Two Wars

US intervention via proxy, designed to contain the spread of revolution in Central America by undermining Managua's left-wing government, had two notable effects. First, by militarizing sectors of Nicaraguan society disaffected by Sandinista rule, weapons and training provided by the US Central Intelligence Agency helped to create and exacerbate a protracted civil war. Second, US rollback and containment policies had the unintended consequence of further internationalizing the Nicaraguan Revolution, as several Latin American governments—fearing that Reagan's intervention imperiled their own strategic interests—subsequently intervened to mediate a peaceful resolution. The March 1982 bridge bombings mentioned above, to which the Sandinista government responded by declaring a state of emergency, therefore marked not only “the opening shot of the Contra war” but also the first critical moment in a parallel conflict on the international diplomatic scene.Footnote ¹⁰ While Reagan promised to begin rolling back Soviet communism in Central America, a group of Latin American governments found common cause in pushing back against US unilateralism in Nicaragua.

Three years prior, the FSLN's armed struggle had won surprisingly widespread approval among Latin American countries. Many regional governments had come to view the 40-year Somoza dynasty as an anachronism. By attempting to stay in power at all costs, they believed, the dictatorship had needlessly mired Nicaragua in a brutal conflict that threatened to destabilize Central America and the Caribbean Basin. Centrist governments in Venezuela, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico were joined by Fidel Castro's Cuba in sponsoring the Sandinista-led insurrection. Tellingly, even the hemisphere's anticommunist military regimes ultimately balked at defending the Somoza family at the crucial Organization of American States (OAS) vote that sealed the old regime's fate in June 1979. Only Alfredo Stroessner's Paraguay—where, incidentally, the outgoing Anastasio Somoza Debayle was subsequently exiled and later assassinated by Argentine guerrillas—voted to oppose a resolution calling for Somoza's resignation.Footnote ¹¹

Anticommunist governments’ begrudging acceptance of the Nicaraguan Revolution depended on the Sandinistas’ promise to share power within a broad coalition committed to a moderate revolutionary agenda defined by three pillars: political pluralism, a mixed economy, and nonalignment in international affairs. The regional mood soured when, soon after Somoza's exit, this apparent coalition collapsed and the FSLN's National Directorate assumed power at the expense of the broad-based Junta of National Reconstruction recognized by OAS member states. Once consolidated, the Sandinista-dominated government postponed elections, emphasized central planning in economic policy, and pursued closer ties with the socialist bloc. These moves troubled key international supporters of the 1979 revolution, such as Costa Rican president Rodrigo Carazo Odio, former Venezuelan president Carlos Andrés Pérez, and Panamanian military leader Omar Torrijos.Footnote ¹² They had lent the Sandinistas a helping hand under the expectation that, to avoid unwarranted bloodshed and assuage the concerns of US diplomats, the resultant revolutionary government would generally strike a moderate pose.

More important, anticommunist military regimes across the continent saw Managua's radicalization as a rising threat. As Molly Avery argues elsewhere in this issue, Argentine military leaders understood Central American revolutionary politics in this period as part of the same “transnational communist threat” that was supposedly fueling subversion in their own country.Footnote ¹³ The junta in Buenos Aires also took special umbrage at the FSLN's harboring of leftist Montoneros; soon, it began financing and training anti-Sandinista forces led by exiled somocista national guardsmen.Footnote ¹⁴ This inchoate counterrevolutionary force was based in Honduras. The government in Tegucigalpa had decried the rapid, Cuban-advised expansion of the Nicaraguan armed forces as well as the FSLN's support for El Salvador's Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), an alliance of Marxist rebels that had long operated inside Honduran territory.Footnote ¹⁵ When the Reagan administration decided to pursue proxy intervention against the Sandinistas in 1981, it started by coopting and revamping this ongoing Latin American operation.Footnote ¹⁶

The Mexican and Venezuelan governments led the diplomatic counterattack. In response to increasing Contra attacks in the summer of 1982, their respective presidents, José López Portillo and Luis Herrera Campins, wrote a letter to Reagan asking him “to cease the support, organization, and deployment of ex-somocista guardsmen.” Another September 1982 missive from López Portillo and Herrera Campins proposed bilateral peace talks between the Nicaraguan and Honduran governments.Footnote ¹⁷ Mexico and Venezuela had already helped to reinforce Managua's fledgling revolutionary government by providing oil and credit on generously subsidized terms. This aid came with strings attached: Nicaragua's revolutionaries, Campins argued in 1981, were “morally committed with Latin America, which gave its support to their struggle, to carry out the pluralist project which they proclaimed when they took power.”Footnote ¹⁸ Both governments sought to moderate the Sandinistas because they believed a “second Cuba” in Central America would provide the pretext for a direct US intervention. With civil wars already raging between right-wing governments and left-wing insurgents in El Salvador and Guatemala, militarized US policies in Nicaragua would, the argument went, only pour gasoline on the fire. Campins and López Portillo understandably felt the heat; as they emphasized in their letter, their countries were “linked by geography to the Central American area and felt its problems as if they were their own.”

