The Civil War in Nicaragua

The Civil War in Nicaragua

Author: Roger Miranda

Publisher: Transaction Publishers

Published: 1992-03-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9781412819688

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"The conflict in Nicaragua is one of the leastunderstood struggles of the Cold War. . . . This account clarifies the central issue and dispelsmany lingering myths." --Zbigniew Breinski,National Security Advisor during the Carter administration


Homicidal Ecologies

Homicidal Ecologies

Author: Deborah J. Yashar

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-12-06

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1107178479

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Latin America has among the world's highest homicide rates. The author analyzes the illicit organizations, complicit and weak states, and territorial competition that generate today's violent homicidal ecologies.


Unfinished Revolution

Unfinished Revolution

Author: Kenneth E. Morris

Publisher: Chicago Review Press

Published: 2010-06-24

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1569767564

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Together with his brother Humberto, Daniel Ortega Saavedra masterminded the only victorious Latin American revolution since Fidel Castro's in Cuba. Following the triumphant 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, Ortega was named coordinator of the governing junta, and then in 1984 was elected president by a landslide in the country's first free presidential election. The future was full of promise. Yet the United States was soon training, equipping, and financing a counterrevolutionary force inside Nicaragua while sabotaging its crippled economy. The result was a decade-long civil war. By 1990, Nicaraguans dutifully voted Ortega out and the preferred candidate of the United States in. And Nicaraguans grew poorer and sicker. Then, in 2006, Daniel Ortega was reelected president. He was still defiantly left-wing and deeply committed to reclaiming the lost promise of the Revolution. Only time will tell if he succeeds, but he has positioned himself as an ally of Castro and Hugo Ch&ávez, while life for many Nicaraguans is finally improving. Unfinished Revolution is the first full-length biography of Daniel Ortega in any language. Drawing from a wealth of untapped sources, it tells the story of Nicaragua's continuing struggle for liberation through the prism of the Revolution's most emblematic yet enigmatic hero.


What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution

What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution

Author: Dan La Botz

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-09-07

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 9004291318

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This volume is a valuable re-assessment of the Nicaraguan Revolution by a Marxist historian of Latin American political history. It shows that the FSLN (‘the Sandinistas’), with politics principally shaped by Soviet and Cuban Communism, never had a commitment to genuine democracy either within the revolutionary movement or within society at large; that the FSLN’s lack of commitment to democracy was a key factor in the way that revolution was betrayed from the 1970s to the 1990s; and that the FSLN’s lack of rank-and-file democracy left all decision-making to the National Directorate and ultimately placed that power in the hands of Daniel Ortega. Pursuing his narrative into the present, La Botz shows that, once their would-be bureaucratic ruling class project was defeated, Ortega and the FSLN leadership turned to an alliance with the capitalist class.


The Banana Wars

The Banana Wars

Author: Ivan Musicant

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers

Published: 1990

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13:

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The Banana Wars is the first history of the rise of the United States as a military power in this hemisphere - from the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the recent Grenadan and Panama interventions. It concerns most of all the men sent to maintain order in remote locales - the military governors, generals, and officers - and also the State Department officials, congressmen, and Presidents who pulled the strings back home. In his gripping account based on primary sources, Ivan Musicant re-creates the experiences of the men who served: daring feats that have become the stuff of military lore, unsung day-to-day duties, successes and failures. (from book cover).


Our Own Backyard

Our Own Backyard

Author: William M. LeoGrande

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-11-18

Total Pages: 790

ISBN-13: 0807898805

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In this remarkable and engaging book, William LeoGrande offers the first comprehensive history of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the waning years of the Cold War. From the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war in the late 1970s to the final regional peace settlements negotiated a decade later, he chronicles the dramatic struggles--in Washington and Central America--that shaped the region's destiny. For good or ill, LeoGrande argues, Central America's fate hinged on decisions that were subject to intense struggles among, and within, Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House--decisions over which Central Americans themselves had little influence. Like the domestic turmoil unleashed by Vietnam, he says, the struggle over Central America was so divisive that it damaged the fabric of democratic politics at home. It inflamed the tug-of-war between Congress and the executive branch over control of foreign policy and ultimately led to the Iran-contra affair, the nation's most serious political crisis since Watergate.


