To the Editor:
In “Nicaraguan Harvest” [July] Mark Falcoff points out that “in some ways what has happened in Nicaragua is not much different from what occurred in Cuba some twenty years earlier.” But he fails to mention one of the more important similarities. In both cases, the previous regime was subject to an arms embargo by the United States. Further, in both cases the United States did its best, through international pressure, to make this arms embargo an international one. I am not an expert on Latin America, but it is my (possibly ill-informed) opinion that the arms embargo handicapped Somoza and Batista, but that they probably would have been overthrown anyway. In the Far East there was a more striking example in the embargo put on the Chinese Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek after the great Nationalist victory at Ssu-ping Kai. It was clearly a major factor in the fall of Chiang Kai-shek and the establishment of the Communist government, although whether it was decisive is a subject of legitimate debate.
The regimes of Chiang Kai-shek, Batista, and Somoza were far from models of good government. Nevertheless, in each of the three cases they were better than what succeeded them. It is ironic that the United States fought for the far from perfect governments of South Korea and Vietnam in order to prevent Communist expansion, but actually took steps to improve the probability of Communist expansion in China, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
Gordon Tullock
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia
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To the Editor:
After reading Mark Falcoff’s “Nicaraguan Harvest,” I took the trouble to reread his earlier COMMENTARY article, “How to Understand Central America” [September 1984]. In both pieces, his political points are very well taken and he cites relevant dates and events with care and accuracy. But, as he says in his previous article, “. . . only a very small percentage of Americans have the interest or the time to think much about” events and issues in Latin America.
As one who has lived in Latin America and who is intimately acquainted with friends who have spent most of their adult lives there, I would like to make a few basic observations.
There have been some 150 “revolutions” in 150 years, somewhere or other “south of the border.” However one may rationalize about (or try to wish away) such persisting patterns, and however justified many such upheavals (or collapsings) are, I think it is time that North Americans quit kidding ourselves about Latin America and “democracy,” “free elections,” and “good government.”. . .
The lands and peoples of Latin America have been bypassed by the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions, and have been victimized by the Industrial and now by the Russian Revolution. And we in North America have due cause for grave reservations, if not alarm, about more Cubas in our backyard. . . .
But short of issuing a nuclear-backed ultimatum to the Soviet Union and Cuba that any and every plane, ship, or submarine which goes past longitude so and so and latitude such and such will be turned back forthwith or sunk, does anyone really think that events in Nicaragua—or in Mexico very soon—will turn out any differently from the way things have always gone in Latin America? I detect in Mr. Falcoff’s very title, “Nicaraguan Harvest,” and in his concluding, not very hopeful, remarks a rather clear realization of this fact. No matter whom we support they will in turn wind up eagerly oppressing their own peoples and looting their own lands, as the Sandinistas are now doing in Nicaragua. This is why the U.S. is on the wrong side, no matter which side or faction we may support, or wish to see take power. But only those of us who have actually lived in Latin America seem to be aware of this basic fact. . . .
Frederick Allen Asher
Fallbrook, California
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Mark Falcoff writes:
Gordon Tullock’s point about arms embargoes is an interesting one, but begs one fundamental question, at least in the case of Nicaragua: if such governments as Somoza’s “probably would have been overthrown anyway”—then by whom? By 1979 there was no alternative to Somoza except the armed formations of the FSLN. Timing is crucial here. The Carter administration had tried earlier to get Somoza to step down, or at least to hold serious discussions with moderate and conservative opposition forces; had he done so, say in 1977 or 1978, the whole point about arms embargoes would have been academic, and the FSLN would be a mere footnote to history.
It is probably worth emphasizing that in the case of both Cuba and Nicaragua, the arms embargoes were imposed at the very last minute. No doubt they had a devastating psychological impact, but their role in the concrete “balance of forces” was minimal.
Frederick Allen Asher’s observations make me a bit uncomfortable, since they are in some ways a conservative restatement of the notion—dear to the liberal Left—that “history” is an implacable goddess before whom all rebellion is futile. (Of course, for the latter, “history” means Marxist revolutions in the Third World, while for Mr. Asher it means governments “eagerly oppressing their own peoples and looting their own lands,” under whatever ideological label happens to be fashionable at the moment.)
I think it is wrong to assume that there is no such thing as progress in the—forgive me—19th-century bourgeois sense of that term, even in countries unfortunate enough not to have had a Protestant Reformation, French Revolution, etc. Nothing in the history of El Salvador prepared us for the constructive, hopeful developments of the last three or four years, and if one thinks about it, there is little in the history of Italy, Portugal, and Spain which would have led us to anticipate a mere forty years ago the kind of civilized, democratic governments which those countries now enjoy.
Moreover, Mr. Asher’s observations could be used to argue that what we are seeing in Nicaragua is merely an aggiornamento of the traditional political style there—and that is clearly not true. What makes the Sandinista regime a threat to its neighbors, and ultimately to the United States, is not its specifically Nicaraguan features, but quite the opposite: its voluntary enlistment in the Soviet alliance. Precisely how to deal with this unpleasant fact is a source of serious controversy—indeed, it is, in a way, the heart of the present debate over aid to the contras. But the situation itself is undeniable, and must be faced.
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