Reagan waited a month before delivering an icy retort. The solution to Central America's problems, his own letter argued, was to “achieve democratic pluralism” in each country.Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, as American diplomats told Sandinista officials in Managua, Washington's support for “democratic forces” in Honduras would continue until the FSLN held free elections and satisfied the otherwise vague criteria of “democratic pluralism,” in this instance democratic pluralism as defined by the US government. This premise was a non-starter for the Sandinista Front. In its view, demands to alter Nicaragua's internal system of government represented a violation of national sovereignty.Footnote ²⁰ Unfortunately for them, the Honduran government rejected the Mexican-Venezuelan call for bilateral peace talks and, echoing the American position, called on the Nicaraguan government to first introduce hazily defined democratic reforms. Seeking to isolate FSLN diplomacy on this issue, and in direct response to the Mexican-Venezuelan position that support for anti-government insurgents should end before the Sandinistas were asked to make reforms, the United States organized a conference, the “Forum for Peace and Democracy,” to take place in Costa Rica.

The October 1982 conference, to which all Central American governments except Nicaragua were invited, was “organized to put Nicaragua in a box,” according to the US ambassador in San José.Footnote ²¹ Nicaragua's Central American neighbors expressed genuine concerns about the size of the EPS and the FSLN's ties to insurgent left-wing organizations in their territories. But conference delegates also argued that rising tensions on the isthmus were caused more broadly by Sandinista leaders’ relations with the Soviet bloc, their Marxism, and their alleged efforts to build a totalitarian state. It mattered little that no other Central American government, save for that of Costa Rica, was democratically elected. The conference operated within the theory, developed by political scientist and US diplomat Jeane Kirkpatrick, that noncommunist “authoritarian” states had democratizing potential, which Marxist “totalitarian” states lacked.Footnote ²² Therefore, the October 1982 Forum for Peace and Democracy cast a clear judgment on the core aspect of the Nicaraguan question: the Sandinistas’ revolutionary government—the “malignancy in Managua,” as Reagan later dubbed it—was illegitimate and contrary to the inter-American system a priori. Footnote ²³ The threat perceived by American policymakers, as William LeoGrande argued, “stemmed from the very existence of the Sandinista regime”—not from any particular policy choice the Sandinistas made.Footnote ²⁴ Central American alignment with this position recalled the broader Latin American response to the Cuban question in the 1960s, when most regional governments voted to excommunicate Havana's revolutionary government from inter-American organizations.

This time, however, regional political winds blew against Washington. Two months after the Democratic Forum, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez—a Sandinista co-conspirator during the 1979 insurrection—received the Nobel Prize in Literature and devoted his winnings to the cause of peace in Central America.Footnote ²⁵ Countless high-profile intellectuals, such as Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, fervently championed Nicaragua's revolutionary cause in the region. But the Sandinista project's ideological luster played only a secondary role in driving regional blowback to Reagan's Contra policy. While leftist intellectuals debated the merits of the Sandinistas’ strategies for social transformation, few Latin American governments viewed Nicaraguan politics through this lens. As Cuban vice premier Rafael Rodríguez stressed to US Secretary of State Alexander Haig in a secret 1981 meeting, the Mexican and Venezuelan governments were hardly leftist.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, most of the governments that soon answered Márquez's call to help mediate the Central American crisis were vocally anticommunist, economically dependent on the United States, and hostile to socialist bloc influence in the hemisphere.

In reality, Latin American governments joined the Mexico-Venezuela axis against US intervention in Nicaragua for three main reasons. First, a growing chorus of regional voices, irrespective of their ideological orientation, argued that American hostility would only serve to push the Sandinistas further into the arms of the Soviet Union, thereby creating the risk of a direct superpower confrontation on Latin American soil. In a July 1981 letter to Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and then president of the Socialist International (SI), Carlos Andrés Pérez complained that the FSLN's leftward drift might see Nicaragua wind up “in the hands of the Soviet Union.” But he provided a caveat for his criticism:

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa aired similar concerns following a fact-finding trip that summer. If Western democracies did nothing to oppose Washington's efforts to undermine the Sandinista government, he asked, “Why would it be strange to expect that the Nicaraguans would turn to hear the siren song coming to them from the other side?”Footnote ²⁸

At the heart of the matter were two competing explanations for the social upheaval that rocked Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas US intelligence services had concluded that the “Soviets by and large successfully implemented a policy of encouraging unrest in various Central American states,” Mexican foreign minister Bernardo Sepúlveda argued that “conflicts developing in Central America have their origin in the deep economic and social problems plaguing that area's countries during the last few decades.”Footnote ²⁹ López Portillo likened the Sandinistas and their revolutionary comrades on the isthmus to the anticolonial nationalists of Afro-Asian decolonization, who “resisted” the “Manichaean” classifications of the Cold War.Footnote ³⁰

