by rendering the environment less threatening, thereby eliminating some of the obstacles to pursuing state objectives. To the extent that they both generate demands upon and are facilitated and affected by foreign policies, domestic policies are an important dimension of foreign policy. Thus, in shaping a new independent foreign policy for Nicaragua the Sandinistas were constrained by domestic and international constituencies and realities. These realities both limited policy options and interacted to shape the Sandinista worldview. Although Nicaragua's revolutionary leaders demonstrated an ideological commitment to structural change, both domestic and foreign pressures regulated the nature and the pace of that change. As we might expect would be the case for a small, dependent state, the Nicaraguan government has had to tailor its committments and accommodate realities and immediate necessities. A salient feature of Nicaraguan policies in the early 1980s has been the necessity of finding some balance between generating and holding support abroad and holding to or altering its plans for structural change in internal structures and in external linkages. A major factor for any poor state in wooing political or material support from abroad is the ability to demonstrate economic, political or social viability at home--another example of the internal-external linkage (e.g. Rosenau, 1980; 1981).

Domestic contexts and determinants of policy are considered in Part Two. I also discuss how external actors maneuvered to affect domestic political dynamics and, in turn, revolutionary Nicaragua's image in the world. External pressures, demands and opportunities affecting Sandinista foreign policy are analyzed in Part Three. There I consider the key role played by US policy and the additional pressures and opportunities flowing from European and Latin American reactions to the revolution. In Part Four I examine patterns in Nicaragua's international relations and military-security policy.

It has not been the purpose or intent herein directly to compare pre-and post-revolution foreign policy. Nor do I undertake an examination of institutional or structural mechanisms of foreign policy-making as such. Rather, my purpose has been to examine patterns in post-1979 foreign policy and to illuminate key determinants of those policies. Considering policy as a function of the dynamic interaction of internal and external determinants with leadership orientations distances the analysis somewhat from the limitations imposed by ideological conceptualizations of the regime under study. Contrary to prevailing theories emanating from Washington regarding the "dogmatic," "Marxist-Leninist" character of the Sandinista government, for example, this study suggests that Sandinista foreign policy into the mid-1980s, though it reflected a political will to break traditional patterns of subservience to the local hegemon, is more accurately characterized as pragmatic, flexible, and responsive.⁴

Because the United States, in light of the Sandinista revolution, quickly came to define its interests in the region and vis-a-vis Nicaragua in broad terms, the US role in shaping the FSLN's opportunity structure in international relations was also great, even predominant. US Nicaragua policy under the Reagan Administration, motivated by an ideological agenda of "rolling back" (i.e., rather than "containing") socialist--read communist--experiments in the Third World, was designed precisely to undermine the survival of the FSLN regime, and thus, of the Nicaraguan example. Much attention, therefore, is given to domestic, regional and global dimensions of US policy. Similarly, much attention is given to the ways in which Sandinismo and immediate concerns about survival have competed and/or interacted to shape Nicaraguan foreign policy options.

Finally, this book also provides a case study of the limitations, pitfalls and opportunities encountered by small states interested in forging new international relationships or addressing dependence in an incipient multipolar global setting. Nicaragua's attempts, successes and failures at promoting alternative linkages, its reliance upon and appeal to Third World solidarity and its willingness to bear the costs of policy independence, and the like, have established revolutionary Nicaragua as something of a test case for Latin American and other underdeveloped states. It is the context of Latin American foreign policies and small state dependence into which this study of Nicaraguan foreign policy is placed. I begin with that theoretical focus.

Notes

1. This is especially so from a comparative perspective on where the United States was accumulating wealth in Central and South America. Unlike in Guatemala, Honduras, Chile or Brazil, for example, there was no American Sugar Company, no ITT, no United Fruit Company monopoly, or no Standard Oil in Nicaragua. Compared to situations in El Salvador and Guatemala, few US companies operated in Nicaragua. Rather, by the 1970s in Nicaragua the Somoza family was the economic power and the near monopoly in many sectors.

