Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Conservatives and liberals in Washington are already arguing over who should claim credit for the Sandinistas' defeat. But nobody really "won" Nicaragua. If the election of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro as President last week reflected anything, it was the people's rejection of the pain they have endured for a decade. Give us a chance, they said. End the war. Save the economy. The immediate target of their wrath was the Sandinistas, but the U.S. too bears a share of responsibility. It now owes Nicaragua generous help if it wants democracy to flourish...
...more common means. Ever since the trauma of Viet Nam, the U.S. has sought a less direct and costly method to have its way. Where military force could still do the trick cost effectively, the U.S. was willing to use it, as in Grenada and Panama. But in Nicaragua, wittingly or not, Washington stumbled on an arm's-length policy: wreck the economy and prosecute a long and deadly proxy war until the exhausted natives overthrow the unwanted government themselves. For Americans, the cost was minimal. True, bruising annual battles over Central America splintered Congress, and the Iran-contra scandal...
...real burden fell on Nicaragua. The U.S. strategy proved excruciatingly slow and extremely expensive, and it inflicted the most pain on the wrong people. The past ten years have savaged the country's civilians, not its comandantes. Since 1985 Washington has strangled Nicaraguan trade with an embargo. It has cut off Nicaragua's credit at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The contra war cost Managua tens of millions and left the country with wrecked bridges, sabotaged power stations and ruined farms. The impoverishment of the people of Nicaragua was a harrowing way to give the National Opposition...
President Bush made it clear that the war is over as far as the U.S. is concerned. "There is no reason at all for further military actions from any quarter," he said. But if power in Nicaragua is to change hands peacefully, the military standoff must be resolved before inauguration day. A violent confrontation would present Bush with an appalling decision on how far to go & to support the candidate the U.S. helped elect. Washington might serve its own interests better by persuading the contras to demobilize immediately, as both Chamorro and the Sandinistas have asked, but only after...
Washington seems prepared to accept the Sandinistas in the role of loyal opposition. "There is space in a democratic Nicaragua for the expression of all political points of view," said White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. Robert Pastor, Jimmy Carter's chief Latin American adviser, suggests that Bush go further, for example by inviting Sandinista ministers to Washington along with the new government to work out the terms of U.S. aid. "The Sandinistas should be given as many incentives as possible for cooperation," he says...