![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In December 1981, Nicaragua’s Sandinista government forcibly resettled some 8,500 Miskito Indians, killing dozens and displacing thousands in a controversy known as la Navidad Roja – the Red Christmas. Two starkly contrasting narratives exist around this episode: one which viewed the affair as a domestic one driven by longstanding ethnic tensions, and another which saw a CIA plot behind the violence. This article explores the chasm between those narratives and traces the breakdown in the FSLN–Miskito relations in 1981, ultimately showing how both indigenous action and Latin American state interventions played an understudied role at the onset of the Nicaraguan Civil War.
Notes
1 ‘Acusan al líder Sandinista de genocidio y crímenes contra la humanidad,’ El País (Spain), 15 October 2006.
2 See, for instance, Nicaraguan historian Frances Kinloch Tijerino’s description of the Red Christmas and the motivations behind the FSLN’s policy: ‘Military logic led the FSLN to commit new political mistakes as well as human rights abuses. On 1 January 1982, the Sandinista Army began a massive displacement of the Miskito communities that lived along the bank of the Coco River, and translated some 8,500 Indians to Tasba Pri, a network of government settlements located 80 km south of the [Honduran] border.’ Historia de Nicaragua, (Managua: Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 2012), 323.
3 American historian, feminist, and indigenous rights activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has a chapter titled ‘Red Christmas’ in her memoir of the time she spent in Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution. She writes, ‘That is what the CIA called it, Operation Red Christmas, and by that they meant bloody. They meant the red of fire and of the blood caused by gunfire, not the red of fireworks in celebration of Navidad. Red Christmas was the opening salvo of the US-organised and -financed Contra war to oust the Sandinistas.’ Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 117; Ariel Armony refers to ‘a major CIA-sponsored counterrevolutionary separatist plan called Operation Red Christmas. The plan sought to provoke a state of emergency in northern Nicaragua so as to isolate the Miskito population of the Atlantic coast from the rest of the nation and promote a general insurrection against the regime.’ Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 1977–1984, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1997), 137. Similar versions can be found in Dario Moreno, The Struggle for Peace in Central America, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994), 27 and Mary Vanderlaan, Revolution and Foreign Policy in Nicaragua, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 103. An entry in the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Conflicts Since WWII suggests that the CIA’s Operation Red Christmas would also count on a US naval blockade and air support once the separatist government was established in the Atlantic port city of Puerto Cabezas, (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 477.
4 A recent article goes further and explores the impact of US indigenous rights activists, who often entered into an unlikely alliance with the Reagan administration on the Miskito issue, in shaping FSLN-indigenous relations later on in the 1980s; James Jenkins, ‘The Indian Wing: Nicaraguan Indians, Native American Activists, and US Foreign Policy’, in Beyond the Eagle’s Shadow: New Histories of Latin America’s Cold War, eds. Virginia Garrard Burnett, Mark Atwood and Julio Moreno, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2013), 175–200.
5 The best study is offered by anthropologist Chuck Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskito Indians and the Nicaraguan States, 1894–1987, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). For a political scientist’s take, see Carlos Vilas, State, Class, and Ethnicity in Nicaragua: Capitalist Modernization and Revolutionary Change on the Atlantic Coast, (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1989).
6 Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
7 In November 1981, President Ronald Reagan approved National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 17 which called on US foreign policy to ‘support democratic forces in Nicaragua’, https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/nsdd-17.pdf. On 1 December 1981, Reagan signed a presidential finding authorising the CIA to build a paramilitary army of Nicaraguan exiles. See William Leogrande, Our Own Backyard: The United States in Central America, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 285.
8 Ernesto Cardenal, a leading figure of the Sandinista Revolution who served as Minister of Culture, recalls this anecdote in his memoir, La Revolución Perdida, (Managua, Nicaragua: Anamá Ediciones, 2013), 569.
9 Stephen Kinzer, Blood of Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 258.
10 ‘FSLN, Declaration of Goals and Programmes’, as reproduced in John Booth, The End and the Beginning: the Nicaraguan Revolution, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), 148.
11 Kinzer, Blood of Brothers, 259.
12 Kinloch, Historia de Nicaragua, 319.
13 The campaigns earned Nicaragua multiple UNESCO Literacy Prizes in the 1980s and 90s. Ulrike Hanemann, ‘Nicaragua’s Literacy Campaign’, paper commissioned for the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2006, Literacy for Life, UNESCO Institute for Education, Hamburg, Germany, March 2005. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001460/146007e.pdf
14 Uriel Vanegas was one of the principal commanders of the armed Miskito forces until 1987. In a 1988 interview with a pro-FSLN journal he explained his reasons for having originally risen up against the Revolution. See ‘Que pasó con la Costa? Hablan Uriel Vanegas y Hazel Law’, Envío, No. 87, September 1988.
