Contra rebels
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The Contra rebels were the insurgency the Reagan administration backed against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Origins

John Kiriakou sets the sequence out from the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza in the late 1970s and his replacement by the Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega, "Ortega was a communist he called himself a socialist but he was pro-soviet and pro Cuban and received a great deal of aid from both of those countries." Reagan, "absolutely obsessed with Communism", promoted the domino theory and announced support for the Contras in response.

The Contras themselves he describes as "conservatives right-wingers and some cases even fascists or Military Officers who were disgruntled with the with Ortega", who "decided to take to the jungles with American weapons and fight the new communist government." The difficulty was legal: a Democratic-controlled Congress passed an amendment forbidding the government from spending any money to provide them weapons, ammunition or weapon systems, the constraint that produced Iran,Contra.

North and south

The distinction that later decided the Gary Webb affair is that the Contras were not one force. In Kiriakou's telling there were "two separate groups of Contraore rebels. one in the north and one in the south. The US was arming the group in the north. In the south, they were selling cocaine and they were using the money from the cocaine to arm themselves."

The agency's role sits precisely in the gap between the two: "The CIA allowed the trans shshipment of the cocaine through the north and into the United States. So, was it the CIA's cocaine? Not really. Not technically, but the CIA still allowed the cocaine to come into the United States. totally immoral and illegal. It's actually a death penalty case to import large amounts of drugs like that."

Meanwhile the United States was "mining the harbors of uh of managa the capital of Nicaragua to put pressure on the sandinistas" while the fighting continued in the jungle.

See also

- Iran-Contra
- Dark Alliance
- Domino theory
- CIA Drug Facilitation
