Peripheries at the Center of a Shadow Nation: the Pivotal Role of Borderland Violence in Central American History

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Peripheries at the Center of a Shadow Nation: The Pivotal Role of Borderland Violence in Central American History

Robert H. Holden

History Department Old Dominion University Norfolk VA 23529-0091

[email protected]

For the panel “American Identities”

The Historical Society’s 2008 Conference “Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History”

Baltimore

June 7, 2008

In 1808, at the outset of their prolonged and violent divorce from the monarchy of Spain, the peoples of Hispanic America had much in common. Having shared the experience of rule by the same overlord for three centuries, the reigning beliefs, language, legal systems and political customs were practically indistinguishable, from New Spain in the north to Chile in the south. Yet the engagement of separation from Spain also entailed a second engagement of separation: that of prying themselves apart into separate national communities. In most places, that process of national dissolution simply meant turning primary or secondary-level ex-Spanish juridisdictional boundaries into national ones. Chile and Peru, for example, had been separate jurisdictions of the overarching viceroyality of Peru; Mexico was most of the viceroyalty of New Spain. But nowhere was the process of national dissolution as divisive as in the Kingdom of Guatemala, which had been a secondary jurisdiction within the viceroyalty of New Spain. That Kingdom, like other Hispanic lands, was organized into intendencias (roughly, provinces). After separating from Spain in 1821, and then from Mexico in 1823, the ex-Kingdom survived as a nominal nation ─ the República Federal de Centro América ─ for two decades. Then, about 1840, after years of almost constant civil war, the federal republic finally collapsed into five separate countries whose international borders followed the boundaries of the states (estados) into which the República had been divided. The state boundaries, in turn, had largely duplicated the intendencia boundaries of the old Kingdom. Political disintegration had not proceeded this deeply and widely anywhere else in Hispanic America. It would have been difficult to create a distinctive national identity for the kingdom-turned-republic of 1821-c. 1840. But the challenge supplied by the breakup of 1840 seemed even greater. For on what grounds was, say, Honduras to be understood as a distinct political community with its own identity, bursting to be free from the national communities of Nicaragua or Guatemala? Elsewhere I have suggested that it was just the legacy of the failed República Federal de Centro América, and the centuries-old networks of cross-national kinship, entrepreneurial, and political ties, that created the conditions for weak nationalisms and a pattern of cross-border intervention, both armed and otherwise, that have persisted to this day.1 The “shadow nation” of this paper’s title is the old República, and the “peripheries” of the title are the ex-República’s state boundaries, transformed into international boundaries after 1840. The “shadow nation” has lived on, not only in mistrust and violence, but also in ever-evolving expressions of an eternally frustrated aspiration to reunite. Between 1842 and 1961, "formal and official steps" were undertaken to reconstitute the federation at least 25 times, though not one of them survived more than a few months, and all five countries did not always join them (El Salvador and Honduras joined almost every one; Guatemala and Nicaragua were only a little less active, and Costa Rica participated in no more than a third).2 Writing in the early 1980s, during the worst period of disunity and violence in the region’s history, the distinguished historian of Central America, Hector Pérez Brignoli, observed that ever since 1821, “la utopía de la Unión se ha visto incansablemente reiterada,” and he was right to predict that the theme of unity would reemerge even after the bitterly destructive horrors of the 1980s.3 Indeed, the banner of the “utopía de la Unión” is carried today by two institutions ─ the politically-oriented Sistema de Integración Centroamericana (SICA) and (in the economic realm) the Secretariá de Integración Económica Centroamericana (SIECA), each with its own cross-

1 Robert H. Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821- 1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 42-43. 2 Thomas L. Karnes, The Failure of Union: Central America 1824-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 243, 248. 3 Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Breve Historia De Centroamérica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985), 154.

regional governing bodies and bureaucracies. Morever, the very constitutions of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras still today commit their countries to restoring the old federation. These multiple expressions of a desire to reunify in turn help to preserve an ambience of ambiguity about national identity. That ambiguity, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate, finds expression in the opportunities for mutual subversion, resistance and innovation that are most hospitably accommodated in the borderlands that separate the five countries. Rare is the Central American borderland violence that is unambiguously nationalistic. For borders to magnify and enhance a sense of national identity, there must be a plausible premise of alterity separating the two sides. But as Pérez Brignoli insightfully observed, the persistence of the unity question means, “en cierto modo, que la identidad nacional de los países centroamericanos no está todavía plenamente constituida,”4 a problem whose bearing on the institutional character of the borderlands (and the violence associated with them) cannot be overlooked. If the agents of isthmian borderland violence typically represent no consistently distinct national identity, national-level discourses about borderland violence cannot therefore readily seize on that violence in order to rally “the nation” against “the other.” The most effective and credible myths of alterity in Central America have been those constituted by the menacing presence of some non-isthmian power ─ above all, the United States, and secondly, the Soviet Union.5 As Jorge Castañeda said of the Latin American left in general from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, “there was virtually no one else [but the United States] to be nationalistic against.”6 In 1953 and 1954, the Guatemalan enemies of the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz took refuge in the neighboring states of Nicaragua and Honduras. Installing themselves in the borderland, they pushed back into Guatemala, fortified with weapons and military training covertly arranged by the United States with the quiet cooperation of the governments of Nicaragua and Honduras. The Guatemalans, Hondurans and Nicaraguans all accused one another of being the stooges of either U.S. or Soviet imperialism. Nor did the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan borderland violence of the 1950s thrive on nationalistic principles, for it was provoked repeatedly by the borderland-based, Nicaraguan-protected, Costa Rican enemies of the Costa Rican governments. In the borderlands conflicts of the bloody 1970s and ‘80s, national identities would fade even further. Nicaraguans, Hondurans and Costa Ricans did not fight each other then as Nicaraguans, Hondurans or Costa Ricans but as sandinistas or anti-sandinistas. Only the weakest of nationalistic discourses can be found in borderland fighting because nationalities were not fundamentally in conflict. Individuals of all three nationalities (and others besides) could be found on different sides of the fighting, and on different sides of the borders. Morales’s characterization of the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican borderland as “binacional” may well apply to others in the region. Owing mainly to Nicaraguan migration, kinship ties and local loyalties have given that borderland "un principio de identidad muy homogéneo e históricamente más volcado hacia Nicaragua," a tendency reinforced by the fact that the borderland itself communicates more easily with Nicaraguan than with Costa Rican centers of decisionmaking. As a result, settlements on the Costa Rican side were more often the result of Nicaraguan rather than