Disagreement with the United States regarding the nature of social revolution in Central America, along with concern over the East-West conflict, brought together governments of vastly different ideological orientations. Even center-right heads of state—such as Colombia's Belisario Betancur, a Conservative Party president who pursued peace talks with Marxist insurgents and incorporated his country into the Non-Aligned Movement—sought to distance themselves from Reagan's East-West thesis. Herrera Campins, a Christian Democrat, warned, on the 1983 anniversary of Simón Bolívar's birthday—an occasion often taken by Latin American leaders to provide a progress report on the region's bicentennial quest for independence—that the “shadow of the East-West dispute” loomed over Central America.Footnote ³¹

Second, several Latin American governments believed that their economic and security interests would be affected by US-fueled civil wars and their potential spillover effects. Under the López Portillo administration, Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) sometimes expressed its pro-Sandinista posture in the romanticized vocabulary of Third-Worldist solidarity. From the outset, however, the country's diplomats believed that support for the Sandinistas—and for El Salvador's FMLN, which they recognized as a legitimate belligerent in a joint declaration with France in 1981—would serve a strategic purpose: to preempt Soviet and American involvement, which they viewed as destabilizing. A Mexican sphere of influence, in other words, might help avert a superpower standoff in the Caribbean Basin.Footnote ³² When Miguel de la Madrid assumed the presidency in 1982, Mexican diplomacy characterized the risks of US intervention in Central America in terms of “core interests.” As Sepúlveda explained:

Mexican political scientist and diplomat Jorge Castañeda wrote at the time that Mexico's dual policy of opposing US military involvement and lending diplomatic cover to Marxist groups in Central America was therefore based “exclusively on self-interest.”Footnote ³⁴ Colombian foreign minister Augusto Ramírez Ocampo similarly explained that Central American instability complicated his country's efforts to reorient its economic growth strategy toward the Caribbean coast, while Panamanian officials frequently commented that instability might jeopardize the Torrijos-Carter treaties that saw Panama win control of its interoceanic canal.Footnote ³⁵

Moreover, political elites across the continent worried that US proxy intervention might evolve into a direct military invasion. Guatemalan opposition leader Vinicio Cerezo told journalists that further intervention would mean “the Lebanization of Central America; we provide the bodies, and others provide the bombs.”Footnote ³⁶ Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina's first elected president after the country's military dictatorship collapsed in 1982, told FSLN leaders that such an invasion would be a “holocaust.”Footnote ³⁷ Carlos Andrés Pérez told Willy Brandt that US support for the Contra “could lead to an armed international conflict which would affect the whole region of Latin America and the Caribbean.”Footnote ³⁸ Unlike in Cuba or the Dominican Republic, geography would not contain the spread of political violence; the interconnectedness of Central American politics was already being demonstrated by the intensification of revolution and repression in Guatemala and El Salvador after the Sandinista victory in 1979.

The third reason for Latin American state opposition to Reagan's Contra policy was the perceived threat that it posed to regional autonomy. In the face of US unilateralism, Mexico's de la Madrid made “Latin American solutions to Latin American problems” a mantra of his administration's foreign policy. “The region,” he asserted, “is capable of generating its own answers to the problems that affect it.”Footnote ³⁹ Because the US was deliberately exacerbating armed conflict in the region by financing Nicaraguan insurgents, Latin American diplomats increasingly felt that Washington was disqualified from participating in a serious negotiated settlement between the Sandinista government and the anticommunist Central American states hosting the Contra.Footnote ⁴⁰

Furthermore, US unilateralism raised questions about the future of self-determination in the region. As Mexican diplomat Claude Heller put it, “The question comes down to the ability of the United States to coexist with Latin American experiments that are in contrast with the fundamental interests of the United States.”Footnote ⁴¹ These two basic principles—self-determination and “Latin American solutions to Latin American problems”—hearkened back to Márquez's 1982 Nobel Lecture, in which the Colombian literary giant called on Western democracies to “end the solitude of Latin America” by supporting its countries’ pursuit of autonomy and local models for development. They should also eschew fears of Soviet meddling; “Latin America neither wants, nor has any reason,” he assured the audience in Stockholm, “to be a pawn without a will of its own.” Why then, he asked, “is the originality granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?”Footnote ⁴²

