With resistance suppressed, the Sandinistas voted out of power, and the collapse of the Soviet Union removing the motive of anticommunism for intervention, the US abandoned war-torn Central America and turned to invading Iraq in 1991. The body count from Reagan’s wars in Central America was horrendous, with sixty-five thousand dead in El Salvador, fifty thousand in Nicaragua, and more than two hundred thousand in Guatemala, the majority rural Mayans.
