ABSTRACT
The victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua in 1979, coinciding with a new surge of revolutionary organization and struggle in El Salvador and Guatemala, created a dilemma for US policy in a region the United States had traditionally taken for granted. The concept of "low intensity" is derived from the idea that conflicts which imperial powers confront in the late twentieth century may be arranged on a spectrum of warfare intensity, ranging from high-intensity global nuclear war to incidents of low intensity civil disobedience and armed confrontation between local government forces and liberation movements. Only in the post-Vietnam context is it possible to weigh the effect of that war on US counterinsurgency strategy. In Central America, the security systems of countries with ongoing conflicts are subsumed within the US security system. Developing the Central American security apparatus implies changing the role of the Southern Command and coordinating US military bases throughout the region.
