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William
R. Meara. Contra Cross: Insurgency and
Tyranny in Central America, 1979-1980.
Annapolis
,
Maryland
: Naval Institute Press, 2006. ISBN 1-59114-518-X.
16 photos. 2 maps. Notes.
Index. xiv + 168
pages.
Reviewed
by John Darrell Sherwood,
U.S.
Naval Historical Center
Washington
DC
.
____________________________________________________
As the Global War on Terrorism lengthens into a protracted struggle,
most navies around the globe seek to grow their special operations and
counter-insurgency capabilities. These types of activities are often
foreign to the conventional orientation of modern military
establishments. Unconventional warfare depends more on language and
cultural skills than brute force or technology, an unusual skill set for
the American services. While the
U.S.
military have a long history of fighting these types of wars, its
success has been mixed. Contra Cross evaluates the American
performance during recent insurgency wars in
El Salvador
and
Nicaragua
during the 1980s.
The book is part memoir, part analysis. It begins with a chapter on the
author’s experiences working at a Catholic missionary school in
Huehuetenango
,
Guatemala
in the summer of 1979. It was here that Meara
began to gain a “grunt’s eye’ view of Latin American culture and
the deep, underlying social, political, and economic problems confronted
in many of the countries. Two weeks after he departed, a right wing
death squad assassinated one of the school’s teachers, Brother Jim
Miller. This event partially radicalized Meara
and made him deeply suspicious of the government in
Guatemala
at the time. It also spurred him to visit
Nicaragua
, which had just witnessed the victory of the Sandinistas. Meara
traveled to
Managua
with romantic visions of the revolution and left there disillusioned by
the totalitarianism he experienced.
Nicaragua
transformed him from a left-leaning college student to a more
center-oriented future military advisor and diplomat.
Meara’s career with the U.S. Army began at
the age of 17, when he joined the National Guard. In college, he
attended
Officer
Candidate
School
, and decided to become a full-time Special Forces officer soon after
returning from
Nicaragua
. The Special Forces “impressed him” with its combination of
adventure and foreign culture immersion. After completing the “Q”
course and the Foreign Area Officer training program at
Fort
Bragg
, Captain Meara began his first real-world
assignment as a psychological warfare instructor for the El Salvador
Armed Forces (ESAF).
In 1986,
El Salvador
was mired in civil war with the Faribundo Martí
National Liberation Front (FMLN), an umbrella group of five Marxist
organizations trying to overthrow the government. Meara’s
job entailed training his Salvadoran counterparts in Communist ideology,
tactics, and strategies. This role put him in close touch with several
FMLN defectors, whom he invited to his class as guest instructors.
Through these courses, Meara gained a
complex understanding of the institutional culture of ESAF. For example,
he learned that it was just as preoccupied with
Honduras
, an historic enemy, as the FMLN. Furthermore, the Salvadoran
officer corps resembled a social club more than a traditional military
hierarchy. This club-like system fostered tolerance for officers who
failed to perform and bred paranoia within the corps. It also made it
extremely difficult for the U.S. Military Group (MILGRP) to convince the
Salvadoran military to punish human rights violations. In the end,
however,
U.S.
influence did convince the Salvadorans to clean up their act and in 1992,
the FMLN laid down its arms in part because of assurances from the
United States
that it would “keep the Salvadoran military in line.”
The second half of the book covers Meara’s
work as a State Department Liaison Officer to the Contras in 1988 and
1989. In that role, he oversaw United
States Agency for International Development aid to the Honduras-based
Contras and served as a de-facto ambassador to the insurgency during the
waning days of the struggle. Meara shuttled
between the Contra base area at Yamales and
the U.S. Embassy in
Tegucigalpa
, trying to secure adequate humanitarian assistance for the insurgency,
and bridge the cultural gap between the troops in the field and their
foreign benefactors.
As a fluent Spanish speaker with extensive experience in
Latin America
, Meara developed a close rapport with the
Contras, but struggled to maintain emotional distance from the
insurgency. This became particularly challenging towards the end of his
tour when the
U.S.
began to cut off support to the fighters. In the end, Meara
saw the Contras as embattled farmers similar in some respects to
the colonial militia of the American Revolution—poor farmers whose way
of life was threatened by the economic policies of the prevailing
government. Meara had profound respect for
the difficult odds under which they struggled but in the end never
forgot that his primary loyalty lay to the
U.S.
and its policies. Meara’s description of
the isolated situation at Yamales reveals
how easy it is for special operations types to succumb to Joseph
Conrad-like influences of the field and become advocates of the
insurgents as opposed to mere advisors. It takes a very special type of
person to keep these impulses in check.
The main lesson of his book is that only people well-versed in foreign
languages and cultures have any hope of successfully waging insurgency
or counter-insurgency wars in the third world. In order to be effective
in special operations, you need to be able to “curse like a Contra,”
and in this regard
America
is still woefully unprepared, not just in the U.S. Armed Forces but
government-wide. The strength of Meara’s
work is its first-hand look at insurgency and counter-insurgency, and
the author’s nuanced understanding of the local cultures in
El Salvador
and
Nicaragua
. Contra Cross also stands out as one of the few published
accounts of
America
’s struggle against Communism in
Latin America
in the 1980s, and for this reason is important.
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