Opening Gambits-Black versus White
LATE THIS MARCH, A SENIOR U.S. MILITARY officer in Honduras was asked to comment on speculation that airstrips built during the Big Pine II maneuvers might be used to launch an invasion of...
...Behind the scenes in Washington, and in U.S...
...Each agency had its role...
...within eleven days, Carter restored economic aid...
...rising popular resistance set off waves of death squad killings...
...Evaluating the Advisability of Sending Military Assistance to El Salvador," Washington Office on Latin America, February 28, 1980...
...On March 12, an astonished press corps was told that it had given too much prominence to the Central America issue, and over the summer news of the region virtually disappeared from the media...
...Miami Herald, August 5, 1979...
...It found "a declining need for and receptivity to their advisory activities in recent years," and concluded that, "In terms of broader military strategy, Latin America, as it has since 1942, lies outside the geographical area of major concern...
...9. Col...
...A frustrated Haig set about changing that with a vigorous press campaign to set the national agenda...
...The ends of U.S...
...On May 2, 1979, with Somoza's grip on power weakening, the CIA prepared an internal report on "Cuban Support for Central American Guerrilla Groups...
...Discussions within the Reagan camp turned on questions of practicality and expediency: how much would it cost...
...The United States can only restore its credibility by taking immediate action...
...Author's interview with former U.S...
...The crisis, said Nutting, gave a new priority to "U.S...
...Despite the belligerent rhetoric, these aid levelsbroadly in line with Carter's-reflected the widespread caution in the Administration about escalating military commitments...
...The number of Green Berets worldwide had been reduced by 30...
...guerrilla activity surged...
...Carter found himself in an awkward position: on one hand, cultivating the Honduran regime, building up its military and urging it to assume a higher regional profile...
...For the State Department, the new regime's program of social reforms were worthy of support...
...and the CIA assessed the types of Central American assets to recruit, the number of covert operatives to be put in the field and the sort of training they would require...
...Part one was a strategy for indirectly managing the counterinsurgency war in El Salvador...
...On at least 10 occasions, troops landed in Honduras, Panama or Nicaragua...
...stance toward Central America with the Soviet MAY/JUNE 1984 25REndgame Ame Endgame attitude to Eastern Europe...
...When Senate hearings called attention to the presence of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba, Carter responded with a major address on October 1, announcing plans to counteract Moscow's Caribbean influence...
...policy circles are alive with plans for direct American Before Vietnam disillusionment set in: saluting the flag at Cam P-nh pa" iIlr intervention...
...and part three, the short-term development of U.S...
...The battle, over means of implementation, would be fought on the executive's home turf...
...Any idea of aiding Nicaragua was abandoned...
...It preached coexistence and co-optation and was not averse to the idea of easing Washington's traditional military-oligarchic clients gracefully from power...
...In the closing stages of the 1980 election campaign, the political authority of the Carter Administration, both in Central America and at home, became an open question...
...I think our first strategic requirement is to fight the covert war in Central America," said Southcom chief Gen...
...The Sandinistas' surge to power and the gathering strength of the leftist movements in El Salvador and Guatemala confronted the United States with a crisis in its own back yard...
...Haig told the Los Angeles Times that "Central America is probably more important to us than any other part of the world...
...By February 1980, a $75 million aid package for Nicaragua had stalled in the House, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and the hostages in Tehran were a nightly feature on network news...
...REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 20THE EXPULSION OF THIS DOCTRINE FROM THE political mainstream had a decisive impact on Central American policy...
...They wrote: "While the intensification in Soviet-Cuban interests in the Caribbean is either ignored or overlooked by Jimmy Carter, its meaning is well understood by his own professional analysts in national security and intelligence: Central America is going red...
...These ranged from small Green Beret training teams to rapid deployment battalions designed for quick and massive invasion...
...We'd do it from aircraft carriers and bring in units straight from the States and Panama...
...Army REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22organization of a rapid deployment force...
...This group saw any fundamental challenge to U.S...
...The airborne units, launched from nearby fields and complemented with heavier airlanded forces, bring with them a capability to influence a situation quickly and dramatically...
...We have dominated Central America militarily," he contended, "We have at times exploited it economically...
