Condemned to Repetition

Here is where Pastor widens the frame. The Nicaraguan collapse of 1979, he argues, was not an isolated misjudgment but the latest run of a pattern with a long history. He lays the episodes side by side. Guatemala in 1954, where a CIA-backed operation removed an elected government read as too far left. The Dominican Republic in 1965, where Lyndon Johnson sent in the Marines to prevent what he feared would be a second Cuba. Each time, the fear of communism on the doorstep overrode almost everything else, and each time the intervention produced consequences that outlasted the men who ordered it.

What links these cases is not ideology or party. Pastor points out that Democrats and Republicans, hawks and idealists, all fell into recognizably similar moves. The constant is a set of reflexes that the relationship itself keeps rewarding: treat the region as a security perimeter rather than a set of countries, read local conflicts primarily through the lens of superpower rivalry, and prefer the stability of a friendly strongman to the uncertainty of a genuine democratic opening.

The Sandinista victory did not end the story; it opened its longest chapter. Under Carter, Washington tried a policy of cautious engagement, offering aid in hopes of keeping the new government from tilting fully toward Cuba and the Soviet Union. Pastor is candid that this was a gamble with poor odds and modest results. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the gamble was abandoned. The new administration saw Managua not as a country to be influenced but as a beachhead to be rolled back.

Out of that conviction grew the Contras — the armed opposition that the United States organized, funded, and directed against the Sandinista government through the 1980s. Pastor traces how the policy hardened into a war by proxy, and how it split the United States against itself. Congress veered between authorizing money for the Contras and cutting it off, most sharply through the Boland amendments restricting aid. The result was neither a decisive push to remove the Sandinistas nor a settled effort to live with them, but a costly stalemate that punished Nicaraguans and poisoned American politics.

What finally cracked the deadlock did not come from Washington at all. In August 1987, the president of Costa Rica, Óscar Arias, brought the five Central American presidents together and won their signatures on a regional peace plan — the accord that carried his name and would earn him the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The plan called for cease-fires, an end to outside support for irregular forces, democratization, and national reconciliation across the region. It was, pointedly, a design by the countries whose fate was at stake rather than by the superpower that had spent a decade treating them as pieces on a board.

Pastor, writing his epilogue as events ran through early 1988, reads this as the more hopeful counter-note to his own argument. The Arias plan reframed the conflict as a Central American problem with a Central American solution, and by doing so it undercut the logic that had governed American policy. The debate in Washington over further funding for the Contras — a debate that came to a head in the House in early 1988 — now had to reckon with a peace process the region itself had launched and did not want disrupted. For once the small nations were setting terms.

The revolution that caught the Carter administration unprepared in 1979 set off nearly a decade of confrontation, and by the time Pastor closed his account in early 1988, the confrontation was still unresolved. What had shifted was the source of the initiative. The country that had spent the twentieth century managing Central America from a distance found itself reacting, for once, to a plan the region had written for itself.