The United States and Nicaragua

...and international aid that poured into Nicaragua laid a foundation for the revolution that took power seven years later, and our ambassador put his shoulder to the task as well by defending Somoza against all criticism...

...Moreover, the hardline position in Washington, by broaching possibilities of U.S...

...Reviewed by Paul Berman Contributor, "Village Voice, " "Dissent," "New Republic" The Mexican historian Enrique Krauze observed in Vuelta magazine recently that yesterday's map of the British Empire is today's map of democracy —or is at least a map of countries with noticeable elements of democratic systems...

...That meant a new ambassador, Lawrence Pezullo, a talented man according to Lake but with scarcely any background in Nicaraguan affairs, had to step intoofficejust as the final calamity unraveled...

...President Carlos Andres Perez of Venezuela, recognizing that Somoza was going to fall, told Jimmy Carter that the time had come for the United States to remove the Nicaraguan dictator...

...Pezullo and the American staff, in an effort to wash their hands of Somoza's remnant regime, escaped the country at the last minute in a C-130 flown by a young Tennessee pilot who had no idea what kind of mess he was involved in— an exit half a notch in dignity above that of the memorable Saigon helicopter evacuation of four years earlier...

...Yet in spite of every advantage and disadvantage that Yankee imperialism has to offer, these countries have never blossomed with the kinds of democratic habits and institutions that are perfectly in evidence among some former British colonies...

...Yet it is hard to believe that Lake's recommendations, even if implemented in full, could begin to cope with a failure as great as America's in Nicaragua...

...We are a civilization that possesses values and achievements almost everyone in the world wants to share...

...The errors were shortterm and, as Lake acknowledges, they were long-term, too, which suggests they were structural...

...We may be among the greatest empires in world history, but we are also a failed empire...

...American officials should try to remember that countries sometimes have histories...

...Democratic ideas spread, when they do, in spite of ourselves...

...Butamapofyesterday'sspheres of United States control shows something very different...

...Apparently Vaky's presentation lacked force...

...Nor did the CIA prove vastly useful...

...Though Central America was never his particular responsibility, he has used his experience to reconstruct Washington's Nicaragua policy in the years leading to the Sandinista triumph...

...policy in the 1970s should have been...

...Embassy in the last days of Somoza were incompetent in the extreme...

...This anti-interventionism of the Left was oddly bolstered by an increasingly conservative anti-Carter atmosphere in Washington that would have roasted the President alive for taking action against a stalwart anti-Communist kleptomaniac like Somoza...

...Yet removing Somoza was, as Perez had been saying, the only conceivable starting point for any policy at all...

...The CIA turned out to have no informants in the Sandinista Front for National Liberation...

...Washington woke up to the inevitable only in the months before the final collapse...

...Nicaragua has been, in short, all but formally a colony of the United States...

...The CIA ultimately had to supply some names...

...The maneuvers by Washington and by the U.S...

...At least that is how things look from the viewpoint of American relations with our neighbor, our brother, our victim, the Republic of Nicaragua...

...After the massacres and atrocities of '78, let alone the still more brutal ones of '79, the Nicaraguan people were on the verge of lynching Guardsmen in the street...

...Somoza's looting of the U.S...

...But the U.S...

...There are countries that have lived for more than a century under American shadows, ruled sometimes by the United States Embassy, occupied for generations by the United States Marines, bullied, exploited, tutored, nurtured, aided, and in general reduced to colonial status...

...Every move made by the United States turned out, after all, to be an error from every possible standpoint—moral, military, humanitarian, democratic, anti-Communist, regional, global...

...The Marines occupied Nicaragua for most of the period between 1909-33...

...In addition, Somoza maintained a lobby of his own in Congress, the self-proclaimed "Dirty Thirty," some of whom would end in jail for their Somoza-like instincts, yet who meanwhile didn't lack for influence...

...The fog was created by an unfortunate collision between the warm breezes of Carter liberalism and an Arctic front of Right-wing anti-Communism...

...He did not go away...

...Cuba's military aid was at first less significant...

...CIA predictions were predictably useless...

...Officers of the Guard, who for more than 40 years constituted Nicaragua's ruling élite, received first-rate educations at West Point and other U.S...

...The logic was so obvious that Panama and Costa Rica were soon enough joining Venezuela in supplying the Sandinistas with arms...

...they were not going to accept Guard authority...

...He also makes several practical recommendations: The recent shift to political appointees in preference to career officials should be reversed...

...A later ambassador, Mauricio Solaun, was honest and well-meaning, but lacked the force to run an effective embassy...

...Embassy staff did not have the slightest notion of who might constitute this interim government...

...No one, it appears, stopped to think what Perez might do in these circumstances...

...universities in the 1920s, resulting in an aristocratic class with aspects of a bilingual culture...

...Realizing that Somoza was going to get overthrown willy-nilly, he preferred to help the Sandinistas and in that manner both dispatch the noxious dictator sooner and win influence for Venezuela in the post-Somoza regime—even if the Sandinistas were not his cup of tea...

