source: NACLA
Central America occupies a special place in the history of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). During the 1980s, NACLA activists traveled to the isthmus and played an important role in bringing attention to its revolutionary and counterrevolutionary upheavals. The NACLA Report, for its part, covered developments in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador with remarkable depth—not only because of United States intervention and complicity in the violence, but also because revolutionary movements in those countries inspired tremendous optimism among U.S.-based scholars of Latin America. The complicated origins and legacies of that climactic period in Central American history continue to motivate significant research interest.
For most Americans, though, the Cold War in Central America was a historical footnote consisting of two hyphenated words: Iran-Contra. The image conjured is not one of left-wing guerillas, right-wing death squads, or tropical mountain jungles, but rather of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, whose medal-laden uniformed figure adorns the cover of Alan McPherson’s The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy. The actual events in Nicaragua—or Iran, for that matter—and their international implications left a far fainter impression on the American psyche than the domestic political scandal that rocked Washington in the latter half of the 1980s.
For most Americans, the Cold War in Central America was a historical footnote consisting of two hyphenated words: Iran-Contra.
Unfortunately, even that memory is fading. When President Donald Trump was impeached in 2019 for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress—stemming from allegations that he pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee in the following year’s election—Iran-Contra appeared less frequently in public discourse than one might have expected. Watergate, despite occurring a decade earlier and involving crimes arguably less serious than those of Iran-Contra, is a more prominent historical reference for presidential abuse of power in our time.
One reason is the sheer complexity of the Iran-Contra operation and its cover-up. While Watergate could reasonably be summarized as a break-in, the American public—in the words of a journalist McPherson cites—saw Iran-Contra “as the policy equivalent of quantum physics,” too complicated to capture interest beyond specialists.
McPherson’s book thankfully proves otherwise. It is the clearest, most accessible account of the scandal ever written. Leveraging a profound knowledge of existing scholarship as well as a forensic review of the most recently available documentary evidence, he makes a strong case that Iran-Contra matters now more than ever.
Even those who closely studied Central America in the 1980s could use a refresher on the scandal, which, in broad strokes, played out as follows. In hopes of securing the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran’s Islamic Republic, which had come to power via revolution in 1979. At the same time, determined to undermine the left-wing Sandinista government that had seized power that same year in Nicaragua, the administration trained and financed rebels known as the Contras. By around 1985, officials cooked up a scheme to divert profits from the Middle East arms sales to fund the Central American insurgents. This was the “hyphen” in Iran-Contra.
All of this was very illegal, for multiple reasons. For one, the U.S. had banned arms sales to Iran, and Congress had passed laws earlier in the decade prohibiting military aid to the Contras for the purpose of overthrowing the Nicaraguan government. Compounding the illegality was the deception and cover-up that followed, as key officials at the CIA, National Security Council, and Department of Defenses misled investigators and, in several cases, destroyed evidence. The events also raised constitutional questions about the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.
This summary barely scratches the surface of the operation, the crimes committed, and the investigations that followed. No single paragraph can do it justice; a full-volume treatment like The Breach is therefore essential. Thankfully, the story is in capable hands here. McPherson’s prose is punchy, direct, and often wryly humorous; one gets the impression he must be phenomenally engaging in his classes at Temple University.
What makes The Breach successful is McPherson’s decision to focus the sprawling narrative—full of moving parts, characters, and twists—on the scandal’s corrosive effects on American democracy.
What makes The Breach successful is McPherson’s decision to focus the sprawling narrative—full of moving parts, characters, and twists—on the scandal’s corrosive effects on American democracy. Readers don’t need a complicated flow chart to make sense of it all. They just need to remember six democratic standards that McPherson argues the scandal violated.
The first, and perhaps most important, was the separation of powers. When confronted with congressional restrictions on aid to the Contras, or when asked by lawmakers to simply explain what the United States was doing in Central America, Reagan officials repeatedly invoked executive privilege to withhold information on national security grounds. Once the scandal erupted, congressional inquiries pressed officials such as Oliver North into admitting that they had intentionally misled Congress for years. Later, Vice President Dick Cheney would take inspiration from the Reagan administration’s handling of Iran-Contra as he justified the enormous expansion of executive power under President George W. Bush during the War on Terror.
Since much of the operation was outsourced to private individuals and companies, effectively shielding it from public scrutiny, the affair also violated the consent of the governed, another crucial pillar of American democracy. One memorable example in The Breach was the administration’s enlistment of Manucher Ghorbanifar—a shady Iranian businessman with ties to both the Shah’s secret police and the post-revolutionary regime’s intelligence apparatus—as a middleman in arms sales to Iran. Individuals like Ghorbanifar conducted sensitive diplomatic negotiations and committed the U.S. to policies unknown even to senior officials like the Secretary of State, let alone lawmakers tasked with overseeing foreign policy. Ghorbanifar was clearly motivated by profit, not U.S. interests—he once sold $2 million in missile parts to Iran for $8 million.
Active citizen participation in government, a third democratic standard, was also grossly violated. To circumvent restrictions on Contra aid passed by elected lawmakers, the Reagan administration engaged in secret quid pro quo deals with foreign leaders like the Sultan of Brunei, who was asked to donate $10 million to the Contras in exchange for vague future favors. The Sultan’s money never made it to its destination: due to a clerical error by Oliver North’s secretary, it ended up in the wrong Swiss bank account.
Though it was hardly the first time in U.S. history that these democratic principles were violated, Iran-Contra marked a significant leap by establishing a precedent that helped normalize illiberal practices that are now seen as routine.
The Iran-Contra affair also eroded judicial independence due to largely successful efforts by Reagan officials to obstruct justice; truth, because they constantly lied and attacked the press; and the rule of law, since virtually no one was held meaningfully accountable, despite numerous convictions.
Though it was hardly the first time in U.S. history that these democratic principles were violated, Iran-Contra marked a significant leap by establishing a precedent that helped normalize illiberal practices that are now seen as routine. McPherson’s book therefore makes an important contribution to the literature on the erosion of U.S. democracy in recent decades.
Future research might explore how the Iran-Contra story of corruption, foreign intervention, and executive overreach intersected with sweeping transformations in U.S. political economy during the 1980s. This was a period that saw the fall of the New Deal orderand the rise of a new, neoliberal order. Deregulation, privatization, and globalization widened income gaps, concentrated wealth, and hollowed out the middle class. When scholars today seek explanations for political polarization, declining faith in institutions, and the growing appetite for authoritarianism, many emphasize this material and economic dimension. Were political flashpoints like Iran-Contra incidental to this economic shift, or part of the same broader transformation?
Regardless, McPherson’s main point stands: “The Iran-Contra scandal,” he writes, “is an object lesson in how the supposed guardians of democracy—elected officials—can themselves threaten its norms.” Those familiar with Central America’s Cold War history will be well-prepared to absorb the book’s insights. But will others heed the lesson?
