Making the economy scream: Us economic sanctions against Sandinista Nicaragua

From 1981 to 1990, the USA engaged in a concerted and multifaceted campaign to overthrow the government of Nicaragua-a policy that was highly controversial domestically and culminated in the Iran-contra scandal. In the history of US attempts to destabilise other governments, the effort against Nicaragua stands out as one of the most intensive and long-lasting. The covert paramilitary dimension of Washington's policy is well known and quite comprehensively documented, in part because of the investigations resulting from the Iran-contra affair. The economic dimension of the policy has received less attention, even though it was arguably more effective. The 'contra' war failed to achieve its aim of overthrowing the Sandinista government by military means, whereas economic sanctions, combined with the costs of the war, succeeded in devastating the economy. Amid widespread privation, the Sandinistas' popular support fell severely, and they were soundly defeated in the 1990 elections. The weight of scholarly opinion holds that economic sanctions are not an effective foreign policy instrument. Even among scholars who have recently tried to rehabilitate sanctions, most agree that they can only be successful under a limited set of circumstances. Hufbauer, Schott and Elliot, for example, offer a list of nine conditions that determine whether or not sanctions will bring about the desired policy change by the target country. One of their conclusions, interestingly, is that the use of economic sanctions by the USA to destabilise governments in Latin America has been more successful historically than the use of economic sanctions for various other aims. The example of Nicaragua is a case in point.