4 Pérez Brignoli, Breve Historia de Centroamérica, 154. 5 For the violence-enhancing risks of such myths, see Peter Lambert, "Myth, Manipulation, and Violence: Relationships Between National Identity and Political Violence," in Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America, ed. Will Fowler and Peter Lambert, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 29-30. 6 Jorge G. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: the Latin American Left After the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 290-291.

Costa Rican colonization efforts. "Aparte, entonces, de las relaciones de parentesco y vecindad entre poblaciones fronterizas de ambos países, se conformó un tejido de rutas y redes comerciales que constituyen los principales lazos de una economía transfronteriza en procesos de expansión permanente." At the same time, this borderland has long been a scene of conflict, with fighting men passing from one side to the other, so that border life has been dominated by war and the fear of war on both sides of the line. Even trade revolved around war materiel.7 Civil war, rather than international war, may thus be the best way to understand these cross-border occasions of violence, a view that would also fit Jack Child’s interpretation of isthmian conflict as fundamentally ideological.8 In the “shadow nation” ─ the whole political history of a divided polity kept alive today by SICA and SIECA ─ a weak centroamericanismo continues to compete with five different yet equally feeble nacionalismos. I. The curious fruits of this contradiction may be most visible in the borderlands. A close study of the case of Nicaragua and Costa Rica during the Cold War suggests as much. A myriad of contradictory personal, ideological and national interests between and within Costa Rica and Nicaragua entailed a sequence of conflictive and often violent interaction during the Cold War that defies the overly simplistic explanations usually proferred in the historiography ─ that it was the inevitable clash of two societies with sharply contrasting levels of political and economic development, or that it was about the geopolitics of big-power interests. Neither explanation is false, for the contrasting development records of the two countries and the geopolitical factor have undoubtedly aggravated relations between them. But I would like to suggest that the underlying enabling condition has been the legacy of federation, the “shadow nation,” which turned this borderland, like those elsewhere in Central America, into a particular kind of instrument, a weapon with both inclusive and exclusive capacities that all sides in a conflict seek to exploit in different ways, for ideological and personal gain. Perhaps the Cold War can be said to have opened on 12 March 1947, the day that President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine: The United States, he said, would support "free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugations by armed minorities or by outside pressures." The same day, Guatemala’s military attaché in Washington warned his country’s defense minister that rumors were circulating in Washington that communists had penetrated the administration of President Juan José Arévalo.9 While his two-year-old government had not repealed an old law prohibiting a Communist Party, it was already notorious for tolerating the Party’s open organizing efforts despite the law. Arévalo’s failure to crack down on communism diminished his standing in Washington, as well as among the other four governments of the isthmus, who called on the legacy of Central American union by signing a pact committing their governments to cooperate in various ways to resist communism.10 But Arévalo called even more

7 Abelardo Morales, Los Territorios Del Cuajipal: Frontera y Sociedad Entre Nicaragua y Costa Rica (San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO, 1997), 132-133, 23-24. 8 Jack Child, Geopolitics and Conflict in South America: Quarrels Among Neighbors (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1985), 5, 13-14. Of the six types of conflict that have pitted country against country in Latin America, that which Child called “ideological” has been commonest in Central America, he said. Ideological quarrels, understood broadly, give rise to the bitterest of hatreds, and thus are the hardest to resolve. 9 Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960, 138-139. 10 Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960, 124-125

directly on the shadow nation, in what may well have been a calculated response to the implied threat from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. At Arévalo’s invitation, three exiled Nicaraguans and a Costa Rican signed a “Pacto de Alianza” in Guatemala City on 16 December, declaring that it was “una necesidad continental” to undertake “la inmediata reconstrucción de la República de Centroamérica,” y por consiguiente, el organizar el gobierno en cada país liberado; se consignará este principio en la nueva constitución e inmediatamente se procederá a dar los pasos necesarios para la consecusión de la misma, usando todos los medios de que el Estado disponga. Los Estados y Repúblicas liberados por el Comité Supremo Revolucionario se comprometen a pactar una alianza democrática del Caribe, . . .11 The pact by the leaders of what has usually been called the “Caribbean Legion” further specified that the first step toward the re-establishment of “La República de Centroamérica” would have to be the overthrow of what it referred to as “las tres dictaduras” of Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua. The work was entrusted to the signers and their armed followers under the supreme leadership of Arévalo himself. The president had already publicly disclosed both his commitment to isthmian reunification and his conviction that reunification would depend on the democratization of Central America, in his inaugural address of 15 March 1945. 12 But Arévalo and his comrades, including the Costa Rican exile José Figueres, insisted on yoking the Costa Rican state ─ already at least a century ahead of Guatemala in the consolidation of liberal democratic institutions ─ with those that Alain Rouquié classified as the “’Sultanates’ of the Caribbean.” This, as Gleijeses correctly observed, was “sheer nonsense.”13 However illogical and mistaken, however, it was an idea that gave Figueres the justification he needed to use the resources jointly committed under the pact to launch a 40-day war against the government of President Teodoro Picado, on 12 March 1948. It ended in the overthrow of the most nearly democratic government in Central America, if not in all Latin America. Costa Rica’s last golpe was thus an archetypal move in the politics of the isthmus, and one that Mendieta would have recognized as the old filibustero routine ─ the result of a plot hatched in another of the “repúblicas fraternales,” with the material aid and political support of an isthmian government. Its success depended on the force of arms, and it was justified ─ according to the pact of 16 December ─ as a necessary step toward the re-establishment of the federation. In fact, Figueres’ rebellion was sustained by nineteen air cargo flights of men, arms and supplies from Guatemala to Costa Rica during the fighting. Figueres himself declared that the foreign military leaders he brought into Costa Rica under the pact were critical to the success of his uprising.14 The second phase of the plan outlined in the pact would seek to duplicate the Costa Rican adventure in Nicaragua. According to the most authoritative interpreter of this episode, the pact’s “punto neuráligo” was the plan to reunite the isthmus politically. As a result, the forward