The Banana Wars

The Banana Wars

Author: Lester D. Langley

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780842050470

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The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898-1934 offers a sweeping panorama of America's tropical empire in the age spanned by the two Roosevelts and a detailed narrative of U.S. military intervention in the Caribbean and Mexico. In this new edition, Professor Langley provides an updated introduction, placing the scholarship in current historical context. From the perspective of the Americans involved, the empire carved out by the banana warriors was a domain of bickering Latin American politicians, warring tropical countries, and lawless societies that the American military had been dispatched to police and tutor. Beginning with the Cuban experience, Langley examines the motives and consequences of two military occupations and the impact of those interventions on a professedly antimilitaristic American government and on its colonial agents in the Caribbean, the American military. The result of the Cuban experience, Langley argues, was reinforcement of the view that the American people did not readily accept prolonged military occupation of Caribbean countries. In Nicaragua and Mexico, from 1909 to 1915, where economic and diplomatic pressures failed to bring the results desired in Washington, the American military became the political arbiters; in Hispaniola, bluejackets and marines took on the task of civilizing the tropics. In the late 1920s, with an imperial force largely of marines, the American military waged its last banana war in Nicaragua against a guerrilla leader named Augusto C. Sandino. Langley not only narrates the history of America's tropical empire, but fleshes out the personalities of this imperial era, including Leonard Wood and Fred Funston, U.S. Army, who left their mark on Cuba and Vera Cruz; William F. Fullam and William Banks Caperton, U.S. Navy, who carried out their missions imbued with old-school beliefs about their role as policemen in disorderly places; Smedley Butler and L.W.T. Waller, Sr., U.S.M.C., who left the most lasting imprint of A


Sandinistas

Sandinistas

Author: Robert J. Sierakowski

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2019-12-31

Total Pages: 455

ISBN-13: 0268106916

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Robert J. Sierakowski's Sandinistas: A Moral History offers a bold new perspective on the liberation movement that brought the Sandinista National Liberation Front to power in Nicaragua in 1979, overthrowing the longest-running dictatorship in Latin America. Unique sources, from trial transcripts to archival collections and oral histories, offer a new vantage point beyond geopolitics and ideologies to understand the central role that was played by everyday Nicaraguans. Focusing on the country’s rural north, Sierakowski explores how a diverse coalition of labor unionists, student activists, housewives, and peasants inspired by Catholic liberation theology came to successfully challenge the legitimacy of the Somoza dictatorship and its entrenched networks of power. Mobilizing communities against the ubiquitous cantinas, gambling halls, and brothels, grassroots organizers exposed the regime’s complicity in promoting social ills, disorder, and quotidian violence while helping to construct radical new visions of moral uplift and social renewal. Sierakowski similarly recasts our understanding of the Nicaraguan National Guard, grounding his study of the Somozas’ army in the social and cultural world of the ordinary soldiers who enlisted and fought in defense of the dictatorship. As the military responded to growing opposition with heightened state terror and human rights violations, repression culminated in widespread civilian massacres, stories that are unearthed for the first time in this work. These atrocities further exposed the regime’s moral breakdown in the eyes of the public, pushing thousands of previously unaligned Nicaraguans into the ranks of the guerrilla insurgency by the late 1970s. Sierakowski’s innovative reinterpretation of the Sandinista Revolution will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists concerned with Latin American social movements, the Cold War, and human rights.


Commandos

Commandos

Author: Sam Dillon

Publisher: Owl Books

Published: 1992-10-01

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780805023572

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Recounts how the American government financed and orchestrated the ten-year civil war between the Sandinistas and the Contras