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A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era

William I. Robinson
Reviewed by By Abraham F. Lowenthal
Spring 1993
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William I. Robinson
Westview Press
1992
310 pp.
$54.95

Written from a pro-Sandinista perspective, this study documents, analyzes and indicts U.S. involvement in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, in which the Sandinista revolutionary movement lost and accepted its defeat. Arguing against the conventional view that the United States and other international observers assured the fairness of the electoral process, Robinson alleges that the U.S. role--public and private, overt and covert--in fact constituted unwarranted, manipulative interference in Nicaragua's politics.

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