A shared assertion of regional autonomy, combined with concerns about the potential effects of US intervention on real state interests, formed the “capital idea,” as Sepúlveda put it, of the Contadora peace process.Footnote ⁴³ In January 1983, in reaction to the US-sponsored Forum for Peace and Democracy, the foreign ministers of Venezuela, Mexico, Panama, and Colombia gathered on the island of Contadora in the Gulf of Panama to discuss how to build peace in Central America by sidelining US diplomacy altogether. At a July follow-up summit in Cancún, the Contadora countries’ presidents—Betancur, Herrera Campins, de la Madrid, and Panama's Ricardo de la Espriella—called on “states with interests and ties in the region” (that is, the United States and Cuba) to support “without reservations” a diplomatic solution. A multilateral negotiated settlement between Central American countries, they argued, should be based on the principle of nonintervention. First, each Central American country should cease its respective arms buildup and expel foreign military advisors—Cubans in the Nicaraguan case, and Americans in the case of Honduras, Costa Rica, and El Salvador. Second, and perhaps most important, Central American countries should desist from allowing foreign actors to use their territory to launch armed attacks against neighbor countries. This second point was aimed partially at FSLN support for the armed Left in El Salvador, but mostly at the Honduran and Costa Rican governments’ policy of allowing the US to recruit, arm, and base anti-Sandinista proxies in their territories.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Cancún Declaration strongly rebuked the US view on the Nicaraguan question and marked a strong contrast with the 1954 Declaration of Caracas at the OAS. In Caracas, Latin American member states had resolved that communism served “the interests of an alien despotism” and ensconced their “faith” in “representative democracy as the best means to promote their social and political progress.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Political actors of Marxist persuasion, in other words, were deemed contrary to the inter-American system. The Caracas Declaration thereby created the diplomatic basis in the OAS for US-led sanctions and interventions in the 1950s and 1960s against leftist regimes in Guatemala (the only state to vote against the resolution), Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. The Cancún Declaration, by contrast, framed the growth of revolutionary movements in Central America as a local problem rooted in historic socioeconomic challenges, making no mention of extra-hemispheric involvement. It explicitly delegitimized unilateral interventions within the inter-American system. And, crucially, it broke with the United States on the issue of the Sandinista regime's a priori legitimacy. The left-wing FSLN government, the declaration implied, was as legitimate and amenable to the inter-American system as its US-backed, anticommunist neighbors.

Though the Reagan administration initially paid lip service to the Cancún Declaration, it privately sought to cripple Contadora. When its foreign ministers submitted a formal draft treaty to their Central American counterparts on September 7, 1984, the Sandinista government signed within two weeks.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Nicaraguan signature came as a surprise because the FSLN had previously stated its refusal to compromise its defense plans until it received guarantees that the US would cease acts of outright aggression. The other Central American countries, which had hitherto expressed willingness to sign the agreement, suddenly walked out on the process and demanded amendments to extract further concessions from Nicaragua. A US National Security Council briefing paper leaked to the Washington Post revealed that the abandonment of the talks by Central American diplomats followed pressure from the Reagan administration, which claimed victory: “We have effectively blocked Contadora group efforts,” it read.Footnote ⁴⁷ But celebrations were premature. By tanking the Contadora treaty—which the Cuban government had encouraged the FSLN to sign—the US confirmed the multilateralists’ view that American foreign policy, rather than the leftists in power in Managua, was the main obstacle to peace in Central America.

In reporting on the document, journalist Alma Guillermoprieto accurately predicted the consequences of American hostility to Contadora: “The administration will have difficulty implementing a workable regional strategy for its friends and allies in Latin America as long as it fails to take their legitimate national interests into account, expecting them instead to adopt the United States’ national interests as their own.”Footnote ⁴⁸ A slew of resolutions at the United Nations and OAS general assemblies backed the Contadora approach and reaffirmed the Sandinista government's right to exist.Footnote ⁴⁹ The international community came to adopt the view that external involvement exacerbated violence in Central America and should be curtailed as a first step toward any peaceful outcome. Washington's position—that indirect US military involvement was in fact indispensable to such an outcome—became increasingly isolated as a result.

Ongoing negotiations hurt the Reagan administration's ability to secure congressional funding for the Contra because lawmakers—eager to avoid another Vietnam-style escalation of commitments in the Third World—were strongly in favor of a prompt settlement. The Reagan administration sought to use ongoing negotiations, as Kenneth Roberts explained, as a “useful cover for bullying tactics,” with US diplomats claiming that sanctions and support for proxies were simply bargaining chips for achieving a better peace agreement. However, because it had been formally excluded from the negotiations, the US government could control the process only indirectly, through its Central American allies. Therefore, because they successfully “constrained US policy choices,” Roberts wrote, multilateral efforts to resolve the Central American crisis were “one of the most significant and concerted challenges ever posed to US hegemony in the Western hemisphere.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Notably, Western European governments—which, as Eline van Ommen has demonstrated, were a key target of Sandinista diplomacy—helped enable this challenge to US unilateralism.Footnote ⁵¹ In the first half of the decade, a wave of center-left social democrats dominated European elections. These heads of state—Austria's Bruno Kreisky (in power since 1970), Greece's Andreas Papandreou (elected 1981), Sweden's Olof Palme (1981), Spain's Felipe González (1982), France's François Mitterrand (1981), and Italy's Bettino Craxi (1983)—shared Contadora's interpretation of the Nicaraguan question and the Central American crisis more broadly. Mitterrand, who earned a bitter rebuke from the Reagan administration when his government sold weapons to the Sandinistas in December 1981, told Le Monde that social upheaval in Central America was “not about communist subversion, but of the refusal of misery and humiliation. The West would be better advised to help these people than to force them to live under the boot. When they call for help, I would like for Castro not to be the only one that hears them.”Footnote ⁵²

