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Book Review: Yankees, Sellouts, and Insurgents

What are the Iraqi and Afghan words for vendepatria? That Spanish word translates literally to "country-seller" and means "sellout." Michel Gobat's excellent study of the failed U.S. occupation of Nicaragua details how Nicaraguans accused one another of selling out to the Americans during the years of the U.S. occupation of their country, as they became alienated by the tactics and culture of the occupiers. The lessons imparted by this study may be applied to the current situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, making this a worthwhile book for a broad audience beyond scholars of U.S.-Latin American relations. It suggests that "the American Dream" cannot be imparted through imperial rule, however well-intentioned.

The book covers Nicaragua during the period 1849-1933, employing twenty-six well-chosen illustrations and five helpful maps. The focus is a careful examination of the U.S. occupation, from the Marine intervention in the civil war of 1912 to withdrawal in 1933. The underlying research is impressive, based partly on a trove of unexamined documents that the author discovered in Nicaragua, records which offer a fresh perspective on the history of the country and its relations with the United States.

The study begins with a succinct account of an earlier Nicaraguan conflict with armed Americans, the filibustering presidency of William Walker, 1855-1857. Walker's attempt at "Americanization through violence" ended in failure for the foreigners, but his rule ignited a cultural transformation in Nicaragua. Whereas the Liberal party was discredited by its collaboration with Walker, "liberal ideals" still carried great weight with the elite. The prospect of building a canal across the country, with help from the United States, fueled their enthusiasm for the "American way of life." This "Americanization from within" took such forms as the mania for baseball that seized Nicaragua in the 1890s. "Reembracing Americanization" went along with the rise of a "bourgeois spirit" that emulated the " 'modern' manly and feminine values" (p. 59) that elite Nicaraguans identified with the United States. Manifestations of this pro-American sentiment included the popularity of male social clubs, the "travel bug" (p. 63) to the United States for education, and the preference for American imports. The boom in agricultural exports, such as bananas and coffee, financed this voracious consumption of all things American. "Elite Nicaraguans wound up becoming more Americanized than Europeanized" (p. 66), a development that was contrary to the tendency of wealthy citizens in most Latin-American nations of the time.

The Nicaraguan political class aligned itself willingly to the United States, but received insensitive treatment from its powerful neighbor. First, the U.S. government "devastated elite Nicaraguans" (p. 68) in early 1902 by suddenly abandoning its plan to build a trans-isthmian canal across Nicaragua, choosing to resume construction on the French effort in Panama instead. After that blow, Liberal Nicaraguan president José Santos Zelaya, heretofore "arguably the most pro-U.S. president in Nicaraguan history" (p. 67), became the nemesis of American foreign policy in Central America. He wooed European governments to build a Nicaraguan canal, contracted European loans, and tried to unite the region under his leadership. Secretary of State Philander Knox severed diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, calling Zelaya a "blot upon the history of Nicaragua" and calling for his overthrow (p. 70). In 1910, a U.S. naval flotilla forced Zelaya into exile, backed a rebel force, and caused the government to collapse. One diplomat on the scene observed that "it was the United States that had 'welcomed disorder' in what had been Central America's most stable country" (p. 71).

Following the intervention of 1910, the United States took over Nicaraguan government finances and customs administration. The book relates in fascinating detail the onset of a severe food shortage that struck Nicaragua in 1912. Despite worsening conditions, the American official in charge of customs refused to permit food imports, because that would deepen Nicaragua's public debt. When grain imports finally did arrive, price speculation and corruption fueled the hatred of those who could not afford to eat toward those who could. The famine spurred a popular revolt targeting the elites who had courted American influence, leading to the outbreak of civil war. Many of the wealthy stalwarts of the Conservative party, accused of being vendepatrias, fell victim to the violence of the civil war of 1912. But other Conservatives stoked the violence, as the ranks of the upper class split under the stresses of U.S. hegemony. The unrest brought even deeper U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, this time a full-blown military invasion.

