In the late 1970s, Nicaraguan revolutionaries, known as the National Liberation Front or Sandinistas, had overthrown the tyrannical government of General Anastasio Somoza, a brutal dictator who had suppressed dissent and tortured opponents. President Jimmy Carter, who had originally supported Somoza’s overthrow, halted all aid to Nicaragua in 1980 after the Sandinistas began nationalizing foreign companies and drawing closer to Cuba. In the early years of the Reagan administration, Secretary of State Shultz suggested a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, reflecting the administration’s belief that the Sandinistas were “Soviet proxies” and that the revolution in Nicaragua had been sponsored by Moscow. Rather than invade, Reagan adopted a more indirect but no less violent approach. In 1982 he authorized the CIA to train approximately two thousand guerrilla forces outside the country, known as Contras (Counterrevolutionaries), to overthrow the Sandinista government. Although Reagan praised the Contras as “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” the group consisted of pro-Somoza reactionaries as well as anti-Marxist democrats who blew up bridges and oil dumps, burned crops, and killed civilians. In 1982 Congress, unwilling to support such actions, passed the Boland Amendment, which prohibited direct aid to the Contras, thereby limiting the president’s ability to aid the anti-Sandinista forces.

Proponents of the Boland Amendment drew on the lessons of the Vietnam War. Recalling that President Johnson had manipulated Congress and the public to support intervention in a civil war conducted by guerrillas, supporters of the amendment sought to prevent Reagan from producing another disaster of this kind. Members of the Reagan administration viewed Vietnam differently. They believed that the United States had to restore its honor and credibility following the defeat in Vietnam, especially in fighting Communists in its own backyard. In the face of congressional opposition, Reagan and his advisers came up with a plan that would secretly fund the efforts of their military surrogates in Nicaragua.

Elsewhere in Central America, the Reagan administration supported a corrupt right-wing government in El Salvador that, in an effort to put down an insurgency, sanctioned military death squads and killed forty thousand people during the 1980s. Despite the failings and abuses of the El Salvadoran government, Reagan insisted that Communist regimes in Nicaragua and Cuba were behind the Salvadoran insurgents. The United States sent more than $5 billion in aid to El Salvador and trained its military leaders to combat guerrilla forces.

While many Americans supported Reagan’s strong anti-Communist stance, others opposed to the president’s policy mobilized protests. Marches, rallies, and teach-ins were organized in cities and college campuses nationwide. U.S.-sponsored wars also drove many people to flee their dangerous, poverty-stricken countries and seek asylum in the United States. Between 1984 and 1990, 45,000 Salvadorans and 9,500 Guatemalans applied for asylum in the United States, but because the United States supported the established governments in those two nations, nearly all requests for refugee status were denied. Approximately five hundred American churches and synagogues established a sanctuary movement to provide safe haven for those fleeing Central American civil wars. Other Americans, especially in California and Texas, began to view the influx of refugees from Central America with alarm. This immigration, both legal and illegal, meant an increase in medical and educational costs for state and local communities, which taxpayers considered a burden.

In addition to financing secret wars in Central America, on October 25, 1983, Reagan sent 7,000 marines to invade the tiny 133-square-mile Caribbean island of Grenada. After a coup toppled the leftist government of Maurice Bishop, who had received Cuban and Soviet aid, the United States stepped in, ostensibly to protect American medical school students in Grenada from political instability following the coup. A swift victory in Grenada boosted Reagan’s popularity and installed a pro-American government.

In Reagan’s worldview, securing human rights was less important than fighting communism. Thus Reagan supported repressive governments in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa without reservations. Reagan embraced the distinction made by his ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, between non-Communist “authoritarian” nations, which were acceptable, and Communist “totalitarian” regimes, which were not. The difference remained fuzzy in practice, particularly in South Africa, where a white totalitarian government ruled over the black majority. Reagan considered the South African government an example of an acceptable authoritarianism, even though it practiced apartheid (white supremacy and racial separation) and torture. The fact that the South African Communist Party had joined the fight against apartheid reinforced Reagan’s desire to support the white-minority, anti-Communist government. Interested in the country’s vast mineral wealth, Reagan opted for what he called “constructive engagement” with South Africa, meaning that the United States would maintain and expand trade with a nation whose government had been condemned by the United Nations for its racist practices. The Reagan administration did so even as protesters across the United States and the world spoke out against South Africa’s repressive white-minority government and campaigned for divestment of public and corporate funds from South African companies.

As early as 1977, the Reverend Louis Sullivan, an African American clergyman from Philadelphia and a board member of General Motors, convinced the company, the largest employer of blacks in South Africa, to treat its employees equally and in a nonsegregated manner. Supporters of this approach campaigned to persuade other companies doing business in South Africa to adopt what became known as the Sullivan Principles and to get investment funds to withdraw their portfolios from the apartheid nation. In the mid-1980s, students on U.S. college campuses nationwide joined the divestment movement by building “shantytowns” to protest the squalid, segregated living conditions of black South Africans. They also conducted demonstrations to demand that universities remove investments in South Africa from their endowment funds. Antiapartheid forces staged similar protests against municipal and state governments. At the same time, numerous African American officials and their allies conducted sit-ins at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C. These efforts were largely successful. Between 1984 and 1988, the number of colleges and universities divesting either partially or fully from South Africa tripled from 53 to 155. In 1986 Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which prohibited new trade and investment in South Africa. President Reagan vetoed it, but in testimony to the strength of this popular grassroots movement, Congress overrode the president’s veto.