Mitterrand and company subsequently supported the Contadora process because, as Felipe González put it, Latin American countries were seeking “regional solutions to regional conflicts . . . which is a way of avoiding that a local, zonal conflict become another scaffold in the escalating tensions between East and West.”Footnote ⁵³ West Germany's Christian Democrats were more skeptical of the FSLN than were these SI stalwarts, but they similarly opposed the Reagan administration's belligerent approach. A RAND Corporation analysis explained why the Washington foreign policy establishment viewed these developments with displeasure: it was not just the Soviet Union, “but also resurgent European powers, notably France and Germany,” that were challenging Washington's uncontested hegemony in the Americas: “They are contributing as much to stabilizing as to destabilizing [Central America's] politics. Simultaneously, local governments and anti-government actors in the region are soliciting support from outside the hemisphere, independent of the United States. Although Western European involvement can contribute to the region's economic and political development, this general push-pull process is fostering the internationalization of local conflicts and eroding US leverage.”Footnote ⁵⁴

North American leverage eroded further as South American countries transitioned to democracy in the middle of the decade, a political transformation that saw the Contadora bloc swell. Where civilian leaders replaced US-backed military rulers, government opposition to Washington's intervention in Central America soon followed. In July 1985, four countries that were in the midst of or had recently completed democratic transitions—Argentina (Alfonsín elected December 1983), Uruguay (José María Sanguinetti elected November 1984), Brazil (Tancredo Neves indirectly elected January 1985), and Peru—formed the Contadora Support Group after their respective countries’ foreign ministers met at the inauguration of left-leaning Alan García in Lima. The Group of Eight—the sum of the Contadora and Contadora Support groups—emitted a joint declaration from Caraballeda, Venezuela, in January 1986, wherein they restated the organizing principles of the peace process and called on Central American countries to sign an updated draft treaty.Footnote ⁵⁵

Leaders of these fledgling democratic governments typically affirmed the Sandinista perspective on negotiations. Mexico's Miguel de la Madrid told Henry ‘Modesto’ Ruiz, a member of the FSLN National Directorate, that the Americans were to blame for the collapse of peace talks.Footnote ⁵⁶ Alfonsín told Nicaraguan vice president Sergio Ramírez that given Washington's refusal to let the Contadora process play out in good faith, Managua should feel no obligation to downsize its army or legitimize the Contras with direct negotiations.Footnote ⁵⁷ Uruguayan foreign minister Enrique Iglesias and Colombian president Belisario Betancur echoed this strongly pro-Sandinista sentiment.Footnote ⁵⁸ Wilson Ferreira, leader of Uruguay's National Party, told Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega that while the US was pressuring individual countries to abandon support for the FSLN, these pressures crashed against a wall of Latin American consensus on the issue.Footnote ⁵⁹ Summing up the way in which Latin American governments increasingly interpreted US intervention in Central America in the 1980s, Alan García told the Sandinistas that Peru was “willing to defend the thesis of continental sovereignty which has been put to the test in Nicaragua.”Footnote ⁶⁰

As fighting between the EPS and US-backed Contras turned Nicaragua into a killing field (some 30,000 people would die by the end of the war), the country had clearly become a battleground in a wider diplomatic sense. At the time of the 1986 Caraballeda Declaration, no fewer than eight states were offering to directly mediate conflicts involving five Central American countries. Most of the hemisphere's countries eventually deemed Central American radicals less hazardous than US efforts to contain them. Some Contadora diplomats even suggested invoking the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (otherwise known as the Rio Treaty)—previously used to legitimize US Cold War interventions in the region—at the OAS, this time to condemn US intervention in Central America. Washington's “East-West” thesis was losing the war of ideas against what García called the “thesis of continental sovereignty.”

The Death of Contadora?

While Contadora was disrupting inter-American relations, it apparently was doing little to quell the fighting in Nicaragua. In fact, casualties from battles between the EPS and various Contra columns reached new heights around the time of the Caraballeda Declaration. FSLN leaders felt they had demonstrated good faith by signing the 1984 Contadora draft treaty and proved their democratic bona fides that year by finally holding elections, a boycott by US-backed opposition parties notwithstanding.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1985, they pursued increased socialist bloc aid to redouble military campaigns to rout the Contra. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration, now in its second term, slapped Nicaragua with an economic embargo, promised “improved assistance to the Freedom Fighters,” and swore to oppose “any concessions which would permit the consolidation of the Marxist-Leninist regime” in Managua.Footnote ⁶² Washington's Central American allies refused to sign the final Contadora treaty in June 1986, effectively killing the multilateral process.

Why did Contadora go under? US obstruction evidently played a significant role.Footnote ⁶³ But the Nicaraguan side is equally worth considering. After improving their international standing by providing the sole signature on the first 1984 draft treaty, the Sandinista government refused to sign revised agreements. FSLN strategists believed that nothing short of a crushing military victory over the rebels could guarantee Nicaragua's territorial integrity—and, it followed, the revolution's future—in the face of US hostility. As this section describes, the Sandinista leadership therefore viewed Contadora less through the prism of conflict resolution and more from the vantage point of international legitimacy and credibility. Ongoing peace talks were a useful but secondary tool for acting on their core interests. For all the acclaim they received, and regardless of the changing details of their proposals, the Contadora countries were powerless to convince the Sandinistas—or their Central American neighbors—that such interests would be better served through non-military means.

