A Call to Conscience: The Anti-Contra War Campaign by Roger Peace (review)

Writing for a wide audience and especially for historians of peace movements, Roger Peace remedies the lacuna in the historical treatment of U.S. grassroots opposition to the U.S.-sponsored Contra War against the Sandinista Revolution, a war that cost the lives of 30,000 Nicaraguans, wounded thousands more, and left some 350,000 internally displaced. Most extant treatments of the Contra War period in the U.S. emphasize congressional debates and media coverage, and to the extent public opinion enters into the discussion at all, up until now it has mostly been through polling data. Peace’s study, in contrast, offers both comprehensive and nuanced treatment of this diverse movement, and his richest sources are his interviews and correspondence with 87 individuals—from both Nicaragua and the United States—who were heavily involved in the movement. The reader will find good coverage of all the better-known players; but because Peace wants to recover the voices of those so often lost to history, the reader will also find coverage of lesser known direct actions and individuals, such as the Oats for Peace campaign, in which activists contracted with Black family-owned farms that were part of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, to provide food to Nicaraguans (under economic blockade), and even the solitary vigil of Grace Gyori outside a Chicago post office every day in the summer of 1985.

Peace skillfully pulls together different strands of what he terms the Anti-Contra War Campaign (ACWC), including the Nicaraguan solidarity campaign that took shape in 1979, the Central America movement that coalesced in 1980 and focused heavily on El Salvador and Guatemala, and the specific campaign against support of the Contras, which formed in 1982. Covering the period 1982 to 1990, Peace foregrounds activities that were “widely promoted and cooperatively undertaken”(5). Sometimes there is a cost to this choice, as the intensity of some of the debates within the movement at the time is not always fully conveyed, and some readers might be tempted to overestimate the ease of coordination among the participants in the movement, but Peace does not elide the complexities of the movement and is honest in delineating both its victories and its limitations, including largely unsuccessful attempts to make the movement more racially diverse. He divides the themes advanced by this heterogeneous movement into seven categories: administrative violations of the law; the Vietnam analogy; the need for diplomacy; the use of terrorist tactics by the Contras; the respect for self-determination; the positive nature of the Sandinista Revolution; and challenges to Cold War ideology. A scan of this list, along with the fact that many participants were acting out of a religious calling and many were not at all religious, quickly reveals the potential fracture lines in the ACWC, but Peace documents ways that the movement, united only by an anti-interventionist stance, was able to hold together for eight years, build impressive transnational networks of solidarity, and achieve many of its goals despite the great potential for fracture and against enormous odds. He attributes this organizational success in large part to the movement’s loose construction and decentralized character, which allowed activists from particular organizations to retain their specific cultural identities and philosophical perspectives and yet cooperate. Peace’s history is a powerful read, and it is recommended for anyone wondering how to build a necessarily diverse resistance movement to the incipient signs of fascism appearing on the horizon in the United States in 2017.