...he asked Congress to reprogram another $5 million, and his FY82 budget sought $25 million in arms credits and another $1 million in training funds...
...All this while the two neighbors were threatening war and while the CIA and the Pentagon were charging that Honduras had become a conduit for Sandinista arms shipments to El Salvador...
...A Gallup Poll published in March showed only 2% of respondents in favor of sending U.S...
...The boundaries of respectable opposition were redefined: Democratic liberals and progressives in the foreign service and the media began to converge toward the "responsible center"' and one by one their fundamental points of conflict with the Right fell by the wayside...
...The situation demanded new subtleties of planning and organization, a sophistication never before needed in Central America...
...That's asinine," he replied...
...A second, rival tendency was based primarily in the Pentagon and the CIA, though it also included John F. Kennedystyle State Department liberals and Democratic neoconservatives...
...But the facts of the case were beside the point...
...troops to El Salvador, and less than 20% supporting military or economic aid...
...counterinsurgency advisers and American-trained officers...
...The young officers' coup of October 15 offered both tendencies in Washington a temporary solution...
...The Somocista contras of Nicaragua and the floating anti-Castro Cubans of Miami rounded out the list of allies...
...officials are from the author's field interviews...
...From the viewpoint of the State Department, the pact helped clear the way for the April 1980 Constituent Assembly elections...
...In Honduras, Carter had been pushing the military regime toward gradual democratic reforms that could defuse social tensions and augment the prestige of the United States as backers of a functioning democracy...
...Collins, vice director of foreign intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency in march 1980...
...Washington Report on the Hemisphere," Council on Hemispheric Affairs, June 16, 1981 and April 6, 1982...
...At the same time, the Justice Department dropped an investigation of contra training camps in the United States...
...For the Sandinistas, this was ominous, and they began to protest hostile tendencies in the Administration in increasingly forceful tones...
...This would mean, in Haig's words, "bringing the overwhelming economic strength and political influence of the U.S., together with the reality of its military power, to bear on Cuba in order to treat the problem at its source...
...In June, with congressional approval, the Administration sent El Salvador $5 million in military supplies and training funds...
...then, in December 1979, a Defense Survey Team which arrived without the knowledge or approval of the civilian members of the Junta.' 4 In January, Congress approved a $300,000 training credit...
...For a time, this allowed both the hegemonists and the advocates of coexistence to pursue their ends simultaneously...
...7. Author's interview with former U.S...
...Carter's sudden change of course came as a pleasant surprise to Pentagon planners...
...Lo For months, the debate continued back and forth in the Administration...
...The Carter presidency, however, threw the hegemonic structure into disarray...
...Victor H. Krulak, "The Rapid Deployment Force: Criteria and Imperatives," Strategic Review, Spring, 1980...
...The oligarchy and military redoubled their efforts to subvert the reform process...
...This in turn demands a rethinking of the meaning of the words 'readiness, 'mobility' and 'responsiveness.' Krulak proposed...
...Carter saw the Sandinistas as locally inspired and subject to U.S...
...Retired Marine Corps General Victor Krulak wrote: There is a growing conviction that a need exists for an enhancement of...U.S...
...One camp favored low-key treatment of El Salvador as a local problem and sought to cure it through limited military and economic aid, along with certain covert measures...
...Just three days later, Carter side-stepped Congress and invoked emergency executive powers to double the level of military aid to El Salvador to $10 million, adding four more helicopters and 19 U.S...
...In January 1980, the Pentagon's Southern Command (Southcom) in Panama devoted its annual Commanders' Conference to "military presence as an instrument of foreign policy...
...El Salvador was not even established as a major news story...
...The policy was based largely on the promise of direct economic aid and multilateral loans...
...The creation of the apparatus of intervention can be seen as a journey along that conflict spectrum...
...By 1980, Washington confronted an unprecedented strategic dilemma: to regain control over lost ground, and to do so in a domestic climate hostile to direct invasion...
...The New York Times, February 12, 1981...
...The region's problems, he proclaimed, were external in origin, and a Republican Administration would commit itself to active intervention on behalf of longtime friends...
...In El Salvador, they built solid links to the D'Aubuisson group, old-line military officers and the security forces...
...aid, and were reorganized by U.S...
...Haig, Op Cit...
