The United States of America is considered to be a superpower on an international level, and during the Cold War their main competition was the Soviet Union. While the United States practiced democracy that favored capitalism, the Soviet Union or USSR practiced a totalitarian style of communism. These two major international superpowers would battle without openly declaring war by trying to get as many countries as they possibly could to use their own socio-economic ideology. The United States often intervened in the dealings of other sovereign countries to keep them from becoming communist. To them, their sphere of influence was what mattered above all else. “A territorial area within which the political influence or the interests of one nation are held to be more or less paramount” is a sphere of influence. In the Central American country of Nicaragua, the United States supported and kept in power a family of brutal dictators rather than allowing the country be run by a left-wing communist government. The issue boiled over in the late 1970’s when a civil war broke out, and the Somoza family was ousted from power, thus allowing the popular Sandinistas to become the government. Suddenly, a communist regime had a foothold on the American continent, and the United States had to take action. Whereas during World War II Americans fought and died to liberate nations of their dictators, the United States then began to supply and finance a rebel group to overthrow a legitimate, democratically elected government. The United States committed terrible acts with the intention in mind to ensure that communism would not gain a foothold in the Americas.
For the majority of the 20th century, Nicaragua was ruled by members of the Somoza family. In 1936, Anastasio Somoza founded a brutal dictatorship with financial aid from the US. The power in this regime would be passed from father to son to brother over the next 43 years. The people of Nicaragua were ruled over by a string of tyrants, all bearing the same last name. The United States was content to let a dictator mistreat his people within their sphere of influence, since his absolute control assured that a communist government was highly unlikely to be put into power. “A theory that if one nation becomes Communist-controlled the neighboring nations will also become Communist-controlled” is a domino theory. During the Cold War, the United States strongly believed in the domino theory, and having a communist country on the same continent as them was a terrifying prospect. The United States not only sat by and watched, but aided and supplied a dictator who brutally oppressed his people in the same geographic area as them, while decades earlier they crossed an ocean to fight and die for the cause of removing a dictator, that being Hitler during the Second World War.
The Somoza family ruled over Nicaragua with an iron fist, and often put personal fortune and benefit over the needs and interests of the citizens of their country. Anastasio Somoza, the first Somoza to rule over Nicaragua encouraged high-ranking members of the National Guard to be as corrupt as he was. His sons, Luis Somoza Debayle and Anastasio Somoza Debayle, both succeeded their father, and had the same approach. Often, money that was supposed to be used to help the citizens of Nicaragua did not get used as it was intended to be used. For example, a 6.2 magnitude earthquake in 1972 leveled the capital city of Managua and killed at least 3,000 people while injuring 15,000. Millions of dollars in relief funds from the international community that were meant to help the already poor citizens of Nicaragua recover from their injuries and rebuild their homes were instead pocketed by Anastasio Somoza Debayle and some of his officials in the National Guard. This terrible act meant that the large majority of survivors in Managua had no support in trying to rebuild and salvage what was left. A left-wing, communist group with had opposed the Somoza regime since the 1960s called the Sandinistas began to draw lots of support. The rebels were united under the name of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation, or FSLN. Most people who are subjected to living under a dictator or tyrant try to look for ways to put something or someone in power that would better look after the needs of the people. Despite the abuse of funds by Somoza, and the corruption of the entire regime, the United States government did not try to free the citizens of Nicaragua from their ruler because he was not a communist, which was worse in their eyes.
The United States did as much as they could to keep Somoza in power, since he was part of a family that had kept Nicaragua the way that they wanted for decades. Firstly, in the 1920s the United States government put in place the National Guard, which was the military presence needed to keep the regime in power, which in the 1930’s became the Somozas. The National Guard was also supplied with weapons from the US. However, all of this was not enough to quell the Sandinistas and their left leaning uprising. On July 17th, 1979 Somoza resigned and fled to Miami. Just two days after this, the Sandinistas marched into Managua without resistance, and soon after they established the Government of National Reconstruction. This government made things like housing, education, welfare, and health their priority, and this alarmed the Americans whose worst fear of a communist government was becoming a reality. The domino theory began to come into play, and was part of the US government’s decision making process on how to go about deal with the Sandinista regime. The FSLN sought a relationship with the United States where both nations respected each other, yet they did not wish to be under the control of the US. Under the Reagan administration, Nicaragua-United States relations became much more hostile. The Nicaraguan military was tiny compared to the size of the US, and yet social reforms that the Sandinista government had created terrified the Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency or CIA began to support and train exiled members of the National Guard who became the Contras, which came from the word contra-revolucionarios, or counter revolutionaries. These Contras who were supplied and trained by the United States waged war on the Sandinista regime for the next ten years, calling it the Contra War. It cost 60,000 lives, 178 billion USD, and devastated the Nicaraguan economy and infrastructure.
A war does nothing to help an economy, especially one that is in its infancy. The United States supplied the Contras, who kept Nicaragua from growing economically. Due to a fear of communism spreading through the Americas and tipping the scales of the Cold War, the United States tried to undermine the legally elected government of Nicaragua. From as early as the 1930s, multiple tactics were utilized by the United States to ensure their will and control were exerted over Nicaragua. From overlooking the actions of a series of dictators, to calling for the isolation of Nicaragua in a similar way to Cuba, the US did many terrible things in a misguided attempt to protect themselves from communism. To them, having a corrupt, abusive dictator under your control was a better thing than to have a peaceful, liberty-assuring communist leader who you could not control as your close neighbor. In the American Declaration in Independence it states that all men are endowed with “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” and yet almost two hundred years after it was written, the government of the United States actively sought to take these rights and freedoms away from the innocent people of another nation. The United States tried to keep communism contained, and yet while doing so sacrificed the rights and freedoms of the people of Nicaragua.