11 Oscar Aguilar Bulgarelli, Costa Rica y Sus Hechos Políticos De 1948 (San José: Editorial Costa Rica, 1993), 309-310; the “pacto de alianza” is reprinted in full at 307-312. 12 Juan José Arévalo, "Al asumir la Presidencia," in Escritos :Políticos y Discursos, (La Habana, Cuba: Cultural, S.A., 1953), 234-235. 13 Alain Rouquié, The Military and the State in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 155; Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 111. 14 Charles D. Ameringer, The Caribbean Legon: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946-1950 (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 70-71.

momentum of invasion-then-overthrow had to be maintained.15 To that end, Figueres, now the victor in the Costa Rican civil war, participated in planning the pacted invasion of Nicaragua, while securing quarters and training facilities inside Costa Rica for the foreign and Costa Rican forces that had been brought into the country to defeat the Picado government, and would now be turned against the government of Nicaragua. On 21 September 1948, Figueres even signed a new pact adding Honduras to the target list.16 II. But the shadow nation never depended for its effectiveness on formal pacts or even rhetorical commitments to reunify the istmus. Its most basic expression could be found in the habitual resort to cross-border intrigue in the search for allies and in the endless pursuit of enemies, elements of what I have elsewhere called the “improvisational state” so characteristic of the isthmus.17 Nothing illustrates that pattern better than the fate of President Picado, his political allies, and the record of cross-border invasions and assassination attempts that unfolded during the 1950s. As his government’s defeat by the figueristas loomed in the closing days of the civil war, Picado and his agents officially authorized the government of Nicaragua (then headed by Gen. Somoza’s trusted 75-year-old uncle, Victor Manuel Román) to “ocupe los lugares que crea convenientes en el territorio de Costa Rica, con el objeto de resguardar la frontera” (in the language of the authorizing document) and thus prevent the anticipated invasion of Nicaragua by Figueres’ forces. The official authorization was signed on 16 April. The next day, Nicaraguan military forces landed in the Costa Rican town of Villa Quesada (well beyond the actual border) and went into action against pro-Figueres forces.18 But the Nicaraguan intervention was unavailing, and Picado surrendered his government to the Figueres-led insurgents on 19 April. He and his political ally, ex-president Rafael Angel Calderón-Guardia, took refuge in Nicaragua. Three weeks later The New York Times reported that Picado had been appointed “a consulting lawyer to the minister of the treasury Elías Serrando” in the Nicaraguan government. In December, Picado-allied exiles with Somoza’s support invaded Costa Rica, but the diplomatic intervention of the Organization of American States led to a “Pact of Amity” between Costa Rica and Nicaragua in 1949 in which both governments affirmed their desire to preserve “the fraternal friendship of the two peoples, manifested in their common history” (in the language of the pact). Picado was promoted on 16 April 1950 to private secretary to the Nicaraguan minister of war, Gen. Somoza, who took possesion of the presidency on 6 May 1950. A Figueres-backed plot to kill Somoza was uncovered in Managua in 1954, and in 1955 a second Somoza-supported invasion of Costa Rica, led by Picado’s son, included the strafing of Costa Rican towns by the insurgents’ air force. During that invasion, the elder Picado, still in exile in Managua, promised the United Press “many more revolutions in Costa Rica ─ until Figueres is

15 Aguilar Bulgarelli, Costa Rica y Sus Hechos Políticos de 1948, 313. 16 Ameringer, The Caribbean Legon: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946-1950, 76-77. 17 Holden, Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960, 25- 28. 18 The quote is from a transcript of the Picado authorization reproduced in Aguilar Bulgarelli, Costa Rica y Sus Hechos Políticos de 1948, 368; Picado later defended his decision in a deposition reproduced in the same source at 636-642; among the reasons that Picado gave was the way in which “el Gobierno de Guatemala, ayudaba descaradamente a los revolucionarios costarricenses y de otras nacionalidades, que peleaban en Costa Rica, y que era manifiestamente hostil al de Nicaragua, cosa también pública y notoria” (639); for the landing of Nicaraguan military forces, see p. 370.