...Carter's lapse in imperial vigilance opened the floodgates...
...In March 1981, Jack Anderson reported that Army strategy director Maj...
...many were plotting to retake Managua...
...He announced the formation of a Caribbean contingency task force based in Key West and the New global military doctrines have taken root under the Reagan Administration U.S...
...By late 1979, military aid to El Salvador and Guatemala was nil...
...During November and December, Salvadorean troops staged four separate bombing runs on camps near the town of La Virtud...
...Quoted in David C. Jordan, "The Turbulent Caribbean: Three Views of U.S...
...State Department and White House officials agreed to seek means of restoring military assistance to both the latter countries...
...The next month, a comprehensive reform package offered by acting Ambassador James Cheek included the eventual acceptance of U.S...
...Army Overview FY84, Washington, D.C., Department of the Army, 1983...
...Military Policy," Strategic Studies Institute, U.S...
...In Nicaragua, the FSLN took the pivotal decision to begin clandestine arms shipments to support the Salvadorean offensive...
...Emerging from a closed-door briefing with Haig, Senate Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Charles Percy (R-IL) declared that the dispatch of combat troops to El Salvador "would be highly unlikely," but declined to "rule out any option...
...The contradictions could not be maintained for long, especially after Carter had recast his coexistence policy in terms of stopping communist expansion...
...F OR A DISPIRITED PENTAGON AND CIA, the Nicaraguan insurrection presented a challenge to strategic complacency and an opportunity to recoup lost political initiative...
...emphasis added)17 Out on the campaign trail, Reagan was taking the issue several steps further...
...2 4 And President Reagan refused to comment "about what we might or might not do" in Central America...
...Carter's personal popularity and authority nosedived...
...land forces had become what a later Reagan era Pentagon report described as "the Hollow Army...
...An Army War College study in 1977 noted that, "the continued presence of military missions is justified principally in terms of maintaining influence with a rather unique regional political elite who guide or control the destinies of many countries...
...It objected to revolutionary movements for the internal changes they promised, the presumptive foothold they would give the Soviet Union, and the signal of weakness their very existence would send geopolitical competitors...
...Schweitzer offered $5 million worth of equipment and $500,000 in training funds.1 3 By now the State Department and Pentagon had worked out a preliminary Honduran-Salvadorean accord formally ending the 1969 "Soccer War," and settling their major outstanding border disputes...
...But Haig's winter offensive was more than passing public spectacle...
...Honduras was receiving $2 million in equipment and $300,000 in training aid...
...Under Carter, Central America policy had departed radically from the old hegemonic vision...
...4 The national security bureaucracy's focus on Central America dovetailed nicely with a series of changes taking shape in U.S...
...client regimes as an affront to American prestige...
...With a wave of patriotic sentiment around the Iran hostage crisis, the national mood was ripe for a reassertion of global muscle...
...The State Department drafted a $75 million aid package...
...Everything depends on these guerrilla groups, and they're an unknown...
...intervention...
...They would not do so until November 1980, as Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S...
...The amphibious force...possesses a great shock power and, with its helicopters, a flexible capacity to make its impact felt deep inland...
...For some, the vision of rollback did not stop with Nicaragua...
...Consideration was being given to closing the Southern Command . CIA covert action had been cut back...
...Deputy Assistant Secretary of State James Cheek was brusquely refused an audience with Guatemalan president Lucas Garcia...
...churchwomen in El Salvador...
...military aid to El Salvador and Guatemala was curtailed and Somoza cut adrift...
...prestige...
...On December 5, 1980 Carter suspended all aid in protest...
...Excessively harsh criticism of the executive's choice of means would ultimately become logically and politically untenable...
...3. The Washington Post, August 2, 1979...
...She explicitly redrew the boundaries of moderation to embrace the Salvadorean security forces, arguing that their "degree of commitment to modern and democratic institutions...is very frequently underestimated...
...Testimony before House Subcommittee on InterAmerican Affairs, May 20, 1980, quoted in Cynthia Arnson and Delia Miller, "Update: Background Information on El Salvador and U.S...
...This described the Salvadorean revolution as "a textbook case of indirect armed aggression against a small Third World country by Communist powers acting through Cuba...
...Some were long-standing CIA assets...
