ABSTRACT

On 19 July 1979, the Sandinista army marched in triumph into Managua, having finally routed the forces of Anastasio Somoza. Other than Castro’s revolution and defeat of Batista in 1959, there was no more significant event in the post-World War II international history of the region. Nicaragua, under a Sandinista government from 1979 through the February 1990 elections, became the fulcrum in east-west relations. Initially, it was a test of the superpowers’ ability to shape the politics of the Third World; finally, it became one of the major symbols for superpower collaboration in bringing an end to a half-century of Cold War as the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev moved away from the domestic and foreign policies of the Brezhnev era. For almost a decade, the Nicaraguan revolution and the determined U.S. effort to contain Sandinista and Castro-ist export of insurgency in the area was rarely out of the headlines. Such importance was intensified by the concurrent and related major insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala. The conflict drew into the maelstrom of debate and negotiation not only the United States, the Soviet Union, and Cuba – the main players in the drama as it unfolded – but all of the Central American countries, the Caribbean rim nations, including Mexico, Canada, a number of European nations, the members of the Organization of American States and the UN. 1