The Third World War: The Untold Story

At the lowest stage of America’s fortunes in early 1984 a Vietnam-style war seemed in process of exploding right across the threshold of America’s southern backdoor. It looked like being a war that the United States would lose and that communist Cuba and Sandinista Nicaragua would win, although Cuba’s and Nicaragua’s own economic experiments were proving an unmitigated disaster for all their peoples. It was a war that started in El Salvador, but then spread also to the four other non-communist countries of Central America — militarist Guatemala and Honduras, troubled Panama, even democratic Costa Rica.

The crisis was made suddenly worse because it seemed that America’s ally, Christian Democrat Venezuela, was going to become embroiled in war with Cuba-leaning Guyana; and there were absurd dangers that all of the important countries of the Caribbean (Trinidad-Tobago, anti-colonialist Grenada, Jamaica) might find themselves to some degree on Guyana’s side.

The crisis was averted in the most unexpected manner; partly because the United States engaged in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Cuba, but also because Venezuela (at first to America’s horror) went Social-Democratic in December of 1983. Thereafter a Venezuelan-Mexican alliance became an important stabilizing force in the region, and in the nick of time brought peace and compromise to it. If it had not, if at this juncture the Caribbean had become a Soviet lake and Central America a Soviet base area, the Western Alliance would almost certainly have gone down in the Third World War.

For all elephants that need to tread delicately in this post-war world, possibly as dangerous and unstable now in 1987 as at any time in living memory, the story carries disturbing lessons. It also carries a message of hope.

As the decade of the 1980s opened, the forces of change in Central America were not all revolutionary or Cuban-supported. There were also moderates and reformists trying both to stop the revolutionary tide and to implement reform in countries that had for generations been oppressed by too few rich families and too many soldiers, and where there were some of the lowest per capita incomes in the world.

To the left of centre among these moderate reformists was the Socialist International, closely related to the social democratic parties in Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico, and influential with groups in El Salvador. It had at one time also been influential with the rulers of Nicaragua, but Sandinista Nicaragua was slipping under communist control. To the right of centre was the Organizacion Democrata Cristiana de America (ODCA), presided over by a Venezuelan (Aristides Calvani) and influential with President Duarte of El Salvador and with several political parties in the Caribbean.

The Cubans and Soviets decided to try to cause trouble for ODCA (ie, El Salvador and Venezuela) first.

Already in 198 °Cuba’s leaders had held a secret meeting with Central American Marxist leaders up country in Nicaragua, to discuss their intended polarization of the region. They could by then celebrate a considerable triumph.

This triumph had been the military victory of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, and the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty.

The United States was completely isolated in its last lukewarm attempt to preserve ‘Somocism without Somoza’. The importance of this event was threefold and to the United States Administration deeply unsettling. It showed that a guerrilla movement in Central America could fight successfully against a US trained, politically demoralized army like Somoza’s National Guard. It brought to power a mainland government in a Central American country that had a strong pro-Cuban faction in its midst. The Sandinistas in Nicaragua, until they turned almost entirely communist, clearly enjoyed wide popular support.

At the 1980 meeting in Nicaragua of rising Marxists the voice was that of Fidel Castro, but the hand belonged to the Soviet Union’s President Brezhnev, who was already propping up Cuba’s ineffective economy to the tune of forty million dollars a week. The Soviets had become attracted during 1980 by the possibility of drawing the United States into a deep trap just outside its southern backdoor, where it could flounder ineffectually while critical events beyond its control unrolled elsewhere.