...Honduran authorities raised no protest...
...Testimony by former Salvadorean Foreign Minister and Junta member Hector Dada Hirezi at Permanent People's Tribunal, Mexico City, February 10, 1981, quoted in Arnon Hadar, The United States and El Salvador: Political and Military Involvement, (Berkeley, U.S.-EI Salvador Research and Information Service, 1981...
...Although this early Nicaragua policy signified a tactical defeat for the hardliners, their campaign had generated public and institutional pressures that Carter was not inclined to ignore...
...Change is inevitable," explained Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Viron Vaky, "The real issue is not how to preserve stability in the MAY/JUNE 1984 21Reto4 ona e4 Ameias Endgame face of revolution, but how to create stability out of revolution...
...The Administration pulled in its horns...
...military advisers.' 5 The initial U.S...
...Under White House pressure, the Pentagon offered a training program for Sandinista Army officers...
...We need a clear policy articulation...
...hegemony...
...Military involvement began piecemeal over State Department and congressional resistance...
...A syndicated column by Evans and Novak provided a barometer of the conflict...
...Where Carter's commitment to the Salvadorean regime had been ad hoc, incoherent and lacking in ideological basis, Reaganites shared a principled commitment to the survival of military-oligarchic rule in Guatemala and El Salvador and the isolation of Nicaragua...
...Military Assistance to Central America," Institute for Policy Studies, June 1980...
...If we were going to mount an offensive attack, we'd do it like Grenada...
...The clash between these two fundamentally opposed conceptions of the United States' role as a world power was immediate, short and decisive...
...Once the purge of "activist" State Department officials was over-which took roughly until June-Reagan presided over a national security bureaucracy united on the direction of policy...
...official, Washington, D.C., February 9, 1984...
...For a period during 1976-77, the CIA station in El Salvador had been closed...
...official, Washington, D.C., February 10, 1984...
...military doctrine worldwide...
...The United States can no longer accept the status of Cuba as a Soviet vassal state...
...The Pentagon's new approach called for new, more mobile units "capable of intervening at all levels of the conflict spectrum...
...emphasis added] By early 1980, Reagan's foreign policy advisers had begun putting their rhetoric into action, establishing close working relationships with Central America's military-oligarchic Right...
...the only debate now was over means...
...Roger Fontaine, of the State Department's transition team, told The Miami Herald that if military aid did not defeat the revolutionaries, "the use of military force is an option...
...Cuba has nurtured the Sandinistas for nearly two decades," explained E.M...
...The playing out of these three options would shape the events of the next three years...
...All around, the pressure on Carter mounted...
...by January 1982, the conference was dealing with the nuts and bolts of implementation...
...In Congress, Rep...
...We're ready all right, but that's not the way we'll do it...
...Unless otherwise noted, quotations from U.S...
...But where...
...Namely, no hostile foreign power will be allowed bases or military and political allies in the region...
...The decision did not become public until March 1981, under Reagan...
...a broadly capable force...already in the critical area: airborne elements at bases only a few hours away, amphibious landing forces positioned in proximate waters...
...FOREIGN POLICY TOWARD CENTRAL America had undergone two basic shifts in the previous year...
...strategic interests in this part of the world, which a lot of us are beginning to appreciate perhaps for the first time in history...
...At the same time, without public notice, a second Green Beret mobile training team arrived on the Honduran side of the border...
...8 Only some of these trends were attributable to Carter's policy of coexistence...
...Boston Globe, February 23, 1981...
...But Carter sensed the shift in public and congressional mood, and repackaged his Nicaragua aid plan as an anti-Soviet initiative...
...What began in October 1979 as basically political support for a reformist movement was evolving into backing for a repressive rightist regime with primarily military needs...
...In the process, political and military options are created and foreclosed, and a new strategic consensus crystalizes around the need for direct U.S...
...The strategy has become clear...
...Ideological war had begun...
...On August 2, the Pentagon and CIA argued in a White House meeting for steps against Nicaragua and protective aid for El Salvador and Guatemala...
...At a White House meeting on August 2, 1979, Pentagon and CIA representatives won approval in principle for resuming military aid to El Salvador and Guatemala...
...It is very doubtful that the Sandinistas could have achieved victory without Cuban support...
