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Reagan got Congress to approve making war on the Sandinistas only to interfere with Sandinista arms supplies to the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador. Congress even passed an amendment (the Boland Amendment) to the covert aid bill that forbade American assistance “for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.” So Congress gave aid to Contras, whose purpose was overthrowing the government of Nicaragua.13
Double-talk continued to characterize the Contra question in the U.S. Congress. After further political debate on Contra aid, the Senate reached a compromise on “humanitarian aid” for the Contras. The solons’ creative definition of “humanitarian” included trucks, helicopters, and communications gear,” as long as this equipment was not “used to inflict serious bodily harm or death.”
According to author Lynn Horton, whose brilliant work is the source of much of the material on Quilalí here, cooperatives were not the place to be in Quilalí. The Sandinistas resettled peasants from the mountains to join self-defense militias for the Sandinista cooperatives in the valleys.14 On July 28, 1986, forty Contras attacked one river valley co-op after they got word that the army was away on mission. They killed six residents, including three children, and wounded twenty-five. Repelled by this kind of humanitarian initiative, Congress finally cut off aid to the Contras in 1987. The cutoff had more to do with the Reagan administration’s misbehavior in the Iran-Contra Affair than the Contras’ misbehavior.
President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica negotiated a peace plan for Nicaragua (with support from other Central American presidents), for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. As part of the deal, the Sandinistas agreed to democratic elections, which both they and impartial international observers thought they would win.
But the Nicaraguan people and the people of Quilalí were not fans of schoolboy socialism and never-ending war. In the February 25, 1990, elections, the candidate of the united opposition, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the widow of a martyr in the struggle against Somoza, carried 55 percent of the popular vote against Daniel Ortega’s 41 percent.
Postwar Quilalí
Between May and September 1990, about five hundred ex-Contras and one thousand civilian families returned to Quilalí from their refuge in Honduras. The Organization of American States provided some aid to ex-Contras, such as kitchen utensils, tools, zinc roofs, and cash payments of fifty dollars. The ex-Contras found a Quilalí where, partly through their own actions, the infrastructure was ruined and about one third of the land lay fallow. The war had killed 300 Quilalí residents, leaving behind 900 widows and orphans. Another 185 were permanently handicapped. In a 1991 survey, only 23 percent of Quilalí’s people drank milk regularly and 30 percent ate any kind of meat, while 70 percent lived in overcrowded housing (defined as 4 to 10 people sleeping in the same room). Nearly half of the people over age ten were illiterate; only half of the children attended elementary school.15
Chamorro didn’t keep a promise of land grants to the ex-Contras. Nor did the United States show interest in the plight of their former allies. The ex-combatants, with their usual directness, took matters into their own hands. In Quilalí, twenty-five families of ex-Contras invaded lands of the Panali cooperative on February 18, 1991, saying they were claiming the plots of land the government had promised them during demobilization. Cooperative members confronted them, and there was a standoff between two groups of peasants armed with machetes. Years later, the conflict was still not resolved, and the ex-Contras continued their occupation of the land. They couldn’t get bank loans since they didn’t possess land titles. The co-op members who lost their lands to the ex-Contras didn’t get any compensation.16
This episode was symptomatic of the confused land question on a national scale. Pre-revolutionary owners of expropriated land, cooperative members, ex-Contras, ex-Sandinistas, and speculators who had bought land from any of the above, competed for the same plots of land. The Chamorro government confused things even more with its own land reform program. Ex-Contras, ex-Sandinistas, and even mixtures of the two again took up arms in some parts of the countryside to agitate for land. The IMF in 2003 summarized this situation as “inadequate protection of property rights.17 With such uncertainty about who owned the land, agricultural production did not rebound strongly after the new government took power.
Fig. 30. Nicaragua Per Capita Income, 1950–2002
Economic growth in Nicaragua in the post-revolutionary era, while at least not as calamitous as it was under the Sandinistas, was anemic (see figure 30).
