Our Own Backyard
The United States in Central America, 1977-1992
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This important expose documents the full extent of the Reagan administration's lies, deceptions, subterfuges and cover-ups in waging a covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas and in supporting El Salvador's right-wing oligarchy in its war against leftist guerrillas. While the Iran-Contra hearing would reveal how Reagan's White House aides diverted profits from arms sales to support the CIA-backed contra army, LeoGrande, an American University government professor who worked on congressional Democratic committees that helped shape U.S. Central American policy in the mid-'80s, digs deeper, drawing hundreds of his own interviews with members of Congress, Reagan and Bush staffers and Central American officials. He argues convincingly that Reagan hardliners--notably Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Casey, Edwin Meese, William Clark--wrested day-to-day control of Central American policy away from the State Department. Ideologically committed (as was Reagan) to purging the national psyche of the "Vietnam syndrome" by means of a quick, decisive victory over communism in Central America, these hardliners worked to circumvent congressional restraints and derail dialogue with the Sandinistas. LeoGrande credits pragmatic President Bush with encouraging the diplomatic process that led to the Sandinistas' electoral defeat in 1990 and acerbically points out that the negotiated settlement that ended El Salvador's civil war in 1992 was strikingly similar to a peace proposal made by Salvadorean guerrillas 11 years earlier. Full of unorthodox, original perspectives, LeoGrande's clearly written, magisterial study holds timely post-Cold War lessons that transcend the Central American setting. Editor, Elaine Maisner; UNC foreign rights contact, Vicky Wells.