...Once the need for rapid deployment had been acknowledged, the door was open to a whole skein of doctrine changes and force improvements...
...policy were no longer in dispute...
...16 T HE CARTER ADMINISTRATION HAD DECIDED to support the Salvadorean Junta...
...for the Pentagon, El Salvador could now be defended as a legitimate military client...
...Their well-publicized disputes, often falsely suggesting policy splits, were on matters of timing: how far up the conflict spectrum and how fast would the Administration have to move to achieve its ends...
...We have placed inordinate emphasis on the non-nuclear scenario that involves waves of Soviet tanks and Warsaw Pact legions flooding the West German plain, despite the obvious portents that our crises are more likely to arise on the world's underdeveloped littorals...
...supporting reform, untenable abroad...
...2. The Wall Street Journal, July 27, 1979...
...In June the Unified Revolutionary Directorate (DRU) was formed...
...The Joint Chiefs of Staff, chastened by Vietnam...and by the steady decline of respect for the military-and the decline of military budgets--resisted a major commitment...
...Nutting...
...It begins at low levels of overt aid and covert pressures, and escalates each time it becomes clear that the strategic goal remains out of reach...
...At the zealous end of the Reagan spectrum lay the desire for rollback in Nicaragua and a blockade or invasion of Cuba...
...Events in Tehran and Afghanistan, over which he had little control, were seized on by domestic enemies to prove the spinelessness of his foreign policy...
...Reagan's election touched off a polarizing chain of events...
...2 6 On March 2, Reagan drew on Carter's precedent to invoke executive authority for a further $20 million in emergency assistance to El Salvador...
...In a remarkable valedictory, consistent neither with his hard-line image nor with recent shifts in Administration policy, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski compared the U.S...
...These expanded with direct U.S...
...We have planes that can fly 13 hours nonstop and insert paratroopers before you'd know what hit you...
...The Reaganites' ideological offensive began even before the inauguration...
...If the workers of Gdansk have the right to demand a decent wage and decent working hours, the peasants of El Salvador and Nicaragua have the right to demand their land...
...On Nicaragua, however, reconciliation would continue...
...But from early 1978, when the political character of the anti-Somoza movement was at its most fluid, influential elements of the CIA and Pentagon began urging a policy based on the premise that the insurrection was a Soviet-Cuban ploy...
...This camp, identified with Carter's human rights policies, viewed revolutionary forces as an unavoidable historical reality that need not adversely affect the United States...
...The system functioned smoothly until 1977...
...In February, the State Department issued its "White Paper" on El Salvador, based in part on documents supplied by Roberto D'Aubuisson...
...advisers...
...The New York Times, December 7, 1980...
...how long would it take...
...Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912-1925, and again from 1926-1933...
...T HE NEW STRATEGY PLANNERS WERE MOTIvated in part by the urgency of breaking events, but also by a sense of playing catch-up ball...
...Back in Washington, quiet bureaucratic changes were underway...
...By the 1930s, military response to crisis had been superceded by a more sophisticated use of client regimes and economic controls, which helped to forestall crisis...
...Even as the advisers packed their bags for San Salvador, Washington heard the last echoes of coexistence as official policy...
...In September 1979, William Bowdler arrived in Tegucigalpa to help engineer a cabinet shake-up and urge the Army to respect election plans if it hoped to avoid the fate of Nicaragua's National Guard...
...By 1981, the discussion had narrowed to "the definition of strategic interests in Latin America...
...FOR THE FIRST TIME, CARTER HAD PLACED his Central America policy in an East-West framework...
...The Committee of Santa Fe called for "a revitalized Monroe Doctrine...
...2 One faction in Congress and the Administration reacted with relative equanimity...
...America is faced with a loss of hegemony in Central America," a State Department spokesman told The Wall Street Journal in the week of the FSLN victory...
...First came $205,000 worth of riot control gear and a six-man training team...
...The third shift, marked by the Reagan election, was arguably less radical than the other two...
...In the corridors of the institutional bureaucracy, the new interventionist strategy was gradually set in motion...
...On July 4, they leaked it to the press, having failed to undercut the White House and State Department's acceptance of a leading role for the Sandinistas in post-Somoza Nicaragua...