15 Sergio Ramírez, Adiós Muchachos: A Memoir of the Sandinista Revolution, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 163. Translated by Stacey Alba Sklar. In his own memoir, Sandinista leader Ernesto Cardenal also laments the impact of racism in the Caribbean: ‘The Revolution was, for those on the Coast, a revolution of españoles. That revolution was foreign to them, and they felt that it was imposed. The slogans and flags that the revolutionaries liked so much, they found repugnant. It wasn’t until later that the revolutionaries understood how to get their message across to them – with song and dance. The Sandinistas committed many mistakes on the Coast due to cultural misunderstanding. The main cause was that at the time of the revolutionary triumph, anthropologists didn’t go to the Caribbean – young soldiers went instead. What’s worse: they came with racist prejudices.’ La Revolución Perdida, 569. For a more sanguine view on the Somoza dynasty’s policies in the Atlantic region, and for an example of how the neglect of the coast could be viewed positively by its inhabitants, see a 2009 State Department cable commenting on recent unrest in the Atlantic Region: ‘During the Somoza era (1934–79) Managua had a “hands off” policy that allowed independent development of the region and a sense of autonomy that is still frequently referred to as “the golden time” because there were plenty of jobs at foreign companies which operated banana plantations, lumber businesses and gold mines. The 1979 Sandinista Revolution irrevocably ended the quasi-independence of the region and brought the Atlantic-Pacific conflict back’, from ‘What’s Really Behind the Mosquito Coast Independence Movement’, US Embassy, Confidential, Cable, Nicaragua, 27 October 2009, Wikileaks (09MANAGUA1051_a).
16 Quoted in Thomas Walker, Nicaragua: The First Five Years, (New York: Praeger, 1985), 211.
17 Cultural Survival, a North American NGO, assisted MISURASATA in their land reform study. For a review of MISURASATA’s land claims and for Cultural Survival’s explanation of why fears of separatism were unfounded, see Theodore MacDonald, ‘Nicaragua: National Development and Atlantic Coast Indians’, Cultural Survival Quarterly, No. 5.3, Summer 1981.
18 Kinzer, 261.
19 ‘Reports of Atlantic Coast Separatism’, CIA, Classification Unknown, Report, 19 December 1980. Nicaragua Collection, Digital National Security Archive (DNSA), ProQuest (1679071984).
20 ‘Quebrado Plan Contra de Fagot’, Barricada, 21 February 1981. All translations from Nicaraguan newspapers my own.
21 ‘Plan Separatista Provoca 8 Muertes en Prinzapolka’, Barricada, 24 February 1981.
22 ‘Vamos a desmantelar conspiración separatista’, Barricada, 24 February 1981.
23 ‘GRN/FSLN Accuses Fagoth of Counter-revolutionary Activities and Being Somoza Informer’, United States Embassy, Nicaragua, Confidential, Cable, 23 February 1981. DNSA, ProQuest (1679048737).
24 ‘GRN Shifts Ground on MISURASATA Affair’, United States Embassy, Nicaragua, Cable, Confidential, 26 February 1981. DNSA, ProQuest (1679051462).
25 ‘FSLN Releases MISURASATA Leader, Steadman Fagoth’, United States Embassy, Nicaragua, Confidential, Cable, 22 April 1981. DNSA, ProQuest (1679071286). Emphasis added.
26 ‘Fagoth traicionó a los Miskitos’, Barricada, 15 May 1981.
27 ‘Even today, after the Atlantic Coast region has experienced mass immigration from the Mestizo-dominated Pacific, the Miskito maintain a compact region with an ethnic territory that transcends the limits of Nicaragua and spills over to the Atlantic Coast of Honduras.’ Wangki Awala: Nuestras Memorias de la Guerra para Vivir en Paz, (Managua: Universidad de las Regiones Autónomas de la Costa Caribe Nicaragüense, 2011).
28 Wangki Awala, 91.
29 ‘Miskito Leaders Hold Press Conference’, United States Embassy, Honduras, Confidential, Cable, 24 July 1981. DNSA, ProQuest (1679071853).
30 ‘Steadman Fagoth Warns Sandinists about Miskito Invasion’, CIA Report, 22 July 1981. Declassified Documents Reference System, (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2009).
31 ‘Nicaraguan Indians Clash with Regime’, New York Times, 18 June 1981. For another example, see ‘Discontent Grows on Nicaragua’s East Coast’, Washington Post, 26 August 1981.