5 finally driven out.” A plot to kill Figueres in which the government of Nicaragua was implicated was uncovered in Costa Rica in 1957; the assassination of Somoza in 1956 did not end the plotting but only transferred its leadership on the Nicaraguan side to Somoza’s brother and son. Two years later, Figueres supported an invasion of Nicaragua that fell apart in two weeks. Ex-president Picado died in exile in Managua in 1960; his obituarist remembered him for exploiting his close relationship with Gen. Somoza and for having “attempted for years to organize revolts in his own land.”19 III. Even as the sun was setting on the montoneras of the caudillos of the 1940s and 1950s, a new montonera, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN), would establish itself in the early 1960s with strong ideological affinities to both Fidel Castro and to Arévalo’s and Figueres’ “Caribbean Legon,” a band that had included Nicaraguans who fought with Augusto Sandino in the 1920s and early ‘30s against the Liberal Party faction eventually led by Anastasio Somoza. These Figueres-led “old Sandinistas thirsting for revenge,” in Ameringer’s words, wanted to fan the embers of Sandino’s insurgency against their traditional enemy, the Somoza family and the National Guard that the Somozas commanded in the 1940s and ‘50s.20 That was the battle that the FSLN took up. And like the members of the old “Legion,” the FSLN also declared its backing, in 1969, for “una auténtica unidad con los demás pueblos que forman con Nicaragua la región de Centoramérica,” and for the “coordinación de esfuerzos para alcanzar la emancipación nacional y establecer un nuevo sistema social.”21 Indeed, the affinity between the FSLN and the old “Legion” would eventually exceed the merely ideological. Edén Pastora, whose FSLN band began operating from Costa Rica in the early 1970s, looked up José Figueres and in mid-1978 "cleaned out what was left of Don Pepe's cache of 1948 weapons and headed for Nicaragua,” Earley reported. “Figueres acted on his own as one revolutionary helping another." That August, some of the Legion’s old guns would be pointed at the Nicaraguan legislators and other officials held as hostages by the twenty-five FSLN gunmen who took over the Palacio Nacional in Managua, one of the most spectacularly successful acts of insurgent violence in the history of Latin America.22 By then the FSLN’s military and political operatives had been warmly welcomed by the Costa Rican government, which practically turned over the country’s northern borderland to the FSLN while facilitating the transfer of weapons to the guerrillas from Cuba and elsewhere. Nowhere is Costa Rica’s decisive participation in the overthrow of Somoza more meticulously documented than in the memoir of Robert A. Pastor, director of Caribbean and Latin American

19 “Picado Takes Nicaraguan Post,” NYT 13 May 1948, p. 3; “Costa Rican Is Aide to Somoza,” NYT 16 April 1950, p. 31; “More Revolts Foreseen,” NYT 26 January 1955, p. 10; “Teodoro Picado Dies in Exile; Ex-Costa Rica Chief Aided Reds,” NYT 2 June 1960; Karnes, The Failure of Union: Central America 1824-1960, 236. The Pact of Amity of 1949 is in Organization of American States, Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance: Applications (Washington, D.C.: Organization of American States, 1973), I:62-64. A synopsis of the cross-border interventions can be found in Stephen Earley, "Arms and Politics in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, 1948-1981," Research Paper Series, Latin American Institute, University of New Mexico (May 1982) 9:5-8; also see Kyle Longley, The Sparrow and the Hawk: Costa Rica and the United States During the Rise of José Figueres (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 139-149. 20 Ameringer, The Caribbean Legon: Patriots, Politicians, Soldiers of Fortune, 1946-1950, 62, 67-68. 21 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, "Programa Sandinista," in Sandinistas: Key Documents/Documentos Claves, ed. Dennis Gilbert and David Block, (Ithaca: Latin American Studies Program, Cornell University, 1990), 19. 22 Earley, "Arms and Politics in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, 1948-1981," 10. The author’s study of the late 1970s is solidly based on numerous published sources and interviews with Figueres.

affairs for the U.S. National Security Council from 1977 to 1981. By late 1978, Costa Rica, with the full support and knowledge of President Rodrigo Carazo (1978-82) and his cabinet, “became the staging area for the war” against Somoza, as well as “the key link in an elaborate logistic system” that included the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Panama.23 FSLN Comandante Humberto Ortega told an interviewer that the FSLN “counted on support from Honduras and Costa Rica to meet some needs of the rear guard . . . . We operated clandestinely in Costa Rica and Honduras.”24 Another comandante, Sergio Ramírez, reported that during the final months of the insurrection, his home in Costa Rica “se volvió centro de conspiración, bodega de abastos, tesorería, cuartel, oficina de relaciones públicas y refugio.”25 Meanwhile, the FSLN leadership continued to nurture its longstanding aspiration to erect friendly governments elsewhere in the isthmus. Only four months before the overthrow of the Somoza government in July 1979, the insurgents reiterated their desire to strengthen “la alianza con las fuerzas revolucionarias del area.” Firmly in power in September, the Frente announced its intention to strengthen “la revolución Centromericana, Latinoamericana y mundial” but added that the first priority was to confront the “política agresiva de las dictaduras militares de Guatemala y El Salvador.”26 True to its promises of 1969 and 1979 and to isthmian tradition, the FSLN secretly and with the aid of Cuba and the Soviet Union began to funnel weapons and other material to marxist-oriented montoneras operating in El Salvador and Honduras.27