...the consensus branded the Sandinistas as an adversary which the United States had a right-indeed an obligation-to pressure into changing course...
...The Reagan team recognized that it was swimming against the tide of public opinion, which though unwelcome, could not simply be ignored...
...REndga o me Amerc Endgame References OPENING GAMBITS-BLACK VERSUS WHITE 1. Author's interview, Tegucigalpa, March 1984...
...But in the wake of Somoza's collapse, the Pentagon moved to expand its military component...
...We now have to make sure that the mechanics...
...The majority of these operations received little public scrutiny and were funded by Congress under general budget categories unrelated to Central American policy...
...In September Carter certified that Nicaragua was not aiding foreign revolutionaries, only to be flatly contradicted by his own Pentagon and CIA...
...2 3 Jeane Kirkpatrick announced that "Our position in the Western Hemisphere has deteriorated to the point where we must now defend outselves against a ring of Soviet bases being established on and around our borders...
...7 The Pentagon's overall readiness to intervene in Third World guerrilla wars had also declined...
...On January 28, 1981, he told reporters that, "International terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern...
...This was the age of Dollar Diplomacy and the Good Neighbor Policy...
...Military aid followed on January 14, and was supplemented with two Huey helicopters...
...By 1980 a backlash against defense cuts and the post-Vietnam demobilization was well underway...
...In El Salvador, the guerrillas expanded their planned seasonal actions into a much publicized "final offensive," to present the new Administration with a fait accompli...
...But the preparations belie the prevailing stereotype of a policy fueled by Reaganite ideological fervor, lurching down a course of reckless brinkmanship...
...intervention and its likely political effect...
...Carter had presided over a decline in the U.S...
...In Guatemala, they befriended the ultra-Right National Liberation Movement (MLN), the business lobby vnajano ing revolution was becoming untenable at home...
...Ibid...
...what remained was for an agenda agreed upon in the CIA, the Pentagon and the Reagan camp to be implemented as unified policy...
...6. The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 1982...
...As Haig lamented in his memoirs, their views enjoyed wide currency in the early days of the new Administration...
...IN EL SALVADOR, TOO, MILITARY AND STATE Department programs were experiencing a coincidence of interests...
...The State Department transition team prepared and leaked a "hit list" of "social reformer" ambassadors including Robert White in El Salvador and Lawrence Pezzullo in Nicaragua...
...Embassies in Central America, officials set to work on a three-part plan...
...From the SpanishAmerican War of 1898 through the mid-1930s, the United States had responded to unwanted developments in Central America with straightforward military reprisal...
...The nature of the adversary was being redefined as well, as the Pentagon and CIA hammered away at geopolitics...
...By March 1980, as Congress opened its first major debate on El Salvador, the policies of coexistence had already been fatally undermined both by events at home and by the rapidly polarizing situation in Central America itself...
...part two was the political and military isolation of Nicaragua...
...the State Department laid out desirable forms of political coordination among friendly Central American governments...
...Some, like Secretary of State Alexander Haig, urged the president to start at the top...
...Wallace Nutting in his key note address, "and that can't be done without the rebuilding of a positive capability which requires the elevation of priorities, and a lot of work and a lot of sweat has gone into that and I am satisfied now that it is happening...
...Shit, the airstrips are a joke...
...Quoted in Michael T. Klare, "The New Counterinsurgency," The Nation, March 14, 1981...
...The first was the Soviet combat brigade episode, placing Carter's coexistence policies in an East-West framework...
...Central American attendance at the School of the Americas in Panama was dropping...
...In May, Roberto D'Aubuisson attempted a coup and the agrarian reform stalled at Phase I. In the same month, a Honduran-Salvadorean pincer operation ended in the massacre of hundreds of fleeing refugees on the Rio Sumpul...
...In December, the State Department reclassified military transport trucks and field radios as "non-lethal" equipment, making Guatemala eligible to receive military supplies again after years in the wilderness as a result of its dismal human rights record...
...SupportMAY/JUNE 1984 23REndgae o Amis Endgame military intervention would have to be reassessed...
...Charles D. Corbett, "Inter-American Security and U.S...
...Green Berets participated briefly (and again covertly) in the 1967 counterinsurgency in Guatemala, but otherwise local forces kept on the lid...
