Winning the November 1988 presidential election against Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis, Reagan's two-term vice president George H. W. Bush assumed the presidency in late January 1989. Bush's foreign policy team might have had a reputation (a considerable chunk of it self-described in subsequent memoirs) as pragmatic, but it was effectively as hawkish as the Reagan administration in its global outlook, especially vis-à-vis Moscow. In the words of Bush and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft: “The biggest thorn in U.S.-Soviet relations remained Central America, where the Soviets still supported their client Nicaragua and, through it and Cuba, the guerrillas in El Salvador.…[While] the Soviets may have ceased supplying weapons, the Cubans and East Germans had stepped in to replace them. When challenged, the Soviets complained that Castro was beyond their control.”

Despite these concerns, however, the incoming Bush team was eager to bolster the White House's relations with Capitol Hill over Central America policy. For incoming Secretary of State James Baker, the ongoing war in Central America was kryptonite to domestic politics and an “obstacle to the continued growth of democracy in all of Latin America.…Without doubt, it was my first priority.” To these ends, Bush's Central America policy emphasized pragmatism and compromise over conflict and principle. The new administration meant “the ball [was] back in Washington's court, in part because key Central American leaders [believed] that Bush [would] give more serious support than Ronald Reagan to negotiated solutions to their decade-old crisis.” At this time it was really Nicaragua as opposed to policy in El Salvador that was the true political thorn for the Bush administration's “Central America” policy. For instance, an article in the New York Times published shortly after Bush's election in 1988, titled “Bush Aides Speak of New Policy of Diplomacy in Central America,” homed in on engagement in Nicaragua, with no mention of El Salvador.

“Merited Serious Consideration”

Having spent two terms as Reagan's vice president, Bush was well versed in the evolution of policy in El Salvador.

In the early morning of January 10, 1978, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a prominent Nicaraguan political figure and head of the opposition newspaper La Prensa, was driving in Managua when a green Toyota truck suddenly swerved in front of him. Two men leaped out of the truck and fired shotgun blasts at Chamorro's vehicle, then jumped into a waiting car and sped away. Chamorro was rushed to a nearby hospital but died on the way. Nicaragua's strongman, Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza, the second son of the Somoza who killed the nationalist guerrilla Sandino and seized power in the early 1930s, claimed that the assassination had been perpetrated by opposition members themselves to implicate the increasingly despised regime.

Few Nicaraguans believed this version of the story. Instead, they blamed Somoza for the extrajudicial killing, and their eagerness to get rid of the dynastic dictatorship increased significantly. In the aftermath of Chamorro's public funeral, youth in cities across the country tossed homemade bombs at military jeeps and shot at the Nicaraguan National Guard (Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua) posts with hunting rifles. In their first coordinated anti-Somoza move, business leaders called a national strike demanding that Chamorro's killers be found and tried. Chamorro's death became the spark for the conflagration that sealed Somoza's dramatic downfall and initiated a Marxist revolution in Nicaragua.

Many focos were attempted in Latin America during the 1960s and ’70s, from Guatemala to Venezuela and down to Bolivia and Argentina, but almost all failed at the hands of counterinsurgent forces, often trained and funded by Washington. Despite this trend, the Sandinistas took inspiration from the Cuban foco thesis that a small group of highly dedicated insurgents could spark a triumphant national revolution. Given this historical context, the revolution was deeply influential for Marxist guerrillas operating in the jungles and mountains across the region – most notably in El Salvador and Guatemala – who witnessed the Sandinistas’ rapid and total victory over what was long believed to be an impregnable Somoza regime.