23 Robert A. Pastor, Not Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 103, 102. This is the revised edition; the first, Condemned to Repetition, was published in 1987. Carazo acknowledged his secret aid to the FSLN in interviews with Pastor; 70, 102. Also see Rafael Obregón Loria, Hechos Militares y Políticos De Nuestra Historia Patria (Alajuela: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 1981), 364, and Costa Rica, Asamblea Legislativa Comisión Asuntos Especiales, Informe Sobre el Tráfico de Armas (1981/V/14);Costa Rica.Asamblea Legislativa.Comisión Asuntos Especiales, Informe Sobre el Tráfico de Armas (1981/V/14), 4, 16, which concluded that the entire operation “fue expresamente autorizada por el señor Presidente de la República,” i.e., Carazo and his security minister, a charge denied at the time by Carazo. 24 Tomás Borge, Carlos Fonseca, Daniel Ortega Savedra, Humberto Ortega, and Jaime Wheelock, Sandinistas Speak (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982), 78. For congruent accountants of Carazo’s collaboration with the FSLN, see John A Booth, Costa Rica: Quest for Democracy (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1998), 61, 179, 183-184; Mitchell Seligson and William J. Carroll III, "The Costa Rican Role in the Sandinist Victory," in Nicaragua in Revolution, ed. Thomas W. Walker, (New York: Praeger, 1982), 335-336; Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed: the Latin American Left After the Cold War, 59; Rex A. Hudson, "Castro's America Department: Coordinating Cuba's Support for Marxist-Leninist Violence in the Americas ;" (Miami, 1988; accessed December 6, 2007); available from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/rex-hudson.htm 25 Sergio Ramírez, Adiós Muchachos: Una Memoria De La Revolución Sandinista (Bogotá: Aguilar, 1999), 21. 26 Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, "Acuerdos de Unidad del FSLN," in Sandinistas: Key Documents/Documentos Claves, ed. Dennis Gilbert and David Block, (Ithaca: Latin American Studies Program, Cornell University, 1990), 69; Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, "Análisis de la Coyuntura y Tareas de la Revolución Popular Sandinista," in Sandinistas: Key Documents/Documentos Claves, ed. Dennis Gilbert and David Block, (Ithaca: Latin American Studies Program, Cornell University, 1990), 98-99. 27 Maj. Roger Miranda, the Nicaraguan defense minister’s chief of staff from 1982 to 1987, revealed details of the FSLN’s subversive operations beyond Nicaraguan borders in his memoir, Roger Miranda and William Ratliff, The Civil War in Nicaragua: Inside the Sandinistas (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 136ff; also see the first journalistic disclosures of what until then had been widely thought to be Reagan-inspired myths: Glenn Garvin, “We Shipped Weapons, Sandinistas Say,” Miami Herald, 18 July 1999, and Douglas Farah, “Managua Blasts Rip Lid Off Secrets; Salvadoran Rebel Cache, Leftist Kidnap Data Exposed; Sandinistas Implicated,” Washington Post, 14 July 1993.

Thus it was that, in the classic tradition of isthmian political movements, the Sandinistas’ desire to carry their revolution beyond national borders (and the equally predictable opposition that their violent seizure of power provoked within Nicaragua itself) re-enflamed Nicaragua’s own borderlands. As early as April 1980 the Costa Rican press reported the presence in Costa Rica of anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan guerrillas. In October, anti-FSLN landing strips and arms caches were said to have been found.28 The very borderland that had once sheltered the Sandinistas now began receiving their enemies, while the Costa Rican government, which had once nourished the Sandinistas, would shortly join with the United States in secret support of the anti-Sandinistas entrenched in Costa Rica’s northern borderland. Once again, strictly national loyalties were practically irrelevant in the borderland violence that followed. Just as in the 1940s and ‘50s, it was not Nicaraguan against Costa Rican. Rather, the sides in the borderland conflict distinguished themselves according to various ideological and personal interests that overlapped national identities. Rival bands of anti-FSLN Nicaraguans attacked each other even as they utilized the Costa Rican borderland as a platform from which to launch attacks on the common political enemy in Nicaragua. Costa Rican government officials exploited the opportunities for personal enrichment and ideological warfare that the borderland once again presented. Nicaragua’s northern borderland with Honduras turned into a battlefield contested by as many as 20,000 anti-FSLN insurgents and the FSLN government, but also (again, traditionally) by competing factions of insurgents. The borderland rivalries even extended to the anti-FSLN groups’ two principal non-isthmian backers ─ Argentina and the United States ─ with the latter naturally prevailing.29 Hovering above all the borderland rivalries was the one that supplied most of the ideological fuel for the lower-level ones ─ the Cold War competition between the Soviet bloc and the West. After having provided decisive support from Costa Rica for the anti-Somoza guerrillas of the FSLN, President Rodrigo Carazo turned on the FSLN within a year after it had seized power in Nicaragua, denouncing its far-left policies and assisting the FSLN’s enemies while welcoming them into Costa Rica.30 The rise of the anti-Somozan insurgency in the 1970s, followed immediately by the anti-Sandinista (“contra”) insurgencies of the 1980s, vastly expanded the opportunities for engagements of negotation and transaction in the northern borderland of Costa Rica. Journalist Martha Honey observed “a wild-west atmosphere" across the borderland, fed not only by the arrival of some 35,000 refugees but by opportunities for "arms and drug trafficking, black marketeering, war profiteering, political killings, and increasing crime and hooliganism." In northern Costa Rica, Nicaraguans outnumbered Costa Ricans she added, while Costa Rican farmers hired out to fight for the contras, and in the "border outposts of Upala and Los Chiles . . . anti-Sandinista fighters, frequently drunk and brandishing weapons, occasionally robbed local stores, raped women, and shot farmers."31

28 Ileana Valerín Román and Fabiola Tellini Neveu, "El Conflicto de la Frontera Norte: Diversificación de los Cuerpos de Seguridad Pública en Costa Rica (1978-1990)." (Thesis, Licenciatura en Historia , Universidad de Costa Rica, Escuela de Historia y Geografía. 1996), 170, 171. 29 Duane R. Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 1997), 200-201; 212- 213, 231; for the splits among the contra and the among the Miskito Indians, see 236 and elsewhere; for the falling out between the United States and Argentina, see 234. 30 Booth, Costa Rica: Quest for Democracy, 179, 184. 31 Martha Honey, Hostile Acts : U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), 206-207.

