The United States in the World

Nicaragua and the United States in the Cold War Era

David Johnson Lee

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501756238
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Ends of Modernization studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. David Johnson Lee charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. Using archival material, newspapers, literature, and interviews with historical actors in countries across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Lee demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War.

In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revolution incited radical changes that challenged the frankly ideological and economic motivations of modernization. In response to threats to its ideological dominance regionally and globally, the United States began to promote new paradigms of development built around human rights, entrepreneurial internationalism, indigenous rights, and sustainable development.

Lee traces the ways Nicaraguans made their country central to the contest over development ideals beginning in the 1960s, transforming how political and economic development were imagined worldwide. By illustrating how ideas about ecology and sustainable development became linked to geopolitical conflict during and after the Cold War, The Ends of Modernization provides a history of the late Cold War that connects the contest between the two then-prevailing superpowers to trends that shape our present, globalized, multipolar world.

Chapter 1

The Alliance for Progress on the Doubtful Strait

“The country is beautiful,” Christopher Columbus’s cartographer Paolo Toscanelli tells him in the opening line of Ernesto Cardenal’s El estrecho dudoso. The long exteriorist poem, published in 1966 and compiled of fragments of texts written by the explorers and conquerors of the Americas, narrates the coming of Europeans to the Central American isthmus in the sixteenth century. The Europeans came to the beautiful country of Nicaragua searching, Cardenal relates, not for gold but for the fabled transoceanic route that would allow them to reach the Spice Islands in East Asia, cementing the dominance of the Spanish Empire over the burgeoning system of world trade. Instead of discovering this “doubtful strait,” they discovered that “the strait was of land, not water,” and their search would lead them to murderous confrontations with one another and the native peoples who inhabited the territory between the Caribbean and the Pacific. Cardenal calls the victor in this bloody battle on the dubious isthmus, Pedro Arias (Pedrarias) Dávila, “the first ‘promoter of progress’ in Nicaragua, and the first dictator.”¹

If readers missed Cardenal’s unsubtle connections between the battle over the doubtful strait and contemporary events in Nicaragua, poet José Coronel Urtecho made them clear in his prologue. If, “by disgrace—or luck, depending on how you see the question,” all of the conquistadors had been like Pedrarias, the enterprising conqueror who turned the isthmus into his own feudal domain, the countries of Hispano-America would be not be “underdeveloped,” but rather “already would have achieved their ‘take-off,’ ” the Rostovian end point of modernization as self-sustaining growth.² The confluence of feudalism and entrepreneurship of the past, Cardenal and Coronel’s readers were to understand, was now embodied in the latest promoter of progress in Nicaragua, the Somoza family regime, backed by the power of the United States and its mission to create an Alliance for Progress in the hemisphere. For Nicaragua’s Conservative elite, among whom Cardenal and Coronel were distinguished members who would soon become partisans of social revolution, the paradoxes of the Alliance for Progress were both an expression of the power of the United States and an outgrowth of Nicaragua’s own history.

The correlation between authoritarianism and US foreign aid was not a foregone conclusion at the beginning of the development decade announced by John F. Kennedy. Nor was it, as Coronel and Cardenal recognized, simply the product of US designs. The Alliance for Progress attempted to implement a vision of the mutually constitutive nature of economic development and political democracy rooted in the US experience. Latin Americans such as Fidel Castro asserted that democratization was a sham and critiqued the Alliance ratified at Punta del Este as US neo-imperialism driven by economic exploitation, an updated version of the lust for gold driving the conquistadors.³ Others argued that the ideals were sincere, but elites North and South failed to hold fast to the transformational promise that underlay hemispheric cooperation.⁴ Thanks to their own complex relationship with the United States, from the William Walker invasion to the Sandino rebellion and the rise of the Somoza dynasty, many Nicaraguans understood that neither democracy nor gold could explain US power on the isthmus. Both the inheritors of the Somoza dynasty and its opponents in Nicaragua understood the multivalent nature of US power, and would spend the decade of development attempting to turn that power to their own ends.

The Alliance for Progress made Nicaragua a battleground over the relationship between political and economic development. In 1961, the government of Nicaragua was target of plans for democratization that US and Latin American leaders hoped would make the Alliance more than just an anti-communist counterrevolution.⁵ Fusing US-centered designs for democratic development with Latin America’s anticommunist democratic movement, the Alliance marshaled the energies of an antidictatorial coalition that had been at work in the Caribbean and Central America for decades.⁶ Nicaragua also became an integral part of an economic experiment in regional development, the Central American Common Market (CACM), which combined the nation-building premises of modernization with transnational institutions that decentered state power. Devised by heterodox Latin American economists, the CACM would reshape the economies of Central America and make possible experiments in development aid that went beyond the nation-state. These impulses—democratization and regional economic development—combined with the shared anticommunism of both the Nicaraguan government and its political opposition, made Nicaragua a testing ground for development programs shaped by US officials and Nicaraguans in and out of power. The result spawned new techniques for organizing foreign aid that would become paramount in US foreign policy in decades to come.