...On September 24, four days before the formal signing of the peace treaty between the two nations, Salvadorean helicopters reportedly machine-gunned refugee camps inside Honduras...
...Miami Herald, April 14, 1980...
...The doctrine of coexistence with Third World revolutions was well on its way to extinction...
...MILITARY officer in Honduras was asked to comment on speculation that airstrips built during the Big Pine II maneuvers might be used to launch an invasion of Nicaragua...
...military buildup in Honduras proved to be a two-edged sword...
...Over the next three months a series of Pentagon and CIA press leaks contradicted claims by the State Department and Carter himself that Cuban involvement in the Sandinista triumph had been minimal...
...The second came in spring 1980, when reformist goals were buried under military and political exigencies...
...For the Pentagon, it opened the door for a six-man Green Beret border security Mobile Training Team in February, and offered the chance for Honduran soldiers to conduct border operations against Salvadorean guerrillas escaping from Army sweeps, a key aspect of the Pentagon strategy...
...The Washington Post, August 1, 1979...
...Ronald Reagan, now a vigorous contender for the Republican presidential nomination, made the Central American crisis a campaign focus, telling the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that "the Caribbean is being made, by way of Cuba, the Soviets' surrogate, into a red lake...
...The Cubans took the threat of war very seriously: Haig later recalled that "Castro ordered antiaircraft guns placed on the roofs of Havana during our naval exercises...
...The origins of the current interventionist strategy lie in an ideological split that racked Washington in 1979, with the fall of its most faithful ally in Central America, the Somoza family...
...The notion of coexistence was essentially dead...
...19 Even as Carter era liberals took to the press to condemn their successors' inflammatory comments, their own Administration, propelled by the speed of events and its own ideological concessions, was sliding toward a Central America policy with a distinctly military cast...
...The Salvadorean regime, meanwhile, was sanitized by elections and accepted as an ally to be defended...
...In his October speech, he explained the money as an effort to "ensure the ability of troubled peoples to resist social turmoil and possible communist domination...
...Now, he took the next logical step and backed it up with military resources...
...Policy," Strategic Review, Fall 1980...
...From the moment of the Sandinista victory, Honduras was awash with exiled Somocistas and National Guardsmen...
...W ITHIN WEEKS, TALK BEGAN OF DIRECT U.S...
...intervention forces...
...2 1 L ANGUAGE LIKE THAT WAS ANATHEMA TO the incoming Administration...
...The United States faced serious choices about the nature of its loyalties, choices that Carter's short-term marriage of opposing camps was inherently unable to address...
...military presence in Central America...
...also...operate with reasonable efficiency...
...The testing and softening up of public opinion was an essential preparatory ritual for the march up the conflict spectrum...
...on the other, sending aid and making diplomatic overtures to Nicaragua...
...Alexander Haig, Caveat: Realism, Reagan and Foreign Policy, excerpted in Time, April 2, 1984...
...The Washington Post, March 23, 1980...
...On September 12, new assistant secretary of state for interamerican affairs, William P. Bowdler, arranged the first highlevel meeting to establish amicable relations between Sandinista and Honduran officials...
...The Washington Post, January 13, 1981...
...Very nearly the first words spoken on the subject of Central America in the councils of the Reagan Administration made reference to the dangers of "another Vietnam...
...Army War College, June 24, 1977...
...5. Financial Times, March 26, 1980...
...2 2 A consensus within the Administration opted for caution, pausing at each new level of escalation to judge whether it was enough...
...We will support the efforts of the Nicaraguan people to establish a free and independent government," said the GOP platform...
...The best that William Bowdler could now offer was that, "We will not use military force in situations where only domestic groups are in contention...
...For them, the domestic political cost of military intervention would be too high...
...Thirty ships headed directly for waters off Cuba...
...influence...
...The changing attitudes of the outgoing Carter Administration were highlighted by a string of decisions taken in the wake of the murder of the four U.S...
...Krulak estimated that it would take "four to five years and twenty billion dollars" to put such a force into place.1 2 O N THE POLITICAL FRONT TOO, CENTRAL America policy was redefined under pressure...
...The Pentagon decided on the kind of fighting for which it should prepare its U.S.-based combat units...