Nicaragua failed to recover despite the boatloads of aid money that arrived in the nineties: aid inflows averaged 40 percent of Nicaragua’s income from 1990 to 1999. The World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Monetary Fund once again offered their assistance (they had withdrawn in the early 1980s under heavy American pressure—the World Bank refers to Sandinista misrule and American intervention as “economic and political disarray in the 1980s”).18
Nicaraguan politics remain chaotic. Of the first two post-Sandinista presidents, Violeta Chamorro and Arnoldo Alemán, the much-abused Nicaraguans say, “It took the Sandinistas twelve years to make a saint of Somoza; it took Violeta only five years to make saints of the Sandinistas; Alemán has needed only two years to make a saint of Violeta.19
Daniel Ortega lost two more presidential elections after he lost to Chamorro. The current president, Enrique Bolaños, put his predecessor, Alemán, in jail for gross corruption. The IMF in 2003 said Nicaragua’s problem was one of “weak governance and rule of law” and “an inefficient public sector.20
As we pursue new interventions for the war on terror, Americans have largely forgotten the land in which one of the most famous standoffs of the cold war took place.
ANGOLA
How many dead in this war? How many homes abandoned, how many refugees in neighboring countries, how many separated families? For what? When I think of all the suffering, the individual hopes destroyed, futures torn apart, I feel anger, impotent anger.
ANGOLAN NOVELIST PEPETEL.21
Henry Kissinger expressed concern about the proxy standoff in December 1975 in Angola, featuring Soviet-backed and American-backed independence movements: “I do care about the African reaction when they see the Soviets pull it off and we don’t do anything. If the Europeans then say to themselves, ‘If they can’t hold Luanda, how can they defend Europe[?].22 Such imaginative thoughts about America’s reputation for saving Africa and Europe from communism motivated the decades of mayhem to follow in Angola.
White Man in Angolan History
Angola’s tragic relationship with her European would-be saviors dates back a ways. Luanda was a slave port for the Portuguese beginning in the sixteenth century, well before its twentieth-century incarnation as the front line in the cold war. The Portuguese sent slave raiders from Luanda into the interior to buy slaves from African intermediaries, then shipped off the slaves to Brazil and Cuba. (Some of the descendants of those Cuban slaves would go back to Angola four centuries later, as part of Castro’s expeditionary force to fight in the civil war.)
The first victims of the Portuguese in the sixteenth century were the Mbundu people, who in the late twentieth century would be backers of the Marxist guerillas fighting for independence, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA, in Portuguese). By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese had reached into the interior plateau of Angola, the planalto, and begun enslaving the Ovimbundu people. The Ovimbundu were the base for the National Union for Total Independence of Angola (UNITA, in Portuguese).23 The small Portuguese population on the coast was mostly men, with the usual result that a population of mixed race, known as mestiços, had sprung up. By the late nineteenth century, a small group of Africans were attending mission schools and learning to speak Portuguese fluently. They were known as assimilados. The assimilados and mestiços played a leadership role in the colony as government officials and traders.
However, by the 1920s, the Portu
guese had changed their minds and decided to sharply limit the role of Africans in government, in favor of Portuguese settlers. Under the dictatorship of António Salazar, from 1932 to 1968, Portugal sought to incorporate Angola as an overseas extension, giving aid to white Portuguese settlers to move there. The dregs of society, such as ex-convicts, were the most likely to take up the offer; they became known as the self-explanatory degredados. The restrictions on upward mobility of the assimilados and mestiços in favor of the white degredados explains why the former groups became leaders in the anti-colonial insurrection against the Portuguese. Together with the Mbundu ethnic group, the assimilados and mestiços founded the MPLA.
