Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

One inoperable link in yours. Two more bits of reading i picked up last night - You mentioned you had done a paper, here is another:

The Reason the Reagan Administration Overthrew the Sandinista Government

A thesis presented to
the faculty of
the Center for International Studies of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Master of Arts

Kevin Santos Flores
June 2010
© 2010 Kevin Santos Flores

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=ohiou1268941542&disposition=inline

The 2nd - Policy Roundtable: Reagan and Latin America

TNSR December 18, 2018

Chair: Evan D. McCormick
Contributors: Daniel W. Fisk, Michelle Getchell, Edward A. Lynch, Andrea Oñate-Madrazo, James M. Scott

1. Latin America and the Legacy of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s, by Evan D. McCormick
2. Revisiting the Reagan Doctrine in Latin America, by James M. Scott
3. The Most Important Place in the World, by Andrea Oñate-Madrazo
4. Reagan’s Legacy: U.S. Support for Democratically-elected Civilian Governments, by Daniel W. Fisk
5. When World (view)s Collide: Foreign Policy-Making in the Reagan Administration, by Edward A. Lynch
6. Reagan’s War on Drugs and Latin America, by Michelle Getchell

We gathered together a group of scholars and practitioners to discuss the Reagan administration's foreign policy in Latin America — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

With photograph

1. Latin America and the Legacy of Ronald Reagan’s 1980s

By Evan D. McCormick

It has become one of the most iconic photographs of the 1980s: A gleeful President Ronald Reagan, flanked by First Lady Nancy and first dog Rex, holds up a bright red shirt emblazoned with simple block letters that read, “Stop communism [in] Central America.” According to press reports, Reagan had been handed the shirt spontaneously from a crowd gathered to see the couple off to Camp David in March 1986: Frank Santana, a Cuban-American visiting the White House along with a group of top-performing stockbrokers, had taken the shirt off of his own back and handed it to the president, who took the gift aboard Air Force One.1

The image endures not only because it captures Republican fervor for defeating the prospect of socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere at the time, but also because of the tragic irony that history adds to the photo. Owing to laborious peace processes and the investigative work of truth commissions, we now know that while Reagan was “performing” anti-communism to approving crowds on the White House lawn, the human cost of the political violence that was occurring throughout the hemisphere was mounting to horrific numbers. As many as 75,000 Salvadorans were killed in the civil war that ran from 1979 to 1992, during which U.S. military aid and support for El Salvador’s counterinsurgency became a centerpiece of Reagan’s policy in the region.2 In Nicaragua, 30,000 people died in the civil war between the Sandinista government and irregular forces, the Contras, which the Reagan administration supported despite U.S. laws forbidding it.3 The 1980s also witnessed the most violent period of Guatemala’s civil war, which claimed 200,000 lives between 1960 and 1996, many of them at the hand of U.S.-backed military governments.4

These figures indelibly mark the period ushered in by Reagan’s election as the bloodiest of the Cold War in Latin America. But casualties alone understate the extent to which Reagan and his advisors recast Latin America as an ideological and cultural battleground in the struggle against Soviet-backed communism. “The Americas are under attack,” declared the Committee of Santa Fe — a group of conservative foreign policy thinkers, several of who went on to serve in the Reagan administration — in 1980. “Latin America, the traditional alliance partner of the United States, is being penetrated by Soviet power. The Caribbean rim and basin are spotted with Soviet surrogates and ringed with socialist states.” To protect the nation’s security and restore its legitimacy, Reagan Republicans believed, the United States would have to extinguish the prospect of revolutionary change in its own backyard.

It is not surprising that a crescendo of militarism accompanied Reagan’s election in 1980. Reagan campaigned in large measure against President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, and in no place did Reaganites believe Carter’s policies toward the Global South had so undermined U.S. interests and legitimacy as in the Western Hemisphere. With a number of Latin American countries facing violent social conflicts, Carter sought to reverse the traditional U.S. policy of interventionism, emphasizing respect for human rights instead. Reagan officials bemoaned Carter’s signing of the Panama Canal treaties, which they felt relinquished control of a traditional symbol of U.S. might in the region.5 They saw fecklessness in Carter’s handling of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, which brought the leftist Sandinista faction to power. They chastised Carter for curtailing aid to military governments in Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile over human rights concerns. And they feared that the insurgency led by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front in El Salvador would cause that country to be the next domino to fall.6 “In four years,” Reagan alleged in an October 1980 campaign address, the Carter administration had “managed to alienate our friends in the hemisphere, to encourage the destabilization of governments, and to permit Cuban and Soviet influence to grow.”7

After taking office, Reagan officials moved swiftly to transform Latin America into a region where U.S. power would stand as an unquestioned bulwark against the Left. In his first year in office, Reagan dispatched military advisors to El Salvador and authorized massive amounts of military aid to the regime there despite widespread public and congressional criticism.8 He cut off aid to the Sandinista government and immediately began exploring means for providing lethal aid to the Contras. The administration promised to downplay human rights abuses and sought to resume military aid to Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile. When faced with evidence that such support was energizing military and security forces to carry out human rights violations against innocent civilians, U.S. officials denied or downplayed the claims.9 And when Congress passed laws making aid to the Contras illegal, the administration brazenly violated those laws, ensnaring itself in the Iran-Contra scandal.10

In its emphasis on Latin America as a focal point of U.S. national security, the Reagan administration’s approach was hardly unique. Indeed, by pledging U.S. power and legitimacy to defeating communism in Latin America, Reagan tapped into a deep tradition of asserting U.S. hegemony in the region for the benefit of U.S. security and economic interests, not to mention political effect at home.11 But combined with the culture of frenetic anti-communism at work in Reagan’s foreign policymaking circles, these policies represented a decisive escalation of the Cold War in the region.

But to remember the 1980s only for the tragic ideological violence in the region is to miss how the decade’s conflicts, and America’s responses to them, spawned more enduring transformations of U.S. foreign policy and hemispheric politics. Beginning in 1982, Reagan’s unapologetic anti-communism and his rhetorical commitment to defeating revolution by force were gradually superseded by rhetoric and policies that emphasized the spread of democracy and free markets in the Western Hemisphere.12 Military aid was not abandoned, but it was increasingly combined with development assistance and so-called democracy-promotion programs.13 This shift was accompanied by the rise of a cadre of neoconservative officials who stressed the salience of democratic transitions underway in places like El Salvador, Argentina, and Brazil. The promotion of anti-communist, democratic forces also had deep roots in Cold War policy, but the energy with which the Reagan administration threw itself behind those efforts was amplified by new institutions like the National Endowment for Democracy, which made support for civil society a new pillar of U.S. regional policy.14 By the end of the 1980s, Secretary of State George Shultz was lambasting “odd men out” — dictatorships of both the Right and Left — for their failure to conform to the wave of democratic transitions.15 Indeed, for many Reagan policymakers, America’s support for countries making the transition from military rule — like in Chile, where the United States supported the plebiscite that ousted Gen. Augusto Pinochet — was the administration’s crowning achievement.16 Critics of neoconservative foreign policies, too, have identified Reagan’s turn to democracy-promotion in the context of Latin American counterinsurgency efforts as a direct antecedent of U.S. interventionism in the Global War on Terror.17

A Climactic Decade

It's long ... https://tnsr.org/roundtable/policy-roundtable-reagan-and-latin-america/