The_Info_Web/60 - PLACES/COUNTRIES/Nicaragua.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	location
Nicaragua	Nicaragua	2026-05-17	2026-10-26	Country	Geography Country CentralAmerica ColdWar ContraWar DarkAllianceInvestigation	Central American nation ruled by the Somoza family dictatorship for forty-six years until the Sandinista revolution in 1979, after which it became the battleground for the CIA-backed Contra war.	Central America

Nicaragua is a Central America nation that was ruled by the Anastasio Somoza family dictatorship for forty-six years until the Sandinistas revolution in July 1979.¹ The country became the focal point of the Contra war and the Dark Alliance drug trafficking network.²

Customs Loans, 1911 to 1912

Brown Brothers Harriman and J. & W. Seligman & Co. made a temporary loan of $1,500,000 to the Republic under an agreement of September 1, 1911, nominated Clifford D. Ham as Collector General of Customs, and on August 2, 1912 wrote the Secretary of State that the entire capital stock of the National Bank of Nicaragua was pledged to them and that "the Bank is under our management and control."³ At the time of the nomination, Ham was Surveyor of the Port of Manila, in the Philippine Islands. The bankers wrote that he had been "recommended to us as a person qualified for the position and worthy of our confidence."⁴ Secretary of State Philander C. Knox approved the nomination on November 11, 1911 and stated that the approval "must not in any wise be understood as indicating that the Government of the United States will lend any other or further good offices in the protection of the American citizens parties to this contract than it would accord to any legitimate American enterprise abroad."⁵ A 1914 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing printed a list of five agreements between the Republic and the two houses, the National Bank of Nicaragua, the Ferrocarril del Pacifico de Nicaragua and the United States Mortgage and Trust Company.⁶ James Brown, senior partner of Brown Brothers & Co., signed 1912 Nicaraguan banknotes as "Presidente" of the Banco Nacional de Nicaragua; Thatcher M. Brown wrote that the loans were paid off, principal and interest, in 1924.⁷

In his annual message of December 3, 1912, William Howard Taft said that "it became necessary to land over 2,000 marines and bluejackets in Nicaragua" during the revolution of that summer, and he recorded "with sorrow the death of seven American marines and bluejackets."⁸ The same message said that the Nicaraguan government had asked the United States to assume the office of protecting American life and property, and that the Senate had not acted on the loan convention of June 1911.⁸

Somoza Era

For the forty-six years the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua, they served as reliable allies of the United States government. Anastasio Somoza personally participated in the Central Intelligence Agency's 1954 overthrow of the Guatemala government, provided the staging base for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, sent troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965, and contributed Nicaraguan forces to Vietnam.¹

The Nicaraguan National Guard served as Somoza's military, police, and intelligence service - a bulwark against anti-American interests that the U.S. had created in the 1930s and trained at Fort Gulick, Fort Benning, and Fort Leavenworth.

Revolution and Aftermath

Sandinista forces overthrew Somoza on July 17, 1979. Somoza and his inner circle fled to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. The National Guard collapsed within hours. National Guard officers who escaped across Nicaragua's borders into El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica formed the nucleus of the Contras, reassembled by the CIA starting in 1980 under Enrique Bermudez.¹

Contra War

Nicaragua became the battleground for a proxy war between the U.S.-backed Contras and the Sandinista government.² The Contra factions - including the FDN based in Honduras and ARDE and UDN-FARN based in Costa Rica - were deeply infiltrated by drug traffickers, including Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon, Marcos Aguado, Horacio Pereira, and others.

Drug Trafficking Hub

The journalist Gary Webb described Norwin Meneses as the Cali Drug Cartel's representative in Nicaragua. Danilo Blandón owned hotels and casinos in the country and partnered with Jairo Meneses in operations there. A 1991 seizure of 764 kilos of cocaine in Nicaragua was linked to Blandón. Meneses was arrested in Managua in 1991 and sentenced to twelve years. Georg Hodel and Gary Webb interviewed him at Tipitapa Prison outside Managua in 1996.¹

Footnotes

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1. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Chapter 1: "A Pretty secret kind of thing" ↩︎

2. Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Seven Stories Press, 1998. Prologue: "It was like they didn't want to know" ↩︎

3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, documents 1482 and 1512. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1482 and https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1512 ↩︎

4. Brown Brothers and Company and J. and W. Seligman and Company to the Secretary of State, New York, November 2, 1911, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, document 1482. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1482 ↩︎

5. Secretary of State P. C. Knox to Brown Brothers and Company and J. and W. Seligman and Company, November 11, 1911, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, Nicaragua, document 1484. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912/d1484 ↩︎

6. Convention between the United States and Nicaragua, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 63d Cong., 2d sess. (1914). https://archive.org/details/conventionbetwee00unitrich ↩︎

7. John A. Kouwenhoven, Partners in Banking (Doubleday, 1968), pp. 189 to 190. https://archive.org/details/partnersinbankinganhistoricalportraitofagreatprivateb ↩︎

8. Taft, annual message to Congress, December 3, 1912, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1912, "Message of the President," pp. XI to XIII. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1912 ↩︎