Contras
The Contras were the anti-communist right-wing rebels who waged a guerrilla war against the Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Junta of National Reconstruction, which came to power after the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979. The insurgency against the Sandinista government lasted from 1979 until 1990, and was one of the highest profile conflicts of the Cold War.
In July 1979, the FSLN took control of the capital Managua after weeks of heavy fighting. The president at the time, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, fled the country and relinquished control of the central government, leaving the Sandinistas in power. The Sandinistas created a military junta that acted as an interim government immediately after. Various groups were created in response to this, consisting of dissidents of the new government and members of the former National Guard. These groups would regularly meet and establish the Contras in 1980.
During the insurgency, the United States and several other countries provided military assistance and financial aid to the Contras. In 1981, the CIA and Argentina's Secretariat of Intelligence persuaded several Contra groups to unite into the larger Nicaraguan Democratic Force.
In 1982, the Boland Amendment was passed to end U.S. aid to the Contras; yet the Reagan administration continued to illegally fund the Contras, which resulted in a scandal known as the Iran–Contra affair. By 1987, most of the Contra militias had united into the Nicaraguan Resistance, within which the Nicaraguan Democratic Force was the largest group.
During the war, the Contras' tactics featured terrorism and human rights violations against civilians. The Reagan administration said that the Contras' tactics did not include attacks against civilians. The CIA said that Contra terrorism resulted from "the poor discipline characteristic of irregular forces", that terrorism was not an official military doctrine of the Contras, and that the Contra leader responsible was executed. The Global Terrorism Database reports that Contras carried out more than 1,300 terrorist attacks.
After a cutoff in U.S. military support, and with both sides facing international pressure to bring an end to the conflict, the contras agreed to negotiations with the FSLN. With the help of five Central American presidents, including Daniel Ortega, the sides agreed that a voluntary demobilization of the Contras should start in early December 1989. They chose this date to facilitate free and fair elections in Nicaragua in February 1990.
History
Origins
The Contras were not a monolithic group, but a combination of three distinct elements of Nicaraguan society:- Ex-guardsmen of the Nicaraguan National Guard and other right-wing figures who fought in Anastasio Somoza García's government before Somoza's government collapsed in 1979. The guardsmen later comprised a significant portion of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the largest Contra organization. Remnants of the Guard later formed groups such as the Fifteenth of September Legion, the Anti-Sandinista Guerrilla Special Forces, and the National Army of Liberation. Initially however, these groups were small and conducted little active raiding into Nicaragua.
- Anti-Somoza activists who supported the revolution but felt betrayed by the Sandinista government, – such as Édgar Chamorro, a member of the FDN's political directorate, and José Francisco Cardenal, who briefly served in the Council of State before leaving Nicaragua following a disagreement with the Sandinista government's policies and founding the Nicaraguan Democratic Union, an opposition group of Nicaraguan exiles based in Miami. Another example was MILPAS, a peasant militia led by disillusioned Sandinista veterans from the northern mountains. Founded by Pedro Joaquín González, known as "Dimas", the Milpistas were also known as chilotes. Following Dimas' death, MILPAS bands emerged in 1980 and 1981. The Milpistas were composed largely of campesino highlanders and rural workers.
- Nicaraguans who had avoided direct involvement in the revolution but opposed the Sandinistas.
Main groups
The FDN was led by its Enrique Bermudez, its military commander, who led its war efforts against the Sandinistas, and Adolfo Calero Portocarrero, a Nicaraguan businessman who opposed the Somoza regime and led its political directorate. Édgar Chamorro later said that the UDN opposed working with the Guardsmen and that the merging only took place because of insistence by the CIA.
Based in Honduras, Nicaragua's northern neighbor, under the command of former National Guard Colonel Enrique Bermúdez, the new FDN began recruiting other smaller insurgent forces in the north. Largely financed, trained, equipped, armed and organized by the U.S., it emerged as the largest and most active Contra group.
In April 1982, Edén Pastora, one of the heroes in the fight against Somoza, organized the Sandinista Revolutionary Front – embedded in the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance – and declared war on the Sandinista government. Himself a former Sandinista who had held several high posts in the government, he had resigned abruptly in 1981 and defected, believing that the newly found power had corrupted the Sandinistas' original ideas. A popular and charismatic leader, Pastora initially saw his group develop quickly. He confined himself to operate in the southern part of Nicaragua; after a press conference he was holding on 30 May 1984 was bombed, he "voluntarily withdrew" from the Contra struggle.
A third force, Misurasata, appeared among the Miskito, Sumo and Rama Amerindian peoples of Nicaragua's Atlantic coast, who in December 1981 found themselves in conflict with the authorities following the government's efforts to nationalize Indian land. In the course of this conflict, forced removal of at least 10,000 Indians to relocation centers in the interior of the country and subsequent burning of some villages took place. The Misurasata movement split in 1983, with the breakaway Misura group of Stedman Fagoth Muller, which aligned more closely with the FDN, and the rest accommodating themselves with the Sandinistas: on 8 December 1984 a ceasefire agreement known as the Bogota Accord was signed by Misurasata and the Nicaraguan government. A subsequent autonomy statute in September 1987 largely defused Miskito resistance.