32 ‘Steadman’s Beachhead’, The Guardian, 3 August 1981.
33 The Sandinista Armed Forces later published a detailed list of those skirmishes: ‘Cronología de las agresiones contrarrevolucionarias’, Barricada, 2 February 1982.
34 Jorge Jenkins Molieri, El Desafío Indígena en Nicaragua: El Caso de los Miskitos, (México, DF: Editorial Katún, 1986), 240. The Miskito insurgents, in response to the revenge killing at Leimus, executed 10 Sandinista prisoners they had previously taken in San Carlos. Another notable incident was the kidnapping of a Sandinista health director and her nurse in Bilwaskarma in late December. Mirna Cunningham and Regina Lewis, both of Miskito origin, said they were ‘taken to Honduras, beaten, raped repeatedly with religious singing in the background, then released back into Nicaragua the following day as an example to others working with government programmes.’ Centre for Research and Documentation on the Atlantic Coast (CIDCA), ‘A Policy of Genocide?’ Envío, No. 37, July 1984.
35 Different casualty figures exist for the Leimus massacre. The IACHR simply declared that they had sufficient ‘information to hold that the Government of Nicaragua illegally killed a considerable number of Miskitos in Leimus’, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Part Three: Conclusions and Recommendations, ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights of a Segment of the Nicaraguan Population of Miskito Origin’, 29 November 1983. In his oral history of the Miskito insurgency, Anthropologist Gilles Bataillon puts the figure at 115 deaths and countless incidents of rape; ‘Astros et Cruces: Pratiques et Imaginaries des Premiers Guerilleros Miskitos’, in L'expérience des situations-limites, (Paris: Karthala, 2009), 29–44. Finally, the researchers who organised the Wangki Awala oral history project put the number of Miskito executed at 10–40, 92.
36 Ariel Armony, Argentina, the United States, and the Anti-Communist Crusade in Central America, 136.
37 ‘Navidad Roja traería la intervención’, Barricada, 4 February 1982.
38 ‘Navidad Roja’, El Nuevo Diario, 4 February 1982.
39 ‘En reasentimiento de Tasba Pry, miles de Miskitos vuelven a la vida’, Barricada, 16 February 1982. ‘Atlantic Coast – GRN Unveils Its Plan’, US Embassy, Nicaragua, Confidential, Cable, 16 February 1982. DNSA, ProQuest (1679052528).
40 ‘Reasantemientos, gran esfuerzo humanitario’, Barricada, 19 February 1982. Roughly half of the 40,000 Miskitos that lived on the Nicaraguan side of the border fled and did not begin returning until 1985, Wangki Awala, 92.
41 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), Part Two: Section E, ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights of a Segment of the Nicaraguan Population of Miskito Origin’, 29 November 1983.
42 Part Three: Conclusions and Recommendations. Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Political scientist Thomas Walker mentions the FSLN’s Tasba Pri resettlement but not the violence which presaged that policy in Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003); Carlos Vilas, despite having worked at CIDCA – a research centre concerned with the indigenous populations on the Atlantic Coast – omits the Miskito question entirely in The Sandinista Revolution: National Liberation and Social Transformation in Central America, (New York: Monthly Review, 1986), translated by Judy Butler.
45 Armony, 132.
46 Kinzer, 97.
47 IACHR, Part Two, Section D, ‘Report on the Situation of Human Rights of a Segment of the Nicaraguan Population of Miskito Origins’.
48 Bataillon, ‘Astros et Cruces.’ Also see Gilles Bataillon, Encuesta sobre una guerrilla, 1982–2007, (México, D.F.: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, 2015).
49 The URACCAN researchers explained their findings, with respect to indigenous motivations for joining the armed conflict, as follows: ‘First, each group of motivations contains a series of initial explicit reasonings that moved a participant toward the war option. But aside from the explicit reasons, the participants remember that there were additional new reasons that emerged in the course of the events. Second, everything seems to indicate that there was some dissonance between the leaders and the community members with regards to these motivations. According to the interviews, the motivations for historical grievances predominated in the discourse of the leadership, whereas circumstantial preoccupations dominated the community members.’ Wangki Awala, 22–27.
50 A declassified cable from the US embassy in Managua comments on the FSLN press conference in which the so-called Red Christmas was revealed. The memo does not comment on potential US involvement – moreover, the official speculates that the government’s accusations of a separatist plot were a response to the embassy’s declaration of travel restrictions to the Atlantic Region for US citizens. ‘Operation Red Christmas: A Counterrevolutionary Plot’, US Embassy, Nicaragua, Confidential, Cable, 4 February 1982.