2. For example, see Edelman, 1985. Instances of anti-dictatorial, anti-Somoza or anti-imperialist uprisings in the 1950s occurred in 1954, 1956, 1959 and from 1958-1963. Many of these revolts were led or organized by veterans of Sandino's guerrilla army.

3. For a discussion of the early organization or evolution of the FSLN see George Black (1981) or John Booth (1982).

4. The Reagan Adminstration's language of crisis and immediacy, its East-West posturing, its rhetoric and hyperbole regarding Sandinista Nicaragua and its institutionalized campaign of misinformation regarding Nicaragua from 1983 onward created an atmosphere of polarization on Nicaraguan issues at home and abroad. That polarization likewise affected the academic community in the 1980s though, I believe, to a somewhat lesser degree. While the US administration was successful in many quarters in shaping attitudes about the Nicaraguan revolution, this work is not intended or designed as a refutation of Reagan Administration claims about the FSLN's foreign policy motivation or direction. Hopefully, this study rather points up the hazards of simple political characterizations of complex processes. It remains a feature of partisan politics and heated debate, of course, that multifaceted realities are reduced to pithy labels or assessed according to narrowly perceived historical "lessons."

1
Nicaraguan Foreign Policy: A Theoretical Focus

A country that wants to call its own shots, that wants to develop its own foreign policy can be a very bad example.

Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto March, 1982

Any analysis of revolutionary Nicaragua's foreign policy must be set into the broader contexts of l)Latin American politics and foreign policy in a post inter-American security era, and 2)small states' dependence, underdevelopment and search for survival strategies in international relations. Changes in United States-Latin American relations, say from the 1950s and 1960s to the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly for Central America and the Caribbean, may be more changes in degree than of kind. Nevertheless, factors such as the decline of global bipolarity and the growing role of European, Asian and Third World states as international actors have led to a waning of US hegemony and to new foreign policy strategies in the region. Although US policy and behavior remains as probably the single-most important consideration among Latin American foreign policy decision makers, global power shifts and Third World interests in economic development, national survival and security have led to small states' concerns with increasing maneuverability vis-a-vis larger, more powerful states. These small and often underdeveloped states seek to gain sovereignty or increased independence by reducing economic and political dependence on external actors.

Because Nicaragua's foreign policy after July, 1979 has been shaped by these historical realities and has paralleled the policy aspirations of other small states seeking to address conditions imposed by underdevelopment, it is useful briefly to review and characterize the trends in Latin American foreign policies generally¹ before discussing Nicaragua's policy in particular.

The Latin American Context: Waning Us Hegemony

The fifteen year period in US-Latin American relations from 1945 to about 1960 has been characterized as the inter-American or hemispheric security era. In this Cold War period of global bipolar politics the United States acted on the hegemonic presumption that it had the capacity and the duty to determine the general course of events in Latin America. This presumption, moreover, was predicated on the notion that the pluralistic democratic tradition of Western humanist government would be a natural outgrowth of self-determination or political development in Latin America--a notion that happened to ignore the actual Latin American perspective that "...freely competing factions all too often seems a choice between chaos and privilege...." Indeed, "For 150 years Latin American governments have endeavored not to balance competing centers of power, but either to integrate them or to eliminate them in the name of collective harmony. This enduring effort characterizes regimes both benign and arbitrary, civilian and military, rightist, leftist or centrist" (Dealy, 1985: 108, 110). This corporatist belief, as Dealy points out, predates the contractarian conception of John Locke, and, in contrast to US political theory, encourages governments "...to intervene actively on behalf of the community..." (p. 111). Individual rights must be limited by the state's need for public order. Thus, contrasting political conceptions between North and South America should have suggested to North American policy makers that Latin American political structures would not easily conform to the US model.

Yet, few Latin American, E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• About the Book and Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• PART 1. INTRODUCTION
• PART 2. DOMESTIC CONSTRAINTS ON FOREIGN POLICY
• PART 3. INTERNATIONAL CONSTRAINTS ON FOREIGN POLICY
• PART 4. PATTERNS IN REVOLUTIONARY NICARAGUA'S FOREIGN POLICY
• References
• Newspapers and Periodicals Cited
• Index