Somoza and Roosevelt: Good Neighbour diplomacy in Nicaragua, 1933-1945

This detailed study of diplomatic relations between the United States and Nicaragua has one foot firmly planted in the heated polemics of the 1980s, when the recently-overthrown Somoza dictatorship was frequently portrayed as having been a creation of US policy. Andrew Crawley correctly points out that these highly politicised debates were rarely conducted with much regard for the documentary evidence, and poses the important question of ‘what demands can reasonably be made on the history of the good neighbour policy in Nicaragua’ (p. 6). His main achievement is to present a new and more sympathetic interpretation of the role played by Arthur Bliss Lane, the chief of the US mission in Managua between 1933 and 1936. Lane has often been depicted as the man responsible for both the death of the revolutionary leader Augusto Sandino and the rise to power of Anastasio Somoza García, director of the US-sponsored Guardia Nacional. Instead, Crawley presents Lane as a man of honour, who was mortified by the murder of Sandino in 1934 and—against his own instincts—sought to protect the elected presidency of Sacasa against Somoza's insidious manoeuvres. Lane appears, therefore, to have waged a lone struggle to avert the danger of civil war between the opposing factions with no support from the State Department. Crawley's defence of Lane is convincing, but his handling of the broader US influence over Nicaragua, which can only be described as hegemonic, is more awkward. Indeed, much of the book consists of a meditation on the impossibility of US non-interference under the auspices of the ‘Good Neighbour’ policy (which Roosevelt had announced in his 1933 inaugural address). This results in some rather tortuous interpretations of US involvement with the Somoza dictatorship. For instance, we are told that the Roosevelt administration ‘cannot be held ultimately and solely “accountable” for [Somoza’s] presidency and subsequent excesses…however, some measure of responsibility is incontestable’ (p. 60). Elsewhere, it is argued that ‘the sort of government that [Somoza] seemed likely to provide came briefly to represent for American diplomats and strategists the option most likely to serve Washington's interests in changing circumstances’ (p. 120).

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