Essays

about 14 families.
Some 22 percent has been transferred to poor farmers under a land reform program launched in 1980 a Christian Democratic mili- tary junta. But the program has stirred the ire of property owners and become a target of Marx-
"The old United Provinces of Central America encompassed Gua- temala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. But Belize and Panama are also regarded as Central American states.
&-Leninist insurgents. Hence, Jose Duarte's ci- vilian government...

n proudly called him- self a Sandinista. As the despised National Guard collapsed on the 19th, and some 300 muchachos in fatigues and berets marched into Managua, the poor and privileged alike rejoiced with laughter and tears. In sublime catharsis, a crowd tore down an equestrian statue of Anastasia Somoza Garcia, the first of three Somozas to call himself el presidente.
Businessmen went on the air to pledge support for the Revolution. Jimmy Carter's envoy, William Bowdler, joined a victory parade...

As an episode in Soviet-American global competition, the conflict in Nicaragua has served to illuminate a recurring problem in American governance: the difficulty of getting Capitol Hill and the White House together on a coherent U.S. foreign policy. Since the Vietnam debacle, the zigzags in U.S. policy overseas have intensified. The War Powers Act (1973) and Congress's initial refusal to fund anti-Communist guerrillas in Angola (1976) were just two early symptoms of the same distrust that led...

the Spanish. Moreover, the mountains hm-ited trade, and slash-md-burn farming ruined "millions of acres of arable land."

Woodward's is the most lucid all- round history of the region in English. Useful surveys include Robert C. West and John l? Augelli's Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples (Prentice-Hall, 1976) and Franklin D. Parker's Central American Republics (Oxford, 1964). Cornell's Walter LaFeber, in Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (Norton, 1984), a...