Our own backyard

In this book, William LeoGrande offers the first comprehensive history of U.S. foreign policy toward Central America in the waning years of the Cold War. From the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua and the outbreak of El Salvador's civil war in the late 1970s to the final regional peace settlements negotiated a decade later, he chronicles the dramatic struggles - in Washington and Central America - that shaped the region's destiny. LeoGrande's central argument is that our Central American policy was driven by the specter of Vietnam and conflicting views on how to avoid repeating…