Nicaragua Essay, Research Paper
Central America, considerably more so than the rest of Latin America, has been a region of great political turmoil. In addition to its inherent instability, there has always been a pronounced foreign interest in the area. Central America is geopolitically important to the United States, who considers the area to be the center of her sphere of influence in Latin America. Of the five countries, the two that have been affected the most by U.S. interests throughout their history have undoubtedly been Panama and Nicaragua. Thus, perhaps because of this high level of involvement, dictators have emerged in the two countries whose regimes have been based on and greatly influenced by the United States. As well, political development in these two countries has been somewhat retarded by the fact that dictatorships were prevalent. However, with the fall of the dictators in each respective country, a wide range of political development has been enacted.
The programs of Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua and Omar Torrijos of Panama exemplify the effects that a foreign power so intertwined in the internal affairs of a country may have on a dictator s regime. These two caudillos, both ruling in countries dominated by U.S. foreign policy, and both influenced greatly by the U.S. in their military schooling, surprisingly differed greatly in the way they handled U.S. intervention in their country and in their political programs. Because of this, the way in which the U.S. subsequently dealt with each country throughout different administrations was distinct as well. To understand why the downfall of each dictator was so different, and why Somoza s legacy is one of an oppressive dictator, while Torrijos was the dictator with a heart , it is necessary to understand the backgrounds of their respective countries, their personally distinct backgrounds, the programs they administered, their differing techniques when interacting with the U.S. and how the U.S. responded to such tactics.
Foreign dominance manifested itself throughout the early history of both Nicaragua and Panama, specifically because of their geographic importance as a trade route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Both the United States and Great Britain played an extensive role in the early history of these countries, specifically in that they took it upon themselves to use the land as they saw fit, without consulting with any Central American authority before doing so.
Nicaragua s history tells a lot about the subsequent internal conflicts with in the country, as well as her relationship with the United States. At first, Nicaragua was a part of the Central American federation which broke away from Spain, but eventually attained her own independence in 1838. Disputes between Liberals and Conservatives plagued the country for most of its history, but specifically from 1824 until 1842. Finally in 1845 the Conservatives, led by Fruto Chamorro (great-grandfather of Pedro Juaqu n Chamorro), secured control of the country over Bernab Somoza (great-uncle of Anastasio Somoza Garc a), leader of the Liberals. Ironically, these names were to play a huge part in the politics of Nicaragua for years to come. Even back then, a Somoza was looking to the U.S. for monetary aid, as Robert Pastor points out, Bernab had requested aid from the United States, which denied it because he was considered a notorious bandit (Condemned to Repetition 18).
Shortly after this, U.S. and British involvement in the region increased significantly with the 1848 California gold rush. Nicaragua was used as a transisthmian transit route for both powers, and in 1850 they agreed on the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which guaranteed equal access to the Isthmus for both powers. Any future railway or canal built would be jointly controlled and neutral. No Central American authority, including Nicaragua, was consulted about this plan. As a result, in 1851 Vanderbilt developed the first transit route across the isthmus.
The apparent presence of yankee imperialism became even more obvious with the Walker affair of 1855. William Walker, a firm believer in manifest destiny and a known U.S. filibuster (he had done the same thing in Mexico even though the U.S. repeatedly tried to discourage him) took advantage of the civil war between the Conservatives and the Liberals in Nicaragua and eventually made himself president of the country. The Liberals had invited him to help them defeat the Conservatives. Once he had done so, he allowed a Nicaraguan Liberal to rule as president for a short period of time until he declared himself president in 1856. As President, Walker took over Vanderbilt s transit company, legalized slavery and declared English to be the official language. Throughout the period the U.S. alternately gave or revoked recognition of Walker s government depending on public opinion at the time. This was one of the only times the Liberals and Conservatives, unified and consequently threw Walker out of the country with financial aid from Vanderbilt.
After this a period of relative peace ensued in a Nicaragua ruled by Conservatives. From 1857 until 1893, the Conservatives were able to stay in power because the party developed a system to rotate its leaders…forms of democracy were maintained. The opposition was ignored or suppressed, and elections were rigged. Still, these were years of relative peace (Pastor, Condemned to Repetition 19). There was much less foreign interference during this period of peace due to the Civil War in the U.S. and Great Britain losing many of her colonies in Africa. Liberals finally seized power with the election of Jos Santos Zelaya, and Nicaragua began to modernize.
