Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

In July 1979, left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua overthrew the dictator Anastasio Somoza, a US ally. Officials in the upper echelons of the State Department, the CIA, and the Defense Department wondered whether El Salvador might fall next. The view in Washington was that the military needed American support for the center to hold in El Salvador.