Despite the lawlessness, however, it would be a mistake to portray this borderland and its violence as somehow beyond the effective reach of agents of the Costa Rican state. Just as officials of the Carazo administration engaged massively (though covertly) in the borderland-based drive to overthrow the Somoza government, those of the administration of President Luis Alberto Monge (1982-86) eventually collaborated with the anti-Sandinista rebels to overthrow the successors of Somoza, even as they publicly denied doing so ─ just as Carazo had falsely denied helping the Sandinistas. Collaboration with the anti-FSLN forces in Costa Rica required collaboration with the U.S. government, which had already begun building a secret program of support for anti-FSLN guerrillas in the Nicaragauan-Honduan-Costa Rican borderlands. “Within weeks” (according to LeoGrande) of the Sandinista takeover on 19 July 1979, President Carter signed a series of secret directives, at first authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to covertly aid non-Sandinista political groups in Nicaragua, then escalating to covert action against Nicaragua in 1980. Even before President Reagan had taken office on 20 January 1980, the Carter administration had spent “several hundred million dollars” in covert action against the Nicaraguan government, according to Woodward.32 The U.S. coordinator of the covert war against the Nicaraguan government (re-authorized by subsequent findings issued by President Reagan in March and December 1981) was the CIA’s Dewey Clarridge. The Argentine army was already secretly training, advising and equipping a 500- man force of anti-FSLN rebels operating out of Honduras, with the permission of the Honduran government. During the first half of 1981, the Reagan administration signaled its support for the Argentine initiative, and began looking for ways to contribute to the “contra” war against Nicaragua. Clarridge immediately went to work recruiting ex-FSLN comandante Pastora. Clarridge met Pastora for the first time in Acapulco in February 1982, and after two days of negotiation, Pastora agreed to publicly break with the FSLN toward the end of March and organize a "political/military structure for a southern front [i.e., in the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan borderland] that we would support with funds and materiél."33 After an 11-hour negotiating session in San José in March or April with Clarridge, Pastora finally gave Clarridge “an exact date and agreement on the general content” of Pastora’s public declaration of his break with the FSLN. On 15 April, Pastora duly called a news conference in San José to denounce the FSLN, then went on to organize the Alianza Revolutionaria Democrática (ARDE), with himself as the comandante.34 Monge was inaugurated on 8 May. On 22 June, he huddled in the Oval Office with President Reagan, minutes after publicly declaring that Central America and the Caribbean were feeling the effects of “a massive offensive on the part of totalitarian Marxism-Leninism.”35 President Reagan was about to ensure Costa Rica’s continued collaboration in the war against Nicaragua with a downpour of military-assistance grants that would come to $36 million between 1980 and 1990 ─ four times the amount of grant military assistance provided in the previous three decades combined (measured in constant 1990 dollars). Economic aid (both grants and loans) came to $1.2 billion in the same decade, nearly five times all U.S. economic aid provided from

32 William M. LeoGrande, Our Own Backyard : the United States in Central America, 1977-1992 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 542; Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, 196, 213-214; Bob Woodward, Veil : the Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 113. 33 Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, 200-201; 212-218. 34 Clarridge, A Spy for All Seasons: My Life in the CIA, 221-222, 224. 35 “Remarks of President Reagan and President Luis Alberto Monge of Costa Rica Following Their Meeting,” 22 June 1982, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Public Papers of Ronald Reagan. http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1982/62282b.htm

1946 to 1979 (measured in current dollars).36 The U.S. transfers are widely considered to have rescued the Costa Rican economy from one of the gravest economic crises in its history.37 Within days of his inauguration, Monge’s public security ministry had begun receiving intelligence reports of activities by both pro-Sandinsta and anti-Sandinista irregular armed forces, composed of Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans, in the country’s northern borderland. Col. Johnny Campos Loaiza, special adviser to security minister Angel Edmundo Solano Calderón, informed Solano on 13 May that in the cantón of San Carlos, “hombres fuertemente armados preparan acciones de hostigamiento contra el Gobierno de Nicaragua; incluso se mencionan nombres como Bianey Cruz, Rafael Brenes y Carlos Coronel que estarían tras estos movimientos.” Around the town of Los Chiles, “gente extraña” had been seen, including a certain gentleman named Sequeira, “reconocido comunista,” who along with members of the Nicaraguan army “realizan 'una espectacular infiltración de nicaraguenses en la zona norte muy bien armados y supestamente para actuar en Costa Rica.'”38 In November, individuals suspected of being FSLN spies were found taking photos around Los Chiles, while Nicaraguan army patrols were crossing into Costa Rican territory to occupy a finca owned by the Nicaraguan consul while hunting down counterrevolutionaries in the cantón of San Carlos. Meanwhile, a Costa Rica finquero, Edgar Salazar, was thought to be harboring and supplying between 50 and 80 anti-FSLN guerrillas, as was the U.S. finquero John Hull. It was clear that the counterrevolutionaries were drawing on a steady stream of anti-FSLN Nicaraguan peasants, now in exile, squatting on Costa Rican land. When a Guardia Rural officer tried to evict some, they warned him that they would organize themselves into "un grupo de 40 hombres los cuales pelearían como contrarevolucionarios y si la autoridad volvía a llegar los matarían," wrote security minister Solano, quoting an informant directly.39 By then, the Monge administration had already taken positive steps to keep from interfering with the anti-FSLN movement, in the capital as well as in the borderland. 40 An internal analysis of the country’s security from March to May 1983, produced by Monge’s own staff, reported that anti- Sandinista activities had intensified considerably in the northern borderland, and so had incursions by the Nicaraguan army. Some residents of towns around Los Chiles, Upala and Guatuso had emigrated to other parts of the country in response to the violence. Journalists were saying, the staffers wrote, that Ciudad Quesada “se ha convertido, a raíz de la situación fronteriza, en un centro de espionaje y contrabando de armas.” Nevertheless, Monge’s analysts wrote, the majority