...Wealthy Nicaraguans began sending their children to U.S...

...Maybe he was a little cowardly...

...Lake gets at it with a solitary fact when he reports that U. S. banks employ more professionals in international affairs than does the Foreign Service...

...Some answers emerge from Anthony Lake's valuable book...

...Richard M. Nixon's ambassador to Nicaragua, Turner Shelton, was an "Ottoman courtier" who turned a blind eye to Somoza's corruption...

...And if, in the seven decades of direct American influence that ended in 1979 as well as afterward, almost nothing of American-style democracy has taken root there, what can be the explanation...

...He was intelligent enough to see that Somoza was playing the role of a Nicaraguan Batista, to be followed by a Nicaraguan Fidel...

...Ambassador Solaun left in the middle of the crisis...

...In the case of Nicaragua, an appreciation of American policy failures of the 1920s might have warned the United States away from failures of the 1970s, not to mention the "slow-motion Bay of Pigs" contra fiasco of the 1980s...

...In Washington, the State Department managed not to burden itself with even a single expert on Nicaraguan affairs in the crucial months of 1977-78...

...With liberalism, conservatism and corruption united in keeping hands off, Washington policy remained nothing more than human rights preachings and passive "distancing...

...These are depressing questions because they speak to the nature of U.S...

...Carter National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and other hardliners came out for shoring up the National Guard to prevent the Sandinista forces from enjoying a monopoly of power...

...but we are an inarticulate civilization, so speechless that we cannot explain our values and achievements to our closest neighbors...

...We cannot succeed at policies in foreign countries because we cannot identify lofty missions even in our own minds...

...military intervention under the auspices of the Organization of American States, managed to raise the specter of Yankee imperialism in the minds of Latin American leaders who until then had worried more about the reality of disaster in Nicaragua...

...But Perez' perceptions got nowhere in Washington...

...civilization...

...High officials should pay more attention to the middle level people who might know something about a given region of the world...

...Lake was, during the fall of Genera] Anastasio Somoza Debaylein 1978-79, director of policy planning at the State Department...

...For how is it—to go to the heart of the matter—that after four decades of influence and tutelage (with occasional half-hearted breaks for nonintervention during the Truman and Carter Administrations), Nicaragua's National Guard, that Frankenstein, failed to acquire even a single one of the characteristics of a democratic army...

...The tale is not inspiriting...

...Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Viron Vaky, having served previously as ambassador to Venezuela, appreciated Perez' wisdom and went about arguing the case...

...His subordinates were not by and large impressive...

...That proved to be especially regrettable after the earthquake that flattened Managua in 1972...

...Somoza slipped ever closer to the brink...

...academies...

...Rallying a timely hemispheric opposition to Somoza became harder instead of easier...

...All of that is, from the perspective of reforming the State Department, undoubtedly sound advice...

...Pezullo tried to pull together an interim government and Guard leadership that would take over in an orderly way from Somoza and work out a deal with the alreadyexisting pro-Sandinista provisional revolutionary junta...

...How is it that from the several American interventions in Nicaragua and the rivers of American and especially Nicaraguan blood that were shed, the only decent thing that seems to have survived is baseball...

...Together with the Embassy, they created the Nicaraguan National Guard in the image of a United States military force...

...There was, in our Managua Embassy, a history of unfortunate appointments...

...Policy makers should study the traits of past Third World revolutions (Lake provides a list of eight traits), in order to prepare for next time...

...In any event, his arguments disappeared into a peculiar conceptual fog that was then descending on Washington...

...The Carter liberals—Robert Pastor and other political appointees at the State Department—favored consistent human rights pressure from Washington...

...Lake succeeds at evoking life at State —the bureaucratic routine, the jargon, the hushed tones and feigned calm...

...The "son of a bitch, but our son of abitch," as Franklin D. Roosevelt apocryphally said of the original Somoza, turned out merely to be a son of a bitch...

...But Pastor and his colleagues did not care to dilute human rights with anything suggesting American imperialism, and therefore wished to hold back from actively removing Somoza...

...The idea Brzezinski championed—purging the corrupt Somocista officers and fashioning a newly professional Guard capable of rallying public support—was a dreamland conception that showed no understanding of what the Guard was actually like...

...Lake has, in hindsight, no doubt what the correct course for U.S...

...The Sandinista army was closing in on Managua...

...The most striking example, apart perhaps from Haiti, is Nicaragua, which was dominated by North Americans as early as 1855, when the adventurer William Walker conquered the country and declared himself president...

...Perez hated Somoza for reasons of democratic principle, regional pragmatism, humanitarian concern, and personal interest...

...Pezullo finally convinced Somoza to turn over power—only to discover that the wily strongman had duped both the Embassy and his own followers and was fleeing Nicaragua with no agreements of any sort in place behind him...