The Ovimbundu had a different history with the Portuguese. The increasing encroachment of the whites on the Ovimbundu homeland on the planalto, including the continuation of the slave trade inside Angola, created tensions between the two groups. White settlers were attracted into the planalto by the mild climate at three thousand to six thousand feet, which one settler called “perpetual springtime.” A random incident sparked a full-scale Ovimbundu rebellion against the Portuguese in 1902. The Ovimbundu saw the assimilados and mestiços as part of the colonial establishment, and thus part of the enemy. Using African troops from other parts of Angola, the Portuguese suppressed the rebellion within a few months, punishing the Ovimbundu leaders with banishment. One of those punished was royal counselor Sakaita Savimbi. His grandson, Jonas Savimbi, would be the leader of the Ovimbundu during the 1975–2002 Angolan Civil War.
After that, in the course of the twentieth century, the mestiços and the Ovimbundu switched positions, with the former becoming hostile to the Portuguese and the latter becoming compliant subjects. The Ovimbundu would agree to work in the homeland of the Mbundu on white-owned coffee plantations when the local people refused. The Mbundu, mestiços, and assimilados scorned the Ovimbundu as scabs.24
The first leader of the MPLA, founded in 1959, was Mário de Andrade, an educated mestiço and a poet. The second leader was an assimilado and poet named Agostinho Neto, who became the first president of independent Angola in 1975. At a time when European powers granted other African colonies independence, Portugal insisted that Angola remain a colony. The MPLA and UNITA thus began a guerilla war for independence in the 1960s, starting with an uprising in 1961.
Ironically, the biggest surge in white settlement of Angola came in the last twenty-five years of the colony’s existence, from the end of World War II until independence in 1975. High coffee prices after World War II brought large profits to new white settlers, who started even more coffee plantations in the interior. By 1975, there were 335,000 whites in Angola, 5 percent of the population. The whites made up most of the economy’s managers, commercial farmers, business owners, and technicians.25
Even more than in other African colonies, the colonizer made a mess out of decolonization. In 1975, after a socialist government came to power in Portugal, the colonizer hastily handed over power in Angola to whoever would take it, leaving the guerilla movements to fight it out among themselves. The white community fled en masse back to Portugal, amputating most of Angola’s economy. Angola has never recovered from the double blow of civil war and settler exodus.
Civil War in 1975
The inability of three egotistical Angolan leaders to agree on power sharing or elections was the proximate cause of the Angolan civil war in 1975. MPLA leader Agostinho Neto, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi, and Holden Roberto (who led a movement called the National Front for the Liberation of Angola [FNLA in Portuguese]—based mainly on the Bakongo ethnic group in the north)—decided to fight it out.
Three Angolan leaders, three white sponsors. The subsequent civil war became more destructive because of the intervention of the Soviets, the Americans, and the South Africans in Angola. The Soviets uncorked a massive arms flow to the MPLA. The Americans’ typical reaction to Soviet arms flows was offering arms to whoever was fighting the Soviet-backed people. It didn’t bother the Americans that one of these fighters they supported, Jonas Savimbi, himself solicited Communist support when he visited Eastern Europe, North Korea, North Vietnam, and China in 1965.26 He stayed in China from July to November 1965, getting guerilla training along with eleven other members of UNITA (later known as the “Chinese eleven”).27 He subsequently incorporated some features of Maoism into his movement, above all a personality cult and a dictatorship of the proletariat. (Savimbi was the proletariat.) In Kissinger’s worldview, American support of the Maoist Savimbi in 1975 was critical to preventing “a massive shift in the foreign policies of many countries” away from alliances with America, which would be “a fundamental threat over time to the security of the United States.28
Communist countries such as China, Romania, and North Korea also supported the third Angolan leader, Holden Roberto. Kissinger nevertheless decided that Roberto’s FNLA was the most “pro-Western faction,” and decided to give most of the covert support to him.29 The FNLA would disappear from the stage of history after losing the civil war, with most of its former supporters joining the MPLA. The American support to UNITA and the FNLA in 1975 was sixty-four million dollars.30 The head of the CIA’s Angola task force, John Stockwell, later admitted the classic Planner’s shortcoming: “The glaring weakness of the program was a lack of information about our allies and about the interior of Angola. We were mounting a major covert action to support two Angolan liberation movements about which we had little reliable information.31 Two consecutive assistant secretaries of state for Africa predicted the failure of covert action in Angola; Kissinger forced them both out of their jobs.32
The MPLA happened to control the capital, Luanda, at the moment that Portugal formally withdrew on November 10, 1975, so they portrayed themselves as the “legitimate” government of Angola, fighting UNITA and FNLA “rebels.” A great many credulous countries around the world bought into this charade and recognized the MPLA as the “government of Angola.”
