As President Carter?s ambassador to Nicaragua from 1977?1979, Mauricio Sola£n witnessed a critical moment in Central American history. In U.S. Intervention and Regime Change in Nicaragua, Sola£n outlines the role of U.S. foreign policy during the Carter administration and explains how this policy with respect to the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979 not only failed but helped impede the institutionalization of democracy there. Late in the 1970s, the United States took issue with the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. Moral suasion, economic sanctions, and other peaceful instruments from Washington led to violent revolution in Nicaragua and bolstered a new dictatorial government. A U.S.-supported counterrevolution formed, and Sola£n argues that the United States attempts to this day to determine who rules Nicaragua. Sola£n explores the mechanisms that kept Somoza?s poorly legitimized regime in power for decades, making it the most enduring Latin American authoritarian regime of the twentieth century. Sola£n argues that continual shifts in U.S. international policy have been made in response to previous policies that failed to produce U.S.- friendly international environments. His historical survey of these policy shifts provides a window on the working of U.S. diplomacy and lessons for future policy-making.

Michel Gobat deftly interweaves political, economic, cultural, and diplomatic history to analyze the reactions of Nicaraguans to U.S. intervention in their country from the heyday of Manifest Destiny in the mid–nineteenth century through the U.S. occupation of 1912–33. Drawing on extensive research in Nicaraguan and U.S. archives, Gobat accounts for two seeming paradoxes that have long eluded historians of Latin America: that Nicaraguans so strongly embraced U.S. political, economic, and cultural forms to defend their own nationality against U.S. imposition and that the country’s wealthiest and most Americanized elites were transformed from leading supporters of U.S. imperial rule into some of its greatest opponents. Gobat focuses primarily on the reactions of the elites to Americanization, because the power and identity of these Nicaraguans were the most significantly affected by U.S. imperial rule. He describes their adoption of aspects of “the American way of life” in the mid–nineteenth century as strategic rather than wholesale. Chronicling the U.S. occupation of 1912–33, he argues that the anti-American turn of Nicaragua’s most Americanized oligarchs stemmed largely from the efforts of U.S. bankers, marines, and missionaries to spread their own version of the American dream. In part, the oligarchs’ reversal reflected their anguish over the 1920s rise of Protestantism, the “modern woman,” and other “vices of modernity” emanating from the United States. But it also responded to the unintended ways that U.S. modernization efforts enabled peasants to weaken landlord power. Gobat demonstrates that the U.S. occupation so profoundly affected Nicaragua that it helped engender the Sandino Rebellion of 1927–33, the Somoza dictatorship of 1936–79, and the Sandinista Revolution of 1979–90.

The new epilogue to Condemned to Repetition covers events, such as the Arias peace plan and the debate over funding for the Contras, through February 1988.

The Ends of Modernization studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. David Johnson Lee charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. Using archival material, newspapers, literature, and interviews with historical actors in countries across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Lee demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War. In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revolution incited radical changes that challenged the frankly ideological and economic motivations of modernization. In response to threats to its ideological dominance regionally and globally, the United States began to promote new paradigms of development built around human rights, entrepreneurial internationalism, indigenous rights, and sustainable development. Lee traces the ways Nicaraguans made their country central to the contest over development ideals beginning in the 1960s, transforming how political and economic development were imagined worldwide. By illustrating how ideas about ecology and sustainable development became linked to geopolitical conflict during and after the Cold War, The Ends of Modernization provides a history of the late Cold War that connects the contest between the two then-prevailing superpowers to trends that shape our present, globalized, multipolar world.

Together with his brother Humberto, Daniel Ortega Saavedra masterminded the only victorious Latin American revolution since Fidel Castro's in Cuba. Following the triumphant 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, Ortega was named coordinator of the governing junta, and then in 1984 was elected president by a landslide in the country's first free presidential election. The future was full of promise. Yet the United States was soon training, equipping, and financing a counterrevolutionary force inside Nicaragua while sabotaging its crippled economy. The result was a decade-long civil war. By 1990, Nicaraguans dutifully voted Ortega out and the preferred candidate of the United States in. And Nicaraguans grew poorer and sicker. Then, in 2006, Daniel Ortega was reelected president. He was still defiantly left-wing and deeply committed to reclaiming the lost promise of the Revolution. Only time will tell if he succeeds, but he has positioned himself as an ally of Castro and Hugo Ch&ávez, while life for many Nicaraguans is finally improving. Unfinished Revolution is the first full-length biography of Daniel Ortega in any language. Drawing from a wealth of untapped sources, it tells the story of Nicaragua's continuing struggle for liberation through the prism of the Revolution's most emblematic yet enigmatic hero.

During the last three decades, Nicaragua posed three of the most difficult challenges faced by U.S. foreign policy-makers in the third world: how to cope with a declining, repressive, but previously ?friendly” dictator? how to relate to an anti-American revolutionary government? how to facilitate a democratic transition? The Nicaraguan challenge was to establish a democratic and autonomous government, with as much support and as little interference as possible from the great powers. This book demonstrates how an unproductive interaction led to both sides' worst nightmares.

This book traces the process through which Nicaraguans defeated US aggression in a highly unequal confrontation.