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The United States only got openly involved with two countries in Latin America, Nicaragua and Cuba. There are other countries that the United States got involved with, but that comes later. :) In Cuba, the United States was trying to prevent the Soviets from storing nuclear missiles on missile platforms in Cuba (only 100 miles away from Florida). Having missiles in Cuba was undesirable, because the Soviets could launch missiles to hit any city in the United States. In Nicaragua, the United States acted under the Truman Doctrine to repress the Soviet-backed Sandinista; who were fighting the Somoza family over the assassination of Augusto Cesar Sandino. We backed the Somoza family, led by Anastasio Somoza Garcia, a dictator.

It's important to remember that in this period of American foreign policy, we would support ANY and ALL countries trying to resist Communism, this extended to dictators that claimed to be Anticommunists to secure American support; supporting these dictators would soil our reputation and create the image of evil Americans in countries that we claim to have supported.

Going back to the Latin American issue, the Sandinists were victorious after Jimmy Carter stopped supporting the Somoza family in 1978-9. Even after they started creating an independent government, we chose to prevent them from creating the government they had fought 43 years to create. In addition, we refused to help rebuild Nicaragua and we left the Somoza family's debt of 1.6 billion with the Sandinists.

After all of that, the United States supported the anti-Sandinist regime, the Contras. The Contras were a group of anti-communist paramilitary partisans, whose desire was to overthrow the Sandinists and re-establish a Dictatorship similar to the Somoza's. This Contra organization was strong in countries like Nicaragua (obviously), Honduras, and Belize.

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