preview

Effects of the Cold War in Nicaragua Essays

Decent Essays

The Cold War was a period in history right after WWII ended and it ended in 1991, when the USSR broke apart. The conflict was between two types of governments: the communists and the capitalism (democrats). The USSR represented the communist side, while the U.S. represented the democrats. Both countries had nuclear weapons and did not want to fight each other directly because they didn’t want a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), so they fought through other countries, by Proxy Wars. The global tensions in Cold War affected a few countries in a couple of regions, for example Central America. The involvement of the United States aided Nicaragua economically, militarily, and politically.
When Central America got rid of Spanish Colonial …show more content…

BBC, 06 May 2004. Web. 13 May 2014). Since the National Guard didn’t have that many people, they started recruiting farmers who were kicked out because of the new farming system that the Sandinistas started using. The second group was lead by a dissatisfied Sandinistas leader, Eden Pastora. He set up two groups in Honduras called the “contras”, or counter revolutionary forces. Reagan wanted to support contras economically and he stated that quite openly; however, a lot of U.S. citizens did not like that. During that time, in 1985, a war between Iran and Iraq took place. Even though the U.S. publicly supported Iraq, the government also secretly assisted Iran. Among those years Iran asked the United States for help with weaponry. It is illegal to sell weapons to the hostages but Regan still thought it would help him and the U.S. One of the reasons why he did it was because he wanted to take control in the problematic Middle East and selling weapons to Iran would improve the relations with Iran and Lebanon. At the same time Reagan wanted to free the seven hostages that were held by Iranian terrorist and even though he strongly supported the rule of not negotiating with terrorists, he broke the rule by supplying Iran with weapons. After receiving money from Iran, Regan sponsored contras using that money. The United States had also supplied the contras with weapons and equipment. After the clandestine deal between the two countries was published in the

Get Access