Nevertheless, although Contadora lost that battle, it won the wider war of ideas surrounding the Nicaraguan question. The Reagan administration had failed to turn Nicaragua into a pariah state. The legitimacy conferred on the FSLN by Latin American diplomacy meant that even when senior EPS officials began arguing that the war effort was no longer sustainable, the diplomatic door remained open. As the Nicaraguans’ willingness to make concessions grew after 1986, a new multilateral settlement—this time negotiated and brokered at the Central American level—built on the Latin Americans’ approach of reintegrating Nicaragua's revolutionary government and rejecting unilateral US intervention. Thus, Contadora's principles outlived the actual peace process and laid the basis for ending war in Central America. Moreover, Contadora had a significant afterlife in the form of the post-Cold War processes of integration and multilateralism to which it was a direct predecessor.

Reagan administration hardliners rooted for Contadora's demise until the very end. They maintained that FSLN leaders were self-declared Marxist-Leninists who could not be trusted to honor their side of an agreement that, in any event, placed inadmissible limits on the unilateral deployment of US military forces in the region.Footnote ⁶⁴ Publicly, Reagan promised in 1986 to support a negotiated settlement. But simultaneously, his administration argued that there was no feasible alternative to continued military assistance to the Contra. The “only” other options, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams told US lawmakers that year, were to “surrender” and allow the consolidation of an unacceptable regime or make costly plans for a direct US invasion.Footnote ⁶⁵

Historians have hitherto paid less attention to the FSLN perspective on Contadora, which was rosier. As we have seen, multilateral Latin American diplomacy tended to shore up Nicaragua's revolutionary government. Contrary to the US position that it was illegitimate a priori, draft treaties explicitly drew an equivalence between the left-wing government in Managua and its Central American neighbors. And by emphasizing matters of sovereignty and security—non-intervention, non-use of countries by third parties to launch attacks on neighbors, and arms control—Contadora seemed to defend the Nicaraguan position that the wars should end before the Sandinista Front made concessions regarding the country's internal affairs. As Castañeda wrote in 1984, the Contadora process was “essentially pro-Sandinista,” even when its representatives chastised the FSLN for imprisoning political opponents or shuttering dissident newspapers, and even though the draft treaties bound the revolutionary government to vague promises of democratization.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Sandinista National Directorate reasoned that the gains from participating in Contadora—mitigating the intensity of US coercion— outweighed the costs—backtracking on its prior refusal to make concessions regarding the country's internal affairs.

The FSLN's Department of International Relations (DRI) and Nicaragua's Foreign Ministry consciously exploited the North-South cleavages exposed by Reagan's heavy-handed approach to the region. Vice Foreign Minister (and former DRI official) José León Talavera recalled why Managua always sent top-level delegations to Latin American presidential inaugurations in the 1980s: “There were nationalist waves which allowed—from Carlos Andrés Pérez to President Alfonsín, or even in Brazil—for us to be viewed with sympathy. Sometimes they would see us as a small buffer which perhaps cushioned them against some of the United States’ aggressive policies, and it was of interest to them to see somebody laying into the gringos in the area so that they could better express their own autonomy.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Foreign Ministry memoranda noted the importance of a regional anti-imperialist current that cut across the traditional Cold War ideological divide.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Sandinistas remarkably put these ideas in practice when Argentina and the United Kingdom went to war over the Malvinas (Falklands) Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1982. Despite the Argentine junta's aforementioned efforts to undermine the Sandinista government, the FSLN joined Latin American countries in rallying around its claim to be fighting an anticolonial war. On a trip to Buenos Aires, Sandinista culture minister Ernesto Cardenal went so far as to offer military assistance in the form of Nicaraguan soldiers. “Latin America was one thing before Malvinas,” he declared, “and another thing entirely afterwards.”Footnote ⁶⁹ As Susan Kauffman noted at the time, Argentina's virulently anticommunist dictatorship felt betrayed by the Reagan administration's support for Britain, which killed in their mind the “Western Hemisphere Idea” of common interests and values held by the US and Latin America.Footnote ⁷⁰ Understanding that Contadora represented a competing “Latin America Idea,” Nicaraguan diplomacy—encouraged by Cuban diplomats seeking to reduce their country's isolation in the inter-American system—eagerly participated.Footnote ⁷¹

Nonetheless, Sandinista strategists were no less ambivalent than US diplomats about Contadora's ability to end armed conflict in their country. When Richard Stone, the US ambassador-at-large for Central America between 1983 and 1984, asked Daniel Ortega if he thought Contadora was “actually useful,” the Nicaraguan leader replied: “Honestly, we just want to have an agreement with the United States.”Footnote ⁷² But bilateral talks in 1984, hosted by Mexico in the Pacific port city of Manzanillo, went nowhere.

Bilateral and multilateral negotiations foundered partly because, when the war began in 1982, the diplomatic track was secondary to the military track in Sandinista strategic thinking. General Humberto Ortega, EPS chief and member of the National Directorate, described the FSLN as having two principal objectives in the 1980s: first, militarily defeating US proxies in Nicaragua, and second, heightening the cost of a potential direct invasion by the United States.Footnote ⁷³ Alejandro Bendaña, secretary general of the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, explained that the Contadora peace process therefore served a bellicose logic in the National Directorate's thinking; ongoing peace talks would constrain the Reagan administration's ability to fund the Contras, thereby creating time and space to destroy local opponents. Only a total military victory would suffice because, in their view, the Contra was a mere appendage of the US foreign policy apparatus. Interior Minister Tomás Borge, another member of the National Directorate, boasted that the stars would fall from the sky before the FSLN held talks with local insurgents.Footnote ⁷⁴

The diplomatic track began supplanting the military track when strategists deemed such a victory beyond reach. Security forces had succeeded by 1986—with Cuban advice and material support from the USSR, the German Democratic Republic, and other strategic allies—in preventing the Contra from taking any significant territory or urban centers from which its civilian leadership might declare a provisional government. But they fell short of annihilating the insurgency altogether. The Contra's ranks, led by ex-somocista guardsmen but filled mostly by rural peasants disaffected by the troubled implementation of an agrarian reform in Nicaragua's central highlands, kept growing through 1988. The Soviet leadership, moreover, signaled as early as 1985 its eagerness to reduce its commitments in the country. Finally, the war effort had taken a catastrophic toll on the Nicaraguan economy and the Sandinista Front's popular support. General Joaquín Cuadra, EPS Chief of Staff, believed in 1986 that the army “was not going to last much longer,” and that the government's negotiating position was therefore unlikely to improve. Meanwhile, the November 1986 Iran-Contra scandal put continued US funding for anti-Sandinista insurgents in doubt.Footnote ⁷⁵ Two key presidential elections also reconfigured the Central American political landscape in favor of a negotiated settlement: Guatemala's Vinicio Cerezo (elected November 1985) campaigned on a promise of “active neutrality,” whereas Costa Rica's Oscar Arias (elected February 1986) made the reversal of his country's pro-Contra policy a centerpiece of his own campaign.

Given newly propitious conditions by 1987, Central American diplomats took their own stab at peace. Some had come to see Contadora as a pesky Latin American intrusion into their subregion's affairs. Ricardo Valero, Mexico's vice foreign minister, recalled that he and his fellow Contadora representatives had become the “laughingstock of Central America.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Privately, some commented that interrelated civil wars in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua were their problems to solve and not the purview of Latin American diplomacy. Luis Guillermo Solís, a future Costa Rican president who worked in his country's Foreign Ministry in this period, even suggested that Central Americans had become Contadora's “victims,” because the multilateral process had devolved into “the tool used by Latin American countries to save face vis-à-vis the United States”—something, we have seen, that Sandinista diplomats were gleefully aware of.Footnote ⁷⁷ Latin American diplomacy had seemed geared toward the broader hemispheric debates described in the previous section, and less attuned to the complex realities on the ground.

Nonetheless, though the 1987 Central American Peace Accords eventually succeeded where wider Latin American efforts had failed, they did so by adopting Contadora's core principles and framework. A fuller discussion of the Esquipulas peace process—named after the Guatemalan city where Central American presidents finally signed the “Procedure for the Establishment of a Firm and Lasting Peace in Central America” on August 7, 1987—lies beyond the scope of this essay. But for the purposes of understanding how the wider Latin American response to the Nicaraguan question changed over time, consider the following. First, Esquipulas was based on the same reintegration of Sandinista Nicaragua that Contadora had tried to achieve, and which US diplomacy had sought to avert. As FSLN negotiator Victor Hugo Tinoco put it, Esquipulas represented a “simple barter”: in exchange for nonintervention by neighbors and their foreign backers, each government—recognized as legitimate a priori by the agreement—agreed to engage in talks with their respective armed insurgencies and eventually hold free and fair elections.Footnote ⁷⁸

Breaking with the Contadora formula, the Central American plan put internal provisions for democratization on the same level as provisions for nonintervention and arms reduction emphasized previously.Footnote ⁷⁹ But in return for painful concessions—full restoration of civil liberties and a cease-fire with US-backed insurgents—the Sandinista Front, aside from pursuing the only realistic path to saving their revolution, won something that Contadora had promised but Central American countries had hitherto denied. Esquipulas explicitly recognized the constitutional legitimacy of the FSLN government and put it on equal footing with its anticommunist, Central American neighbors (the Salvadoran government, crucially, was equally eager to see the FSLN government recognize its legitimacy in the face of a growing leftist insurgency). In this regard, as France's ambassador to El Salvador put it, the Esquipulas meetings were the “anti-Democratic Forum” of 1982 described earlier in this article.Footnote ⁸⁰ The United States’ Central American allies had crossed the line and joined the Latin American consensus on the issue of the Nicaraguan Revolution's compatibility with the inter-American system, the core issue of the Nicaraguan question.