At this point the U.S. began to play a more significant role in the internal affairs of Nicaragua. Just having finished the war with Spain, the U.S. turned her attention to the Caribbean and Central America with the need of excluding other powers from the area. Thus, the U.S. repealed the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, retaining all power in the area for herself and building a transisthmian canal. Though much deliberation went into where to put the canal, and although Nicaragua had been the main center of trade throughout the 19th century, the decision was finally made to build it in Panama. Meanwhile, with the notion of modernization, Zelaya was making plans to build an alternate canal through Nicaragua and initiated negotiations with Germany, Great Britain and Japan. Becoming aware of this, the U.S. financially aided the Conservatives in the overthrow of Zelaya s government in 1909 under the guise of the 1903 Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine which justified U.S. intervention in the Caribbean. Because of the large investment the U.S. had made in building the canal, the U.S. was intimately concerned with Central American and Caribbean stability, thus installed a puppet government. As Pastor points out,
Whereas internal instability and cross-border intervention in the region was hardly noticed by the U.S. in the 19th century, it generated profound disquiet and occasionally direct military action by the U.S. in the 20th. The are had not changed; the reach and the investment of the U.S. had (Condemned to Repetition 20).
This was not only true of Nicaragua, but of all Central American countries at some point in their history.
After this first intervention in Nicaraguan politics, it was as though the U.S. was sucked into all internal affairs of the country. The U.S. essentially occupied Nicaragua from 1912 until 1933, installing a series of presidential puppets. During this time the U.S also created the Guardia Nacional , which was a non-partisan police force trained and equipped by the Marines to oversee Nicaragua, essentially trained and motivated to act as an occupation force within its own country.
Many Liberals at this point were rising up against the puppet conservative governments that the U.S. had installed, and perhaps the most notorious among the rebels was Augusto C sar Sandino. At first fighting along liberal lines, Sandino realized that the Liberals he was fighting for had also agreed to align themselves with the United States, basically selling out . Sandino and his Army for the Defense of National Sovereignty continued to fight against U.S. occupation and their marines, and even against Nicaragua s own Guardia Nacional, which was turned against him by liberal General Jos Maria Moncada who became president by aligning with the U.S. It is true that although there was never any possibility Sandino would overthrow the government, he did succeed in capturing the popular imagination as a national David- one of Latin America s first- struggling against the U.S. Goliath (Pastor, Condemned to Repetition 24). This image of Sandino would serve to haunt the Somoza dynasty for years to come.
Sandino agreed to stop his insurgency once the U.S. pulled out of Nicaragua, and the U.S. agreed to leave Nicaragua after the elections of 1932. Both sides did what they agreed to do, but the U.S. left the Guardia Nacional intact with the American trained Anastasio Somoza Garcia at its head– a Nicaraguan sure to look after the interests of the U.S. Juan Sacasa was elected president, but the real power lay in the hands of the head of the Guardia Nacional. Somoza used this power to kill Sandino in 1933, another action that would later serve to haunt his dynasty.
Panama s history, on the other hand, is linked in a much more direct fashion with the United States. Virtually since its independence, Panama has had to adhere to whatever restrictions or interference the U.S. decided to place on the country, because without the U.S. Panama might have never gained independence from Gran Colombia.
Independent from Spain in 1821, Panama decided to join Colombia as a member of La Gran Colombia. To Colombia Panama was relatively unimportant– but it was of obvious importance to countries that were engaged in mercantile endeavors. Panama was affected by the California gold rush of 1848 in the same manner that Nicaragua was, and this boom of trade and involvement in Panama lasted from 1849 until 1869. A transisthmian railroad was completed in Panama in 1856 which greatly aided in the transport of goods from one side of the continent to the other. Unlike the period of peace in Nicaragua while the U.S. and Great Britain were involved with their own affairs, the region of Panama was continuously at war with Gran Colombia, constantly trying to break away from the confederation, but did not have the power to do so.
The United States had first approached Colombia to negotiate a deal to build a canal through Panama. The U.S. proposed the Herran-Hay treaty which would give the U.S. permission to build the canal in exchange for 10 million dollars. Colombia would not agree to this, so the U.S. did what it knew how to do best: get involved in the internal politics of the country. Realizing that Panama had long been trying to gain its independence, the U.S., with Roosevelt s consent, offered to help the Panamanian independence movement if she agreed to the U.S. building the canal through her territory. Panama agreed, and on November 3, 1903, gained her independence.
Phillipe Bunau-Varilla, the man who had the equipment to build the canal, but was not Panamanian himself, was negotiating the treaty with the U.S. on behalf of the Panamanians. As a result, the treaty did not take into account the interests of the Panamanian community, and instead greatly favored the U.S.. Secretary of State John Hay, who was negotiating the treaty even realized this, and acknowledged it by stating that we have a very advantageous treaty for the U.S., and not so for Panama. You and I know very well how many points are in that treaty that every Panamanian patriot would object to. (Alfaro, 122-125).
