Our Own Backyard

August 31, 1998
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.