Unfortunately for the US, there could be no pretence now that democracy was being defended in El Salvador. An outright and firm decision in favour of or against the all-military government was necessary.
The US Administration chose to favour it. With the help of American advisers and the provision of significant quantities of weapons and equipment it started a major counter-insurgency effort of the sort that could not work. El Salvador’s military, reinforced in their ‘win or die’ stand by this show of support, raised the level of violence in a war that by now had become something very like a popular insurgency. From both the Government and the guerrillas ever more widespread brutality was used against the civilian populace.
In America, the liberal opposition exploded. The Cubans had laid their plans in 1981 for Hispanic and black demonstrations against the welfare cuts they correctly expected from the US Administration, but they had shown their usual inefficiency in not getting the demonstrations (which had already been paid for) mounted on the target date. This inefficiency now proved for the Cubans a great advantage. Just as had happened in 1968, subsidized demonstrations spread with increasing violence across America. Decent young people and others looking for political mileage also, quite understandably, joined in protests against the ‘new Vietnam’.
By late 1983 El Salvador’s war was spreading across Central America. It looked at one stage likely to involve all of Central America’s five other republics.
Even before the right-wing coup in El Salvador the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua was going further down the sad Cuban road. Under pressure from a deteriorating economic situation, Nicaragua started putting local and even multi-national businessmen in prison, because they were ‘slandering’ instead of aiding the national economy. The US responded by cutting off economic aid, and Venezuela followed suit. This led the pro-Cubans in the Sandinista leadership to ask for Cuban and Soviet economic and other assistance. Cuba loudly and angrily denounced the ‘US-inspired interventionist measures against Nicaragua’, and claimed that a ‘mercenary army’ paid for with US and Venezuelan money was being trained in Costa Rica ‘to make war on the Nicaraguan revolution’.
More Cuban military advisers and weapons were rushed into Nicaragua. Mexico was not helpful at this moment. It said that America’s action in cutting off economic aid was pushing Nicaragua into the hands of the Soviet Union.
Some rather more sinister folk began to fear (or hope) the same thing. In Guatemala, a well-organized and equipped guerrilla army made the military apprehensive that a full-scale revolutionary war might develop very soon. The trouble spread to Costa Rica, a country possessing no armed forces but only police, long admired for its domestic tranquillity and its pacifist international stand. Reductions in the standards of living in Costa Rica’s hitherto well-off and civilized society, and the fall in the prices of coffee and other exports, set the stage for the appearance of something unheard of in that country — tiny, but highly efficient, terrorist groups. The same happened in Panama, where the death in 1981 of the spectacular General Torrijos had left a power vacuum that contributed to the resurgence of left-wing revolutionary activities. Rioting near the Panama Canal caused grave disquiet among senior officers of the US Navy.
Foolishly, Guatemala now intervened in El Salvador, and Honduras in Nicaragua. In the late summer of 1983 the Guatemalan military government, faced with a major guerrilla insurgency of its own, sent forces through the frontier to help Salvadoran Army units engaged in fierce battles with the guerrillas in the northern part of the country.
Honduras allowed attacks to be launched on Nicaraguan border areas by former Somocista National Guardsmen. Consequent clashes between border guards developed into sharp, bloody encounters throughout the months of September and October 1983. No war was declared. Hondurans accused the Sandinistas of promoting revolution in their country. The Nicaraguan Government denounced a Honduran ‘invasion’ and mobilized popular militias ‘for the defence of the fatherland’. The Organization of American States (OAS) called a meeting in October which passed a weak resolution ‘condemning all aggressions’. The war in Central America was suddenly looking like a trans-national one of left against right. National boundaries might be about to lose their significance.
At this moment it began to look as if there would be a Venezuela-Guyana war as well.
The Venezuelan general elections were due at the beginning of December 1983. During the Christian Democrat period in El Salvador, Venezuela had acted as a hard-line ally of the US. Its own people did not like this. Public opinion polls even at this stage showed that only 10 per cent of Venezuelans thought that their country should get involved in El Salvador and help the junta. Nearly 60 per cent thought that Venezuela should continue to give aid for the reconstruction of Nicaragua.
The struggle which began with Cuba-leaning Guyana at this time was welcomed by some extreme right-wing nationalist groups in Venezuela, plus some of the Venezuelan military, but it was really initiated by Cuba-leaning politicians in Guyana itself. A quarrel between these countries is always easy to ignite, because Venezuelans think that two-thirds of the land area of Guyana should actually belong to Venezuela. Some Guyanan politicians wanted to integrate their country more closely with Cuba because this would advance their own careers. They could feel fairly certain that the movement of armed bands across the disputed areas, spilling occasionally over the frontier, would trigger a reaction from Venezuelan generals. The trigger was pulled, and the reaction came. The spectre had now been raised of a war on the South American mainland.
Guyana asked for Cuban military help, and new teams of Cuban ‘advisers’ quickly turned up. All the other Caribbean countries tried to persuade Venezuela and Guyana to come to terms peacefully, and their general mood was against Venezuela. A left-wing inspired campaign against ‘Venezuelan imperialism’ spread throughout Trinidad, Tobago, Curacao, anti-colonialist Grenada, Dominica and even Jamaica. It was embarrassing to the US that its key ally in containing subversion in Central America and the Caribbean should start to lose sympathy in both regions as a result of a ninety-year-old territorial dispute with a black-dominated, English-speaking Caribbean country. Cuba did not miss the opportunity to show its anti-colonialism. It prepared to station military units on the mainland ‘at the request of a friendly government, threatened by foreign aggression’.
In November of 1983 America’s fortunes in Central America therefore seemed at their lowest ebb. The US Administration, committed to a policy of containment of subversion, but not opposed in principle to moderate change, had almost given up hopes that any middle-of-the-road alternative was feasible in countries torn apart by extremists from left and right. Mexico persisted in its anti-US stand, willing to take risks with the centre-left and more extreme left-wing movements. The Venezuelan Government had lost most of its capacity for action as the election approached, and it was unpopular internationally because of its border disputes with Colombia as well as Guyana. The Soviet Union was delighted to see the United States caught in the elephant trap and wallowing ineffectively, while the Soviet Union’s Cuban ally was recovering political prestige and gaining opportunities to intervene militarily at the request of ‘friendly governments’, as it had done in Africa.
As only one example, Cuban technicians now accelerated work on the new airport in Grenada, begun in 1980, which was clearly going to be able to service sophisticated combat aircraft. The United States had to decide whether it was going to take military action to-stop ‘new Cubas’ from arising right across Central America and the Caribbean.
The US Administration adopted, as the only possible way out of the trap, Teddy Roosevelt’s old policy in the area: ‘speak softly, but carry a big stick’. The big stick hit the headlines. The United States gave warning to Cuba that the despatch of any more Cuban troops to countries outside its borders would be regarded as a
The policy worked. The ships were not attacked, and no more Cuban troops were despatched to the mainland or through the Caribbean. The CIA triumphantly attributed this to the big stick. As was reported in the