51 This point requires clarification. The CIA had already worked with civil society groups (approved under the Carter administration), but it was not until late November and early December of 1981 that Reagan authorised the CIA to send money to the Nicaraguan exiles (19.5 million dollars) and to create a paramilitary force in conjunction with other governments operating in the region. Leogrande, 285.
52 Interviewed in Roy Gutman, Banana Diplomacy: The Making of American Policy in Nicaragua, 1981–1987, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 150–51.
53 ‘Que pasó con la Costa? Hablan Uriel Vanegas y Hazel Law’, Envío.
54 Quoted in ‘GRN Shifts Ground on MISURASATA Affair’, United States Embassy, Nicaragua, Cable, Confidential, 26 February 1981. DNSA, ProQuest (1679051462). Later in the decade, Cerna referred to ‘Red Christmas’ in a list of US covert operations against the Sandinista government published by the Ministry of the Interior, ‘La Guerra No Declarada’, Managua, Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y de Centroamérica (IHNCA), Archivo Historico, 355.03a. However, Cerna attaches the ‘Red Christmas’ moniker to yet another foreign plot, this time completely unrelated to the Miskitos or even the Northern border with Honduras: ‘At the beginning of 1982 our security organisations managed to uncover a whole conspiracy designed by the Central Intelligence Agency of the US, with ramifications for several countries in Latin America, to dynamite the Managua Refinery as well as the cement factory, under the framework of an operation dubbed “Red Christmas” by the CIA, through which they hoped to sow chaos in the country by carrying out various terrorist activities, including assassination attempts against high-level officials of the Revolutionary Government of the Sandinista Front, as well as the demolition of electrical stations and other strategic targets, in order to destabilise the national economy’, 8.
55 ‘Early Warning of a U.S. Plan to Invade and Occupy the Miskito Indian Region of Nicaragua’, New York Times, 13 November 1983.
56 Bataillon, ‘Astros et Cruces’, 29.
57 Armony, 136.
58 FSLN Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto argued in a press release that news of the crash ‘confirms that Major Leonel Luque Jiménez openly helps the somocista conspirators that are using the Honduran territory with the purpose of assaulting Nicaragua and thereby provoking tensions between the two countries’. “Contubernio al descubierto! Cae avión en que iban Fagoth y militares hondureños”, Barricada, 29 December 1981.
59 Leogrande, 286.
60 Quoted in Banana Diplomacy, 57. According to Gutman, who cited interviews with FDN commanders, as late as 1982 ‘decisions on timing, training, logistics, and targets were made by the Argentines. The Argentines were also the paymasters’. 104–5.
61 Armony, xiii.
62 Ariel Armony, ‘Transnationalizing the Dirty War: Argentina in Central America’, found in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, eds. Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniela Spenser, (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 155.
63 Quote taken from Christopher Dickey’s interview with an Argentine general in With the Contras: a reporter in the wilds of Nicaragua, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 145.
64 For the first two criticisms, see Alex Taylor’s review of Armony’s book in H-LatAM, H-Net Reviews, February 1998. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1728. Recently declassified Carter administration documents pertaining to Argentina’s Dirty War provide examples of how the country’s generals might have used their Central America policies as leverage to discuss other matters with US officials. In a confidential cable to the State Department, the US ambassador in Buenos Aires described a meeting with Argentine General Roberto Eduardo Viola as follows: ‘Throughout the meeting Viola kept telling me his purpose in wanting to see me was to discuss Nicaragua. We did discuss Nicaragua, but I felt that it was only an excuse to discuss multiple other matters.’ AmEmbassy Buenos Aires to Secretary of State, June 1979, https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Argentina-Carter-Reagan-and-Bush-VP-Part-2.pdf.
65 Pastor, Not Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 196.
66 Roy Gutman describes how the Falklands Crisis nearly derailed US cooperation in Central America with the Argentine military. Argentine officials were in disbelief over US support of Great Britain in their crisis, given their military’s extensive work supporting US covert ops in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Banana Diplomacy, 102–106. Armony explains: ‘Because military leaders considered the intervention in Central America to be vital to US policy, they falsely presumed that the United States would remain neutral if Argentina occupied the Falkland Islands.’ ‘Transnationalizing the Dirty War’, 136.
67 Armony, ‘Transnationalizing the Dirty War’, 136.
68 Mexican diplomatic officials reviewed the gradual breakdown in Nicaraguan-Honduran relations in 1980 in an internal memo, ‘Memorandum Para Información Superior 304173’, Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, Tlatelolco, México, III/510(728.3) 81.