36 Calculations by author, using printout by U.S. Department of Defense, “DSAA Fiscal Year Series,” 1950- 1990, acquired via Freedom of Information Act, and U.S. Agency for International Development, U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants. Series of Yearly Data. Vol. II Latin America and the Caribbean, Obligations and Loan Authorizations FY 1946-1990. The military data have been posted by the author of this article at http://www.lions.odu.edu/~rholden/db/usmilaid/ 37 Luis Guillermo Solís R., "Costa Rica: la política exterior y los cambios en el sistema internacional en los ochenta," in El Nuevo Rostro De Costa Rica, ed. Juan Manuel Villasuso, (Heredia, Costa Rica: CEDAL, 1992), 351-353; for a broader discussion of the institutional effects of the U.S. economic aid, see Bruce M. Wilson, Costa Rica: Politics, Economics, and Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998), 115-132. 38 ANCR. SP. 54/604. Angel Edmundo Solano Calderón, Minister of Public Security, to Col. Johnny Campos Loaiza, Asesor Especial, 13 May 1982. 39 ANCR. SP. 27/251. Mayor Jorge A. Cedeño Arrieta, comandante, Comando Atlántico, to Cor. Oscar Vidal Quesada, Director General de la Guardia Civil, 30 November 1982. 40 See, for example, ANCR. SP. 37/373. Maj. Carlos Monge Quesada, director, Inteligencia y Seguridad, to Angel Edmundo Solano Calderón, min. of public security, "Actividades relevantes del mes de septiembre [1982]." Also see "Costa Rica/Nicaragua," Latin American Weekly Report, 21 January 1983

of the population in the northern borderland remained sympathetic to the anti-Sandinista guerrillas and even ayudan a esta causa, en la medida de sus posibilidades, unos proporcionando alimentos, ropas; otros poniendo a su disposición sus viviendas o fincas u ocultando los sitios donde estos puedan localizarse; lo que no sólo compromete, sino que afecta directamente al país y su seguridad. Es menester de las autoridades, controlar esta situación, sin embargo, como apuntamos antes, los recursos con que cuenta el cuerpo policial no les permite abarcarlo todo, pero es obvio que el Gobierno Sandinista se apoye en estos factores, para denunciar que desde Costa Rica, se arma la contrarevolución, por lo que se hace necesaria tomar las medidas del caso hasta donde sea posible.41 That October, after five members of the Guardia Rural were found collaborating openly with the contra in the town of Upala, they were duly punished ─ by being transferred to another post.42 The following month, in what may have been one of the most mendacious policy announcements in Costa Rican history, President Monge on 17 November 1983 declared “la neutralidad de Costa Rica frente a los conflictos bélicos que puedan afectar a otros Estados,” pledging a neutrality that would be “perpetua y no transitoria . . . frente a todos los conflictos bélicos que afecten a otros Estados,” as well as “activa” and “no armada.” As for the anti- Sandinistas with whom officials of his government were even then secretly collaborating, Monge promised to prevent the use of Costa Rican territory as a “base de operaciones” for warriors on any side, as well as to abstain from assisting any of the belligerents in any way. Any combatants found in Costa Rica would be disarmed and placed under detention “lejos del teatro de guerra.”43 Meanwhile, the publicly-announced deluge of compensatory U.S. military and economic assistance was being complemented by secret payoffs to various Costa Rican public officials to purchase protection for the contra forces that continued to operate from bases in the Costa Rican borderland, the New York Times reported. Cash supplied by the CIA was being paid to members of the Costa Rican security forces, as well as high government officials. In return for the money, the recipients tipped off their contacts among the contra whenever a raid on a contra base was being planned.44 The records of the public security ministry for the period of Monge’s presidency fully confirm the continued presence of contra camps in the borderlands during his entire administration, as well as the collaboration of public security officials at all levels with the contra. 45 But what the CIA took to calling “the southern front” in its war against the Nicaraguan government never achieved the levels of success recorded by the much larger operation in Nicaragua’s borderland with Honduras. As late as July 1985, Lewis Tambs, the U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica, was telling his staff that his “one mission” in Costa Rica was to “form a Nicaraguan

41 ANCR. SP. 8/83. Memo, Presidencia de la República de Costa Rica. "Análisis de Seguridad (Período marzo-mayo de 1983)." 42 ANCR. SP. 6/59. Johnny Campos Loaiza, viceministro of seg. pub., to Enrique Chacón Zúñiga, viceministro de Gobernación, 22 de agosto de 1983. 43 Héctor Gros Espiell, La Neutralidad De Costa Rica (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Juricentro, 1986); the proclamation is reprinted in full at 74-84. 44 Joel Brinkley, “Costa Rican Aides Said to Get Bribes,” The New York Times, 23 April 1984. 45 See, for example, "Norteños Hicieron Graves Denuncias Ante Ministros," La Prensa Libre (San José), 3 November 1984, p. 6.