Second, Esquipulas carried on Contadora's approach of seeking South-South integration as a response to US intervention, which was seen as hurting—rather than helping—regional stability. Despite having been burned by Central Americans’ unwillingness to sign their agreement, the Contadora and Support groups happily cheered on this “Central American solutions to Central American problems” framework, clearly inspired by their own approach. No US mediators or observers were present at the signing. When Arias received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the agreement, he echoed the same Cold War concerns that had animated Contadora in the first place: “Let Central Americans decide the future of Central America . . . Support the efforts for peace instead of the forces of war in our region. Send our people ploughshares instead of swords, pruning hooks instead of spears. If [the superpowers], for their own purposes, cannot refrain from amassing the weapons of war, then, in the name of God, at least they should leave us in peace.”Footnote ⁸¹

Though Esquipulas involved a complex series of interlocking agreements negotiated over several years’ worth of summits, Arias recalled that the basic ingredient was putting an end to US funding to the Contra.Footnote ⁸² Following concessions made by the FSLN, Honduras and Costa Rica eventually stopped hosting and supporting anti-Sandinista insurgents in their own territories. With its allies jumping ship, the White House soon found it impossible to persuade Congress to continue funding the Contra program.Footnote ⁸³ The Central American Peace Accords set the stage in Nicaragua for a cease-fire agreement in 1988 and free elections in 1990, definitively ending the country's civil war. The Esquipulas framework also gave rise to the Chapultepec and Oslo Accords that ended civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, respectively. The Contadora and Support Group countries had agreed to form, alongside the UN and OAS general secretariats, a verification commission to assist in the implementation of these agreements.

Meanwhile, Contadora outgrew the Central American crisis, coming to define an era of inter-American relations. For instance, Contadora—a rare exercise in regional autonomy—overlapped in interesting ways with Latin America's “lost decade” of GDP growth. The external debt crisis behind the 1980s economic downturn had increased Washington's leverage over Latin American countries. The US government could use its influence over global financial institutions to ensure that loans disbursed to indebted Third World governments were made conditional on the adoption of certain policies, in particular, structural adjustment programs and market-based reforms. When Peru joined the Support Group, Alan García saw Contadora as an opportunity to coordinate Latin American countries’ collective bargaining with US commercial banks and multilateral lenders like the International Monetary Fund.Footnote ⁸⁴ Much like his administration's intervention in Central America, Reagan's restructuring of the global economy posed a common threat to disparate Latin American governments and engendered a collective response. The 1986 Declaration of Rio de Janeiro officially turned Contadora and its Support Group into a “permanent mechanism for political consultation” where Latin American governments regularly debated the debt crisis and other issues unrelated to Central America specifically: legal frameworks for regional integration, food security, poverty reduction, and trade policy.Footnote ⁸⁵

Contadora therefore helped catalyze post-Cold War processes of regional integration, multilateralism, and multipolarity in the hemisphere. The eight founding members of the so-called Rio Group were joined in the 1990s and 2000s by nearly every country south of the US-Mexico border, becoming in this way the first significant alternative to the OAS that was exclusive to Latin American countries. In 2010, the Rio Group morphed into the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the apex of post-Cold War Latin American regionalism. The “regional solutions to regional problems” rubric also spawned a litany of subregional blocs such as the South American Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the Central American Integration System (SICA). These South-South dynamics dovetailed with the rising importance of extra-hemispheric actors such as the European Union—many EU members had previously facilitated Contadora—and China. The changes amounted to a modest renegotiation of US hegemony in the region. As Spanish diplomat Manuel Montobbio aptly reflected, the Reagan administration's failure to press its case in Central America resulted in the United States losing “its monopoly as the sole relevant actor on the Latin American scene (if not its quality as decisive and indispensable actor in any situation).”Footnote ⁸⁶

Latin American diplomacy reimagined itself in the process. Analysts have long noted how Contadora helped Latin American states recover their “regional consciousness” and impulse to act as a coherent bloc despite demographic, economic, and cultural differences between them.Footnote ⁸⁷ This article demonstrates that transformation's Cold War dimensions. In the early Cold War, Latin American countries adopted hemispheric values on North American terms, leading Fidel Castro to denounce the OAS as the “Yankee Ministry of Colonies.” By the 1970s the situation had begun to change. When the United States failed to prevent member-states from individually normalizing relations with Havana, the Cuban foreign ministry noted that “it is not the monolithic OAS behind the Yankee master anymore.”Footnote ⁸⁸ And in 1979, the Sandinistas and their Latin American allies successfully used the OAS to legitimize their armed struggle against a US-backed dictatorship.

But processes of regional integration—and specifically, attempts to integrate outside the US-dominated OAS—truly took off with the crisis caused by US efforts to militarily unseat the Sandinista Revolution. Efforts to rethink Latin America as a unique community of nations emerged in response to a recrudescence of US intervention in the region. In this sense, they call to mind the origin of the term “Latin America” as an anti-imperial concept mobilized by the disparate nations of Central and South America to cohere the alliance they forged against the invasion of Nicaragua (coincidentally) by US filibuster William Walker in the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁹