Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.

Chapter 10 returns to the Nicaraguan context, examining the country’s experience of postwar chronic instability within land tenure. It traces how frequent elite political realignments drove the breakdown of the undermining rules governing land titling. After losing the 1990 elections, the FSLN retained considerable influence and pressured the new UNO government into compromise; however, within the property sector, a new decision-making coalition came to dominate – one comprised of UNO technocrats, US government agencies, and international civil society groups dedicated to resolving the confusion and conflict sown by previous policies. As a result, new procedures to formalize land acquisitions emerged. However, this neoliberal coalition was again unsettled with the return of the FSLN to the political scene through a series of bargains with the ruling Liberal Party in the 2000s. The eventual second period of FSLN rule beginning in 2007 has further reconcentrated land and resulted in politically motivated confiscations.

Chapter 6 turns to the case of Nicaragua’s land tenure institutions, analyzing the emergence of new land titling rules that stoked insecurity and corruption. It argues that the Contra War (1980–1990) remade the rules of agrarian reform and land titling in ways that subverted the state’s ability to regulate property ownership and opened up a property rights gap. As the perceived threat posed by the insurgency deepened and large numbers of peasant producers defected to the rebels’ side, the increasingly narrow and highly centralized FSLN coalition in power implemented a series of alternative rules that permitted the individual and provisional titling of unregistered lands, which generated greater peasant dependence on the incumbent regime but also heightened corruption and conflict.

During the 1960s, the effects of the Cuban Revolution – especially in terms of support for guerrilla warfare against U.S. allies – became all too evident, and the United States pursued interventionism with new vigor. This renewed use of power included economic and diplomatic pressures, veiled threats, covert operations, and even invasion. U.S. officials framed the Cold War as a valiant struggle to protect freedom in the hemisphere, and the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Guatemala epitomized the lengths to which the United States would go to fight what it considered to be security threats. In Latin America, many elites supported U.S. policy, but a growing undercurrent of discontent also emerged, which pushed for negotiated conclusions to war and protested against the treatment of so many citizens caught in the middle. They did not share the notion that leftist or even Marxist governments necessarily constituted a threat to national security and global order. This chapter ends with a discussion of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

The establishment of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua following the overthrow of the US-friendly Somoza regime in 1979 caused considerable alarm in the United States. Chapter 6 analyzes the role of human rights concerns in the battle between the Reagan administration and members of Congress over US policy toward Nicaragua in the 1980s. Fearful of Nicaragua turning into a communist stronghold in Central America, the administration conducted covert operations against the Sandinistas and supported the anti-Sandinista guerillas know as the Contras. Once these activities were revealed, the administration found itself engulfed in a public diplomacy war for congressional and public support. The chapter examines congressional attempts, predominantly by liberal Democrats, to restrict US aid for the Contras through the imposition of the so-called Boland Amendments. Ultimately, restrictions led the administration to undertake illegal actions that resulted in the Iran-Contra Affair. The chapter demonstrates how both the administration and its congressional critics invoked human rights to claim moral authority for their positions on Nicaragua. It argues that the debate over Nicaragua both raised the salience of human rights concerns in the United States and highlighted their ambiguity as it underscored the selectiveness of the administration’s commitment to human rights.