southern front.”46 The San José station chief of the CIA, Joe Fernandez, told a U.S. congressional investigating committee in 1987 that one of his main duties was to supply the anti-FSLN forces in Costa Rica. But the biggest problem he encountered, he said, was in trying to persuade them to leave their sanctuary in Costa Rica and fight in Nicaragua: “They were extremely -- and that is not an overstatement -- they were extremely reluctant to do so.”47 Benjamin Piza, Monge’s security minister from late 1984 to 30 April 1986, appears to have been the administration’s key defender of the anti-Sandinistas and the CIA’s main contact in its dealings with the Costa Rican government. According to Lt. Col. Oliver North, the U.S. National Security Staff member who shared authority with Clarridge in overseeing U.S. relations with the contra, "Piza had been instrumental in helping the U.S. organize the Southern Front. Piza had intervened with another senior Costa Rican official on numerous occasions and had personally assisted in the development of a logistics support base for Resistance forces deployed north from Costa Rica." Col. North’s supervisor, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, “had met with Piza to discuss future plans for the Resistance and support for them through Costa Rica."48 V. For Central America, a real historical novelty sprang forth in Nicaragua in 1979. A successful social revolution, justified in terms of marxist dogma, overthrew the Somozan sultanate and then proceeded to enact a socialistic program of reconstruction with the collaboration of the Soviet Union and its allies in the socialist bloc. But the novel aspects of this drama have obscured its faithfulness to some of the most longstanding patterns in isthmian political life. Among the Sandinistas, one could mention the persistence of personalism and patrimonialism, and the search for a powerful foreign patron in the governments of the Soviet Union and Cuba. A more momentous and consequential pattern of continuity is the one highlighted here: a habit of violent cross-border intervention and intrigue linking ideological allies, with little regard for nationality. Caudillos like Picado, Calderón, Figueres and Pastora found asylum as “exiles” in a neighboring land before returning with a montonera assembled with the aid of powerful friends elsewhere in Central America or beyond ─ governments headed by Arévalo or Somoza, or later on by Figueres himself, and later still Carazo, and then his successor Luis Alberto Monge, not to mention the governments of Honduras, Argentina, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba and the United States. If the agents of the Central American states found it impossible to control their own borders, neither did any of them fail, when challenged ideologically by a counterpart on the other side, to exploit the cognate weakness of the enemy across the border. Outside powers like the United States and

46 United States.President's Special Review Board, Report of the President's Special Review Board (Washington DC: United States Government, 1987), C-12 (testmony of Joe Fernandez, CIA station chief in San José). 47 United States, Congress, “Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair.” Appendix B, Vol. 3:305-307. 48 "U.S. Government Stipulation on Quid Pro Quos with Other Governments as Part of Contra Operations." Statement submitted by U.S. Government in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in the case of USA vs. Oliver L. North, defendant, 6 April 1989, reprinted in Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne, The Iran- Contra Scandal : the Declassified History (New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 1993), 95. Also see the report of an invesgitations committee of the Costa Rican legislature: Asamblea Legislativa, Comisión especial nombrada para investigar los hechos denunciados sobre narcotráfico, Informe final (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universidad Estatal a Distancia, 1989: 64-65; also, Digital National Security Archive. August 19, 1985 Trip [Robert Owen Trip to Costa Rica to Set Up the Southern Front - Unredacted Copy], Secret, Memorandum, August 25, 1985, 4 pp. Collection: Iran-Contra Affair Item Number: IC01467 Origin: United States. National Security Council From: Owen, Robert W. To: North, Oliver L.

Cuba followed the paths across the borderlands blazed and worn smooth by Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans, Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans. What sets the borderlands of Central America apart from others is that they have facilitated interaction far more effectively than they have disrupted interaction. The preferred forms of interaction ─ trade, tourism and legal immigration ─ appear to coexist in a perpetual rivalry with cross-border public violence and intrigue. The evidence and the interpretation of that evidence submitted in this paper suggest that borderland public violence should not be attributed mainly to the weakness or lack of resources of the central authorities. Rather, the pattern reported here suggests the persistence of old habits of intervention, interference, and the search for support from ideological allies within the domain of the ex-República Federal de Centroamérica ─ habits whose existence are both confirmed, and kept alive, by the interminable construction of quasi-state regional organizations and associations. Can those efforts eventually overcome the notorious ungovernability of the borderlands? But any answer to that question must first acknowledge that their ungovernability, as we have seen, has in large part been created and sustained by agents of state and counter-state violence who cannot resist exploiting them for a variety of ideological and personal reasons. On the one hand, semi-controlled borderlands may weaken state power; on the other hand, state agents show little hesitation in using borderland disorder and insecurity to make themselves stronger. Finally, the political union of the five states may well depend above all on finishing the task of individual state formation and nationhood. Only stable, strong states at the head of well-formed national communities founded on the rule of law would have the legitimate authority necessary to negotiate the construction of a Central American union. Only states thus empowered can legitimately yield any sovereignty to a larger entity. If the increasingly obvious ungovernability of the isthmian states is a sign of their leaders’ incapacity to govern, how can they be expected to negotiate a devolution of sovereignty to an imagined common state, much less govern such a state? President Arévalo may have been right, therefore, to argue that reunification depended on the separate consolidation of democracy in each country. However, he failed to see that, by taking up the old habits of subversion and military intervention, he was undermining his own reunification project. A 2007 report by an alliance of isthmian human rights organizations warned that another outbreak of region-wide violence, similar to that of the 1980s, may await Central America as long as the region’s states fail to “garantizar, respetar y proveer condiciones para el pleno goce de los derechos humanos” while allowing themselves to be permeated, weakened and corrupted by criminal gangs operating much like the “esquadrones de la muerte” of the 1980s.49 If that prediction is fulfilled, Central America’s borderlands will likely once again emerge as hubs of violence.

49 Federación Luterana Mundial, Departamento de Servicio Mundial, et al., “Centroamérica 2005-2006: Desde Una Perspectiva de Derechos Humanos,” 2007, 66, 5-6.