The Alliance for Progress on the Doubtful Strait

Abstract

This chapter starts by outlining the origins of the Alliance for Progress in Latin American ideas and political networks. It discusses the earliest version of the Alliance and how they promoted drastic political and economic change as an antidote to the spreading of a Cuban revolutionary model. US planners originally hoped to overturn the Nicaraguan government after fostering regime change in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, building on the efforts of Latin America's anticommunist democratic movement. When these initiatives faltered, Nicaragua became a key site for new programs to manage political and economic development built around the Central American Common Market (CACM). The chapter then assesses the implications of the promotion of regional development to regime change and analyzes how US programs work to integrate Nicaraguan elites by using community and regional development programs to win Conservative support for the Liberal-controlled central government. The chapter then looks at the impact of the election of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and the 1967 massacre in Managua and how it led many elite Nicaraguans to turn to the more radical politics promoted by the Cuba-inspired Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN).