United States Aid to El Salvador and Nicaragua

Abstract

US policy makers learned several military lessons from their long and disastrous intervention in Vietnam, which they subsequently employed in their engagements in Central America. For example, US ground troops were not utilized in the Central American conflict as they had been in Vietnam. Nevertheless, political-economic policies that were used in Vietnam, like the ‘Land-to-the-Tiller’ Program initiated toward the end of the US Vietnam intervention, were continued in Central America in the 1980s. The right-wing ideological perspective of the Reagan and Bush administrations (1981–92) in fact moved aid policies in El Salvador and Nicaragua further to the right from the 1960s/1970s Central America and East Asia policies. Aid policy toward the Salvadoran government and the Nicaraguan Contras (encamped along Nicaraguan borders during their Sandinista period) continued to (i) serve the elite of the region, (ii) intrude into the details of development strategy with a neoliberal bias; and (iii) waste the resources placed under the control of weak governments.