China withdrew its support of the FNLA once South Africa intervened on the anti-MPLA side. South Africa invaded Angola from Namibia in October 1975, in support of UNITA; Cuba followed up on earlier support for the MPLA by sending troops in November 1975. The FNLA desperately tried to reach the capital before independence, but the MPLA and Cuban forces turned them back using Soviet-supplied rocket launchers known as “Stalin’s Organs.”
News of American covert support for UNITA and the FNLA leaked in late 1975, provoking Congress to pass a law forbidding American military aid to Angolan political factions (the Clark Amendment). The South Africans were unwilling to bear the burden of supporting UNITA alone, and they withdrew.33 UNITA lost the civil war in 1975 and retreated into its rural Ovimbundu bases, to fight another day.
Jonas Savimbi and the Reagan Doctrine
Angola again came into cold war prominence after Reagan became the U.S. president and decided to provide aid to insurgents fighting Soviet-allied regimes (the “Reagan Doctrine”). Reagan’s man on Africa, Chester Crocker, said that aid to Savimbi “would be the African version of the ‘America is back’ message of the Reagan presidency.34 According to this cold war Planner, supplying Savimbi and UNITA with land mines was “standing tall,” giving the Americans a “place where we can achieve victory, a psychological victory.35
In one of the most bizarre episodes of the cold war, the Reagan administration sponsored an organization called Democratic International, which brought together the Contras in Nicaragua, UNITA in Angola, the Islamic mujahedin in Afghanistan, and anti-government rebels in Cambodia.36 Representatives of these disparate groups met in Jamba, Angola, Savimibi’s base, in the summer of 1985. The lack of democratic credentials of these groups was perhaps most extreme for the Cambodian contingent, which had allied itself with the genocidal Khmer Rouge to fight the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian regime.37 None of the other groups could be called excessively democratic, either. Reagan said of the Democratic International in 1988: “there is something in our spirit and history that makes us say
these are our own battles and that those who resist are our brothers and sisters.38
Savimbi was to democracy what Paris Hilton is to chastity. He was tarnished by such documented incidents as: (1) murdering dissidents, including burning alive a couple and their three children; (2) kidnapping foreign aid workers as hostages; (3) using famine as a weapon of war, such as attacking UNICEF and Catholic Relief Services food convoys to drought victims; and (4) establishing the personality cult that demanded total obedience to O Mais Velho (The Eldest One).39
On February 1, 1986, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s representative to the UN, called Savimbi, “One of the few authentic heroes of our time.” Ronald Reagan welcomed Savimbi to the White House in 1986, saying that American support would enable UNITA to win “a victory that electrifies the world and brings great sympathy and assistance from other nations to those struggling for freedom.40
The Reagan administration got Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, allowing military aid to let loose the dogs of war in Angola. Chester Crocker explained the motivation: “Repeal changed the equation we faced. It would send a signal—a useful one—to Moscow, Havana, and Luanda that we had options if they continued to use our diplomacy as a cover for the pursuit of unilateral, military objectives. Now we could threaten to raise the price. Now we had the basis to acquire a stake of our own.41 The price of a stake of our own, Crocker later acknowledged, was a “wrecked Angola,” and the deaths of “an estimated 350,000 Angolans.” But Angolans don’t vote in U.S. elections.
Crocker declared victory when the MPLA and UNITA signed a peace agreement on May 31, 1991: “I knew that we were celebrating the end of an era. Angolans could now begin to shape their own destiny after centuries of foreign domination, living with foreign legacies and foreign conflicts.42