Unity efforts
U.S. officials were active in attempting to unite the Contra groups. In June 1985 most of the groups reorganized as the United Nicaraguan Opposition, under the leadership of Adolfo Calero, Arturo Cruz, and Alfonso Robelo, each of whom opposed the Sandinista revolution. After UNO's dissolution early in 1987, the Nicaraguan Resistance was organized along similar lines in May.U.S. military and financial assistance
In front of the International Court of Justice, the Nicaraguan government claimed that the Contras were altogether a creation of the U.S. This claim was rejected but the evidence of a very close relationship between the Contras and the United States was considered overwhelming and incontrovertible. The U.S. played a very large role in financing, training, arming, and advising the Contras over a long period, and it is unlikely that the Contras would have been capable of carrying out significant military operations without this support, given the large amount of training and weapons shipments that the Sandinistas had received from Cuba and the Soviet Union.Political background
The U.S. government viewed the leftist Sandinistas as a threat to economic interests of American corporations in Nicaragua and to national security. U.S. President Ronald Reagan stated in 1983 that "The defense of southern frontier" was at stake. "In spite of the Sandinista victory being declared fair, the United States continued to oppose the left-wing Nicaraguan government." and opposed its ties to Cuba and the Soviet Union. Ronald Reagan, who had assumed the American presidency in January 1981, accused the Sandinistas of importing Cuban-style socialism and aiding leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The Reagan administration continued to view the Sandinistas as undemocratic despite the 1984 Nicaraguan elections being generally declared fair by foreign observers. Throughout the 1980s the Sandinista government was regarded as "Partly Free" by Freedom House, an organization financed by the U.S. government.File:Bush reagan.jpg|thumb|U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Bush in 1984. Under the Reagan Doctrine, the Reagan administration provided overt and covert assistance to the Contras.
On 4 January 1982, Reagan signed the top secret National Security Decision Directive 17, giving the CIA the authority to recruit and support the Contras with $19 million in military aid. The effort to support the Contras was one component of the Reagan Doctrine, which called for providing military support to movements opposing Soviet-supported, communist governments.
By December 1981, the United States had already begun to support armed opponents of the Sandinista government. From the beginning, the CIA was in charge. The arming, clothing, feeding, and supervision of the Contras became the most ambitious paramilitary and political action operation mounted by the agency in nearly a decade.
In the fiscal year 1984, the U.S. Congress approved $24 million in aid to the Contras. After this, since the Contras failed to win widespread popular support or military victories within Nicaragua, opinion polls indicated that a majority of the U.S. public was not supportive of the Contras, the Reagan administration lost much of its support regarding its Contra policy within Congress after disclosure of CIA mining of Nicaraguan ports, and a report of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research commissioned by the State Department found Reagan's allegations about Soviet influence in Nicaragua "exaggerated", Congress cut off all funds for the Contras in 1985 by the third Boland Amendment. The Boland Amendment had first been passed by Congress in December 1982. At this time, it only outlawed U.S. assistance to the contras "for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government", while allowing assistance for other purposes. In October 1984, it was amended to forbid action by not only the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency but all U.S. government agencies.
Nevertheless, the case for support of the Contras continued to be made in Washington, D.C., by both the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, which argued that support for the Contras would counter Soviet influence in Nicaragua.
On 1 May 1985 President Reagan announced that his administration perceived Nicaragua to be "an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States", and declared a "national emergency" and a trade embargo against Nicaragua to "deal with that threat". It "is now a given; it is true", the Washington Post declared in 1986, "the Sandinistas are communists of the Cuban or Soviet school"; that "The Reagan administration is right to take Nicaragua as a serious menace—to civil peace and democracy in Nicaragua and to the stability and security of the region"; that we must "fit Nicaragua back into a Central American mode" and "turn Nicaragua back toward democracy", and with the "Latin American democracies" "demand reasonable conduct by regional standard."
Soon after the embargo was established, Managua re-declared "a policy of nonalignment" and sought the aid of Western Europe, who were opposed to U.S. policy, to escape dependency on the Soviet Union. Since 1981 U.S. pressures had curtailed Western credit to and trade with Nicaragua, forcing the government to rely almost totally on the Eastern bloc for credit, other aid, and trade by 1985. In his 1997 study on U.S. low intensity warfare, Kermit D. Johnson, a former Chief of the U.S. Army Chaplains, contends that U.S. hostility toward the revolutionary government was motivated not by any concern for "national security", but rather by what the world relief organization Oxfam termed "the threat of a good example":
The government's program included increased wages, subsidized food prices, and expanded health, welfare, and education services. And though it nationalized Somoza's former properties, it preserved a private sector that accounted for between 50 and 60 percent of GDP.