ABSTRACT
From 1909 to 1933, at the behest of Roosevelt and Taft's "dollar diplomacy" and Wilson's "missionary diplomacy," US Marines would spend twenty years in Nicaragua, imposing or trying to impose US policies and in the process undermining much of the development achieved under Zelaya. With the marked increase of US and British interests in Nicaragua and the escalation of their direct intervention there in the early twentieth century, the process of stabilization and slow progress of the previous half century changed to a process of destabilization and destruction. In 1927 the United States decided to change sides, from the hapless Conservatives to the stronger Liberals, in pursuit of that elusive stability and political order that might permit it permanently to withdraw its forces from Nicaragua. In so doing it created an unanticipated difficulty—the anti-interventionist rebellion led by Augusto César Sandino.
