Somoza and Roosevelt: Good Neighbourn Diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1933-1945

Abstract

Diplomatic history, or as some job descriptions now classify it, “the history of the United States and the world,” has undergone significant changes over the last quarter century, with many historians applying the tools of social and cultural history to America's diplomatic record and others focusing on the archives of other countries to document the impact of the United States. Andrew Crawley's work is an unembarrassed throwback to an earlier era, an account of the policy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration toward Nicaragua based almost exclusively on the State Department's voluminous records. But a traditional approach still has its strengths, and Somoza and Roosevelt is surprisingly enlightening on many issues and raises important questions in trying to understand the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. Crawley's argument is inspired by the view that the history of this era was distorted by the “intense, ideologically charged, international debate” of the 1980s, occasioned by the efforts of the Ronald Reagan administration to overthrow the Sandinista regime (p. 2). Crawley is determined to set the record straight and rejects many of the key assumptions that historians have made about the Good Neighbor period, including the view that “Washington … ordered the murder of Augusto Sandino” and created and consolidated the Anastazio Somoza regime (p. 3). Using a detailed and exacting approach to the diplomatic record, Crawley demonstrates that the Roosevelt administration decided to adopt a rigid anti-interventionist policy and that this approach unintentionally played into the hands of General Somoza and his American-created national guard. In effect, what Crawley argues is that the U.S. decision to change its policy to one of nonintervention, while applauded by much of Latin America, had adverse consequences for Nicaragua. Having constructed the apparatus that led to the election of Juan Sacasa and the creation of the national guard, the new U.S. policy of nonintervention was, in fact, an abdication of American responsibility. In Crawley's view, this situation is clearly revealed in the failed efforts of American officials in Nicaragua, such as that by Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane, to convince Washington to help Sacasa against the machinations of Somoza. Lane's failure only underscores the importance of Somoza's own agency in determining events. Far from being an American puppet, Somoza was very much his own man, and not, as fdr supposedly characterized him, “our S.O.B.”