To the disappointment of the revolutionary rank and file, all but one of their leaders surrendered to the U.S. Marines without a fight. Most rich Nicaraguans, rattled by the intensity of the revolt, chose to side with the occupation force for protection, at the cost of substantiating the charges that they were selling out their country to the foreigners. But the occupation they facilitated failed to benefit them, as the economic policies prescribed by "Dollar Diplomacy" impeded large export-oriented agricultural producers while benefiting middling producers and smallholders. This had the effect of further dividing the Nicaraguan upper class between those who favored the "modern" U.S. model and the "backward" elites who wanted the Americans to leave and the traditional social order to return. Although the United States maintained only one hundred troops stationed in the capital to enforce its occupation, American influence on the country was pervasive. Nationalist rejection of the "onerous and irresponsible banker rule" (p. 141) of Dollar Diplomacy triggered an uprising aimed at the symbols of Wall Street domination, which culminated in another U.S. invasion in late 1926.

As this study illuminates, the aggressive presence of U.S. troops in Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933 gradually eroded the support of the well-to-do sectors of society, who previously had accepted American involvement. "Cultural anti-Americanism" spread in the ranks of Nicaraguan bluebloods, as U.S. influence was felt in more and more aspects of Nicaraguan life. Among the objects of elite antagonism was the wave of Protestant missionaries that followed the intervention of 1926-1927. The missionaries yielded before the violent opposition of an organization formed to stop their inroads, the Caballeros Católicos, or "Catholic Gentlemen." Some conservative women took aggressive action against the missionaries themselves, throwing stones and excrement at them, and hitting them with sticks! Another cause for alarm among conservative Nicaraguans was the advent of "new women," who boldly styled themselves as assertive "flapper" types in the American mold. These young women broke gender conventions in many ways, perhaps most provocatively by playing the newly introduced sport of basketball, wearing attire that was scandalously skimpy by the standards of the time and place.

The chapter in Confronting the American Dream that is most germane to the contemporary international situation of the United States is one that describes the "militarization via democratization" that resulted from the American occupation. The moral of this story is that "clean" elections imposed by outsiders are unable to bring about significant positive changes, even if the voters dip their fingers in ink at the polls. Nicaraguans came away with inky fingers after U.S.-supervised elections placed their country on the path to authoritarian rule, and Iraqis did the same in 2005, waving their purple thumbs after casting their ballots in an election that failed to prevent their occupied state from veering into civil war. In the Nicaraguan case, the intent of the U.S.-administered elections was to eradicate the local strongmen called caudillos from their positions of authority. But when American Marines in the field tried to identify the caudillos and their supporters, it was often the strongmen themselves who became their guides, like so many Chalabis in Iraq, misleading the occupiers in order to benefit from the occupation.

Despite their idealistic intentions, the elections carried out by U.S. forces suppressed, censored, and deported third parties, including the one established by Augusto Sandino, the legendary Nicaraguan revolutionary. Contrary to American intentions, the National Guard established by the Marines to maintain public order became a "state within a state" (p. 220), ushering in the long-lasting dictatorial dynasty of the Somoza family. The book reveals the complex relationship between Conservative elites and the leftist movement of Sandino, "what may be Latin America's most celebrated anti-American insurgency" (p. 235), based on their common anti-Americanism. "U.S. imperial rule," Gobat concludes, "had pushed Conservative oligarchs to turn against the American dream they had valorized for so long" (p. 266). This previously overlooked meeting of the minds between the famous guerrilla leader and the disgruntled Nicaraguan Conservatives demonstrates that foreign occupations can create strange bedfellows. The connections forged between the grassroots Sandinistas and elite Conservatives came back to haunt the United States in 1979, when the Sandinista Revolution toppled Anastasio Somoza, the biggest vendepatria of them all, with assistance from some of Nicaragua's leading landowners around the Conservative bastion of Granada.

The volume's epilogue resonates deeply in today's foreign-policy climate, stressing that dictatorship and revolution are the bitter "imperial legacies" of U.S. efforts to impose democracy in other countries. In the aftermath of the ill-fated American occupation of Nicaragua came the tyrannical Somoza regime, which enjoyed U.S. support. After that came the bloody Sandinista revolution and a potent anti-American backlash. Reflecting on this history, the author persuasively contends that what George W. Bush calls "the great liberating tradition" of the United States often leads to "powerful anti-democratic effects" (p. 280). This study reminds us of the limits of American might and ambition, limits which seem rarely to be discerned by those who wield U.S. power.

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