Violeta Chamorro - Relations With The United States

Relations With The United States

The United States contributed to the 1990 election that brought Violeta Chamorro to power as they allocated $9 million to aid her party and created systems that monitored the electoral process. Additionally, when Chamorro was elected, George H. W. Bush removed the embargo that Ronald Reagan had imposed during Sandinista rule and promised economic aid to the country. Some people in Chamorro’s campaign team were hoping to get $1 billion worth of aid from the United States to help rebuild the country after years of civil war. However, the Bush administration instead gave $300 million to the country in the first year of Chamorro’s presidency, 1990, and $241 million the year after. Given the devastation that Nicaragua had faced, this amount of aid was not enough to make any serious improvement.

Chamorro’s presidency faced decreased US interest to the point that when Chamorro came to the US in April 1991 to ask Congress for more economic aid, few members even showed up to listen to her. Because the Sandinistas were defeated and peace talks were being established, U.S. foreign policy did not treat Nicaragua with as much importance anymore.

In 1992, Senator Jesse Helms worked to cut off financial aid to Nicaragua. Helms stated in his Senate report that the Sandinistas were still controlling much of the Nicaraguan government and suggested that the government replace all former Sandinista officers with ex-contras, replace all judges, and return all US property that was taken from US citizens during the revolution. Chamorro’s administration denied the allegations while still trying to meet Helms’ demands. Helms ended up winning and the US government denied Nicaragua the $104 million that they had been promised for that year. Predictably, the aid cut-off, subsequent freeze, and Helms' demands were put forward in October, the month after Chamorro withdrew the compensation claims associated with the Nicaragua vs. United States verdict.

Read more about this topic:  Violeta Chamorro

Famous quotes containing the words united states, relations with, relations, united and/or states:

    And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    She has problems with separation; he has trouble with unity—problems that make themselves felt in our relationships with our children just as they do in our relations with each other. She pulls for connection; he pushes for separateness. She tends to feel shut out; he tends to feel overwhelmed and intruded upon. It’s one of the reasons why she turns so eagerly to children—especially when they’re very young.
    Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)

    Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.
    Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    Hollywood ... was the place where the United States perpetrated itself as a universal dream and put the dream into mass production.
    Angela Carter (1940–1992)

    Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.
    Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)