This explanation of Central America's turmoil, however, was not the view of
U.S. policyrnakers. In 1980 the Council for Inter-American Security's Committee
of Santa Fe had published a scathing critique of U.S. Latin American policy under
the Carter administration and had outlined what it hoped would be a blueprint
for U.S. policy in the hemisphere for the incoming Reagan administration. The
committee described U.S. policy in the late 1970s as ineffectually "hoping for the
best" in the face of the dedicated, irrepressible activity of a Soviet-backed Cuba to
win ultimately total hegemony over this region. ²

The Americas are under attack. Latin America, the traditional alliance partner of the
United States, is being penetrated by Soviet Power. The Caribbean rim and basin are
spotted with Soviet surrogates and ringed with socialist states. ³

Although acknowledging domestic causes for the rise of turmoil in Central
America and the Caribbean, the report heavily emphasized external communist
aggression and internal leftist subversion.

The Santa Fe report went on to recommend aggressive U.S. efforts to contain
and roll back the perceived rising tide of communism in the hemisphere, with
particular emphasis on Central America. Policies advocated included beefing up
inter-American military cooperation to isolate nations such as Nicaragua, Cuba,
and Grenada; rejecting the pursuit of U.S.-style democracy; "abandon [ing] and
replac[ing human rights advocacy with] a noninterventionist policy of political
and ethical realism;" ⁴ working with the Catholic church to counter liberation the-
ology; promoting free trade and the development of capitalist free enterprise --
large and small -- through aid and trade policy; fomenting nonleftist, U.S.-
advised "free" labor unions; working with international lending institutions to
force reductions in the role of the state in Latin American economies; and pro-
moting education and propaganda programs to disseminate U.S. ideological val-
ues throughout the region. ⁵

These policies had many sympathizers in the incoming Reagan administration.
Indeed, several of the authors of the Santa Fe report soon became high-level ad-
visers to the new president and helped shape U.S. policy toward Central America
in the early 1980s. However, three years of energetic and highly public efforts to
implement such policies failed to rally either the U.S. public or the U.S. Congress
behind them to President Reagan's satisfaction; in 1983 Reagan appointed a
highly visible presidential commission to study Central America.

In its 1984 report, President Reagan's National Bipartisan Commission on
Central America (the Kissinger Commission) explained the turmoil in Central
America and dramatized its gravity:

Central America is gripped by a profound crisis. That crisis has deep roots in the re-
gion's history . . . The crisis is the product of both indigenous and foreign factors.
Poverty, repression, inequity all were there breeding fear and hate; stirring in a world

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