...But eight days later, Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte became president of the Junta...
...In that camp were Vice President Bush, Defense Secretary Weinberger, Director of Central Intelligence Casey (with reservations), National Security Adviser Allen and most of the others...
...Strategy development and the creation of operational tools proceeded concurrently, often by trial and error, but always in a clear direction...
...There are clear indications that the Cubans are assisting (Salvadorean leftists) in their attempt to overthrow the current government," testified Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Franklin Kramer at the House Foreign Operations hearings of May 20, 1980...
...2 5 In February, 50 U.S...
...Cuba and Nicaragua had not yet begun their military support for the FMLN...
...In El Salvador, the first Junta collapsed...
...In fact, in the five years since the fall of Somoza, the United States has evolved a strategy and an apparatus of intervention that are calculated and serious, grounded in institutional and political mandates far broader than the war cries of the radical Right...
...The Sandinistas declined...
...Others, ironically, grew out of the Pentagon's past successes in creating a local counterinsurgency system in Latin America...
...But we are outgrowing that phase of our history...
...The armies and security forces of El Salvador and Guatemala, emboldened by their talks with the Reagan entourage, stepREPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24After the purge-Reagan's appointee to the San Salvador Embassy was Deane R. Hinton Ian ped up the killing...
...Anybody who thinks we're going to invade from a couple of overgrown dirt runways is pissing in the wind...
...Jeane Kirkpatrick stated clearly that Washington would assist a "moderate autocracy...friendly to the United States" rather than see it "overrun by a Cuban-trained, Cuban-armed, Cubansponsored insurgency...
...4. Transcript of General Nutting's speech "Security Development for the 1980s," January 1982, obtained through Freedom of Information Act request by NARMIC of the American Friends Service Committee...
...some reflected the political and bureaucratic aftereffects of Vietnam...
...We are involved in a very fundamental reassessment of interests," observed Gen...
...The issue had become an ideological benchmark, and is still so today...
...CONTROL Over Central America began with a series of covert battles in the corridors of official Washington, a necessary prelude to the shooting war that would shortly follow...
...Haig was in a minority in proposing Central America as a testing ground for U.S...
...capability to respond to a wide spectrum of short notice international threats...
...The brigade, as military officials privately admitted, had been stationed in Cuba for 17 years and hardly posed an imminent threat...
...Robert L. Schweitzer told the Honduran Junta "that it is expected to assume the regional role played for years by Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza-to become the bulwark of anti-Communism against the pressure of popular revolt...
...ships led by the aircraft carrier America began the six-week long Readex 1-81 exercise north of Puerto Rico, the largest Caribbean maneuver in history...
...During the 1960s, Kennedy and Johnson took the philosophy of pre-emptive security one step further, and put much of the responsibility directly in the hands of local armies and security forces...
...By showing no stomach for the fight over strategic goals, Congress forfeited its primary source of leverage: the ability of the legislature to define the broad outlines of policy...
...Neither is subject to facile alteration by withdrawing some troops on maneuver in Honduras or letting airfields go to seed...
...8. U.S...
...When the bill eventually passed the House in March 1980, it carried a requirement that the president periodically certify that Nicaragua was not supporting foreign revolutionary movements...
...The significance of that choice, however, was being redefined by events...
...It was within this vacuum of opposition that the forces of the interventionist Right worked, at first from bastions in Carter's Pentagon and CIA, and later from every corner of Ronald Reagan's Washington, to regain U.S...
...Others argued that control could be regained in Central America with less drastic means...
...Not until 1954 in Guatemala did it again prove necessary to resort to direct invasion, and even there the job was done covertly through the CIA...
...interests section in Havana, noted in the Fall 1982 issue of Foreign Policy...
...John Murphy (D-NY) mounted an effective campaign against Carter's Nicaraguan aid package, fueled by a constant stream of leaks from the intelligence agencies...
...Their will to prevail, however, was no less than Haig's, and as each experiment in limited political and military intervention fell short, the march up the conflict spectrum continued...
...THE CAMPAIGN TO REASSERT U.S...
...The State Department conceded one crucial point: if foreign involvement could be established, the need for Amigos ael rais and me military clique around president Romeo Lucas Garcia...
Vol. 18 • May 1984 • No. 3