69 Pastor, Not Condenmed to Repetition, 195.
70 According to Gutman, US ambassador in Honduras John Negroponte gave Alvarez advance notice of the Reagan administration’s position on the Falklands in order to ensure that operations in Central America were not disrupted. The Honduran General was not pleased: ‘And let me ask you something’, he allegedly said to Negroponte. ‘Who is the next one you betray? Honduras? El Salvador? Guatemala? Costa Rica?’ Banana Diplomacy, 104.
71 ‘The Use and Abuse of the Miskito Indians’, The Washington Post, 28 March 1982.
72 ‘U.N. Envoy Says Nicaragua’s “Assault” on Miskitos is Massive Rights Violation’, Washington Post, 2 March 1982.
73 See President Reagan’s full quote: ‘Well, today freedom-loving people around the world must say: I am a Berliner. I am a Jew in a world still threatened by anti-Semitism. I am an Afghan, and I am a prisoner of the Gulag. I am a refugee in a crowded boat foundering off the coast of Vietnam. I am a Laotian, a Cambodian, a Cuban, and a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua. I, too, am a potential victim of totalitarianism.’ ‘Remarks at a Joint German-American Military Ceremony at Bitburg Air Base in the Federal Republic of Germany’, 5 May 1985.
74 CIA Director William Casey, quoted in Leogrande, 283. For a review of the Sandinistas’ human rights record, see W. Gordon West, ‘The Sandinista Record on Human Rights in Nicaragua’, Droit et Societé, No. 22, 1992: 393–408. While accusations of genocide against the FSLN faded after the end of the Cold War, and while the Red Christmas case was not re-opened by the IACHR, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan militaries are still being prosecuted for their abuses committed while in power. Last year, a Salvadoran judge re-opened an investigation into the massacre perpetrated at El Mozote in 1981, where the US-trained Atlactl battalion massacred more than 800 unarmed villagers, in what that country’s United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission declared to be the worst war crime perpetrated in that country’s civil war (‘El Salvador judge reopens case of 1981 massacre at El Mozote’, The Guardian, 2 October 2016). The Guatemalan Truth Commission, installed as part of the country’s UN-sponsored peace accord in 1996, concluded that the Guatemalan military committed ‘acts of genocide’ against the country’s Maya community as a part of a war in which it tortured, kidnapped, and executed thousands of civilians (‘Guatemalan Army Waged “Genocide”’, New Report Finds, The New York Times, 26 February 1999.) Several Guatemalan military leaders, including former head of state Efraín Rios Montt, are currently on trial for charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
75 Peter Wade describes the passing of the ‘Law on Autonomous Regions of the Atlantic Coast’ in Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 105. For an in-depth analysis, see Marvin Ortega’s study, Nicaraguan Repatriation to Mosquitia, (Georgetown University: Centre for Immigration Policy and Refugee Assistance, 1991).
76 ‘Temen “Navidad Roja” en RAAN’, La Prensa, 29 November 2015. Anthropologist Laura Hobson describes the violent conflict between mestizo peasants and Miskito inhabitants in a recent article, ‘The New Colonisation of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast’, NACLA, 9 September 2016. Armed Miskito groups have sometimes been led by Fagoth, who is presently at odds with the current Sandinista government but until recently worked in President Daniel Ortega’s administration. Since the end of the 1980s civil war he has switched loyalties between the FSLN and various right-wing parties on several occasions.
77 Matthew Connelly, ‘Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence’, The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (June 2000): 742.
78 Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.
79 Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Aaron Moulton, ‘Building their own Cold War in their own backyard: the transnational, international conflicts in the greater Caribbean, 1944–1954’, Cold War History, 15(2), 2015; Bethell and Roxborough, ‘The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America’, in Origins of the Cold War: An International History, eds. Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, (London: Routledge, 2005), 431.
80 Political scientist Deborah Yashar explains the belated emergence of ethnic political debates and mobilisation in Latin America in Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Postliberal Challenge, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Yashar argues that ‘citizenship regimes fundamentally changed in the last third of the twentieth century, with a corresponding, albeit unintentional, consequence of politicising ethnic cleavages in the late twentieth century’. To explain why this phenomenon led to the emergence of indigenous movements in some countries but not others, Yashar points to the importance of transnational networks in providing the mechanisms, capacity, and resources necessary for sustained legal organising. This article provides an example of how the emergence of such transnational links was bound up in Cold War international politics.
81 IACHR Report, Part Three: Conclusions and Recommendations.