Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), pp. xi + 374, £27.95 pb.
Similarly, he shows that the introduction of guerrilla warfare tactics in late  and , and the use of Batallones de Lucha Irregular (Unconventional Warfare Battalions, BLIs), helped to secure the Sandinistas’ military victory. But he fails to mention that the BLIs were composed almost entirely of conscripts, and that the use of compulsory military service in these years was one of the Sandinistas’ most divisive and bitterly opposed policies. The second half of the book focuses on events in the United States, and the impact of the FSLN’s advocacy work. Perla provides a series of statistical analyses of coded data. He argues that the FSLN gained considerable ‘standing’ within the US media; and that the FSLN was successful in ensuring that the framing of the Contra conflict in the mainstream media ran counter to the President’s preferred narrative. Working from opinion polls, he then suggests that the periods when this counter-narrative was more prevalent correlate with periods when public opposition to the Contra War was more pronounced. Finally, Perla presents data which demonstrates that members of Congress with larger numbers of solidarity organisations in their districts consistently voted against Contra aid in greater numbers than their peers, arguing that this demonstrates the decisive impact of the Central America solidarity movement. Throughout the book, Perla relies on a comparison between Nicaragua and other cases of ‘rollback’ in the Reagan era: Afghanistan, Cambodia and Angola. He suggests that the fact that Congress consistently supported aid for these other interventions is clear proof that it was the FSLN’s advocacy efforts, and not alternative factors such as Vietnam syndrome, which ensured that Reagan’s intervention in Nicaragua was unsuccessful. Given the centrality of this point to the overall argument, a brief summary of these other cases of intervention would have been welcome, and might have revealed some important differences. In Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia the presence of substantial numbers of foreign troops from Communist countries made US intervention much easier to justify to Congress. Moreover, in both Afghanistan and Angola third countries – Pakistan and South Africa respectively – played a significant role in the intervention, quelling congressional fears about the extent of CIA involvement. In Nicaragua, Argentina was originally meant to play a similar role, a hope that was thwarted as a result of the Falklands War. Arguably, the relative strength of solidarity with Central America was not only the result of activists’ agency. The proximity of the United States and Nicaragua, and the considerable migration that had occurred between the two nations, created far more fertile conditions for the kind of cultural interchange necessary for activism. But these caveats do not detract from the fact that, as Perla shows, the raw unmediated testimony of victims of the Contra War had a considerable impact in the United States, thanks to the countless speaker tours and brigades organised by solidarity activists in Nicaragua and the United States. This book is a very welcome contribution to the scholarship on the Contra War, one that is sure to spark considerable and fruitful debate.