Introduction

Located at the geographic center of Central America, Nicaragua is the largest country in the region. The inegalitarian nature of Nicaraguan society had its roots in the Spanish conquest in the early sixteenth century. After an unprecedented eighteen-month War of Liberation in 1978 and 1979, Somoza's army was defeated and the Nicaraguan revolution came to power. Ronald Reagan's tactics for dealing with the Sandinistas could be criticized but not the administration's picture of the Nicaraguan regime itself. The storm was the Reagan administration's massive and multifaceted campaign to destabilize and overthrow the Sandinista government which was covert in name only. In economic affairs, the Sandinistas decided to honor Somoza's foreign debt in order to maintain Nicaraguan creditworthiness in Western financial circles. US behavior toward Nicaragua in the 1980s was by no means an aberration either from traditional patterns in the US treatment of Latin American countries or from the behavior of great powers in general.