Nicaragua became the confluence of impulses for democratization and regional development thanks to Latin American political and intellectual networks, repurposed through collaboration and contestation between Nicaraguans and US officials. This confluence would make Nicaragua one of the few economic success stories in the hemisphere by the end of the decade. It would also make possible the rise to power of the final member of the Somoza dynasty and create conditions for the final Latin American social revolution of the Cold War. An authoritarian disposition was certainly built into the Alliance for Progress, and tensions between ideology and strategy put democratization, socioeconomic transformation, and counterinsurgency at odds.⁷ In Nicaragua, US aid harnessed the transformational ideals of the Alliance to make opposition forces the accomplices to authoritarianism. Both the Somoza dynasty and the country’s opposition elite took part in cementing the dictatorship that came to dominate Nicaragua. This would turn members of that elite such as Cardenal and Coronel toward radicalism as the only escape from Nicaragua’s position on the “doubtful strait.”

Antidictatorial Coalition and the Alliance

The first draft of the Alliance for Progress was a product of Latin America ideas. When President John F. Kennedy announced the Alliance to the assembled Latin American diplomatic corps in the East Room of the White House on March 13, 1961, he famously invoked Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek’s Operation Pan America as a precedent for the new ten-year plan to remake Latin America as a bulwark against communism in the same way the Marshall Plan had remade Europe a decade earlier. Kennedy also gave an inter-American cast to the announcement by invoking Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín, but for many listeners, especially those in Central America, several other ideas with Latin American roots stood out. Kennedy declared that an “alliance of free governments” must exclude Cuba and the Dominican Republic, foreshadowing US attempts to rally the nations of the hemisphere to joint intervention against pariah governments of both the left and the right. In doing so, he elevated the antidictatorial campaign of Latin America’s anticommunist democratic movement to the center of US foreign policy in the region.⁸

Latin American political leaders such as José Figueres of Costa Rica heard the speech as a call to arms against political despotism and an endorsement of their decades-long antidictatorial struggles. Figueres had been a leader of the celebrated Caribbean Legion, which in previous decades had gathered exiles from around the region in often quixotic battles against Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, Anastasio Somoza García, and other regional despots.⁹ The speech went so far as to quote Figueres—“once dormant peoples are struggling upward toward the sun, toward a better life”—indicating an alignment between the modernizing goals of the Alliance and the antidictatorial mission with which Figueres was openly affiliated. Many Latin American listeners heard in the speech a declaration that political transformation was the precondition for longer-term economic change, a belief that would amplify support for the Alliance throughout the region. In Nicaragua, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, declared on March 14 that Kennedy had announced an “eradication of tyrannies” and suggested that Nicaragua’s government, ruled by the sons of Anastasio Somoza García, would be the next to fall after those of Cuba and the Dominican Republic.¹⁰

Kennedy’s announcement also contained another Latin American idea that moved from South to North but would be repurposed by US power. Kennedy cited the Central American Common Market, initiated by the nations of the isthmus a decade earlier, as a tool to end the “fragmentation of Latin American economies,” a “serious barrier to industrial growth.” This regional development program was the creation of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), led by Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch, and combined Prebisch’s concerns about primary commodity producers’ declining terms of trade with prescriptions for import substitution at the regional rather than national level.¹¹ Kennedy’s endorsement of the heterodox economics of the global South signaled that the Alliance would not simply re-create the free market prescriptions of the Eisenhower administration. Instead, the spiritual power of the “Alianza” would be fused with the technocratic expertise of both North and South to “transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts” fueling economic and political progress.

Adolf Berle was responsible for putting the Latin American antidictatorial movement at the center of the Alliance. Though Berle would play a decisive role in shaping administration policy only for a short time, his vision of US imperial power built around an antidictatorial alliance against dictatorships of the right and left was formative of the initial stages of the Alliance. Berle believed that after the imminent demise of dictators in Cuba and the Dominican Republic thanks to US-supported forces, Nicaragua’s leadership should be the next to fall. As head of the Task Force on Latin America charged with shaping the incoming president’s hemispheric policy, Berle sent recommendations for immediate action to the president-elect calling for the replacement of the current US ambassador in Nicaragua by someone able to negotiate the withdrawal of the Somoza family from power.¹² The current US ambassador, Thomas Whelan, was “widely believed to be in the pocket of the late dictator” and thus unfit to bring an end to the Somoza dynasty.

Berle was chosen by the incoming Kennedy administration as a bridge between the New Deal and the New Frontier.¹³ As a member of the Roosevelt “brain trust,” Berle had promoted a vision of economic reform predicated not on dismantling the structures of big business and capitalism, but on increasing governmental powers to regulate business in an effort to provide a counterweight to corporate power. He was closely involved with the formulation of Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy of nonintervention in internal Latin American affairs, helping to shore up hemispheric alliances to combat the Great Depression and resist the encroachment of fascism.¹⁴ After the Cuban revolution, Berle became one of the foremost proponents of overt use of US power in the hemisphere, believing that the threat of communist penetration was comparable to that of fascism two decades before.¹⁵ He asserted that antidictatorial intervention should be carried out openly as a prerogative of US power and should be legitimated with the assistance of Latin America’s democratic leadership. “Non-intervention,” the foremost principle of hemispheric cooperation, “is not absolute but qualified,” Berle argued, and political intervention could be j...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Alliance for Progress on the Doubtful Strait
• 2. Decentering Managua
• 3. Dis-integrating Rural Development
• 4. Pluralism, Development, and the Nicaraguan Revolution
• 5. Retracing Imperial Paths on the Mosquito Coast
• 6. Institutionalized Precarity in Postwar Nicaragua
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index