The Hay-Bunau Varilla treaty of 1903 basically stated that the U.S. had permission to build the canal and have a 5 mile strip on either side of it that was governed by the U.S. It gave the U.S. rights over the canal as if it had sovereignty, and the canal would be governed by the U.S. in perpetuity, in other words, for an indefinite amount of time. The Platt Amendment was also built into the treaty, which stated that the U.S. had the right to intervene in the internal affairs of the country in order to secure its independence and its solvency. This was essentially to protect U.S. interests and allow the U.S. to legally intervene and mediate over any internal conflicts that may occur. This was mainly because the canal was the United State s biggest investment up until that point in history, and could not afford to lose control over it. Thus, in the case of Panama the U.S. really had no need to install a force such as the Guardia Nacional in Nicaragua because not only did the treaty give the U.S. legal rights to intervene, the stakes were too high. As Priestly points out:
The U.S. was unwilling to accept prolonged instability there. During the early part of the century, moreover, the American government preferred to use its own forces to control disorder in Panama rather than create an indigenous armed force that might itself threaten U.S. interests. Panama was too vital to risk U.S. dependence on a Somoza (11).
The U.S. couldn t risk having such an important investment be guarded by a non-partisan police force that was not American.
In fact, the U.S. used this legal right to intervene 12 times in Panama between 1906 and 1928. Because Panama was essentially the jugular vein of U.S. hemispheric defense, especially during both World Wars, the U.S. would not tolerate prolonged instability (Priestly, 10).
Panama was ruled by a series of oligarchical elites that rotated power . They had a very hard time appeasing the population s want of sovereignty, particularly because there was really no way for them to achieve it due to the choke-hold the United States placed on Panama. A series of crises resulted from this inability to obtain sovereignty for Panama, the first taking place between 1925 and 1932 (around the same time as Sandino in Nicaragua) and the second between 1947 and 1952. The first was instigated by the nationalist middle class mobilizing the popular classes to end oligarchical rule and U.S. intervention. The U.S. successfully intervened a number of times during this period and killed hundreds of Panamanians in the process. This resulted in a treaty in 1936 between Franklin Roosevelt and current president Harmodio Arias Madrid which abolished the U.S. right of intervention in internal affairs, yet still obligated Panama to ally with the U.S. in times of war (Priestly, 11).
The second crisis which began in 1947 was due to the extreme amount of intervention in Panama at the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War period. The Filos-Hines treaty was being negotiated to allow 130 military facilities that were used during the war to remain open. Student and teacher groups mobilized and the treaty was not ratified. Therefore, although the Panamanian oligarchy basically did whatever the U.S. wanted them to, popular movements in Panama had the ability to sway U.S. policy.
The background of these two Central American countries are very similar with regard to their importance as trade routes to Great Britain and the U.S. during the middle of the 19th century. Both were of geopolitical importance to the United States, but because of the large investment made in Panama, the U.S. was much more involved in every aspect of her internal affairs. Both also had nationalist uprisings against the U.S. intervention and both of these uprisings succeeded in the short term. However, the main difference is that the U.S. had much more to lose in Panama, thus was much more involved since Panama s independence. Such extensive involvement can be said to have been a determining factor in the development of Torrijos later tactics of balancing the interests of the Panamanian oligarchy with the demands of the popular classes, while embracing an anti-american stance in all foreign policy. Anthony Lake asserts that Washington was a midwife to the birth of the Somoza dynasty (10), thus in the same way that the U.S. influenced Torrijos, it can be said that U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, especially the U.S. creation of the National Guard, may have directly led to the rise of the Somoza dynasty.
To understand the differences between the regimes of Somoza and Torrijos in countries that are geographically and historically quite similar, it is essential to understand each of their backgrounds and their rise to power.
Anastasio Somoza Debayle s background is particularly important to understanding his rule, because without the events that preceded his rise to power and the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua, he may have never achieved the infamous place in Nicaraguan history that he has.
The first Somoza, Anastasio Garcia, commonly referred to as Tacho, basically manipulated his way into power. By appealing to U.S. authorities in Nicaragua he managed to become appointed to head the National Guard. He spoke English perhaps better than he spoke Spanish, and used U.S. involvement in Nicaragua to his advantage– to secure a place in power. Pastor makes an interesting observation when stating that Nicaraguans had become so accustomed to U.S. control that the psychology of their dependent relationship continued long after U.S. involvement ended. Somoza, having begun as an interpreter, proved most adept at manipulating the image of the relationship and made it appear that the U.S. condoned, approved or even instructed him (Condemned to Repetition 26). Thus Somoza used what was already inherent in Nicaraguan culture for decades, he exploited his people in the same manner that the U.S. had.