The insane true story of a government-backed army that went rogue.
In 1979, a popular revolution in Nicaragua toppled a US-backed dictator. The leftist Sandinistas took power, promising a new future.
The US government, deep in the Cold War, panicked. They saw Nicaragua as another 'Cuba'—a potential Soviet ally in their own backyard.
A rebel force formed to fight the new Sandinista government. They were a mixed group of former soldiers, farmers, and disillusioned revolutionaries. They called themselves the 'Contras', short for counter-revolutionaries.
US President Ronald Reagan saw the Contras as 'freedom fighters'. In 1981, he secretly authorized the CIA to arm, train, and fund them.
From hidden bases in neighboring countries, the Contras launched a guerrilla war. They attacked farms, clinics, and schools, aiming to destabilize the new government.
While Reagan called them the 'moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers', human rights groups documented widespread atrocities by the Contras, including torture and executions of civilians.
Alarmed by the brutality, the US Congress passed the Boland Amendment. It explicitly banned all US government funding for the Contras. The secret war was supposed to be over.
A secret group inside the White House, led by a marine named Oliver North, refused to let the Contras die. They created a plan that reads like a spy thriller.
The plan had two parts. First, the US secretly sold millions of dollars in weapons to its enemy, Iran, in hopes of freeing American hostages held in Lebanon.
Second, they illegally diverted the profits from those arms sales. The money went straight into funding the Contras in Nicaragua, completely bypassing Congress and US law.
The story got even darker. Reports emerged that to fund their war, some Contras partnered with drug traffickers, smuggling cocaine into the United States.
An explosive 1990s newspaper series, 'Dark Alliance', alleged that this Contra-linked cocaine helped fuel the devastating crack epidemic in American inner cities, with the CIA allegedly turning a blind eye.
This wasn't a game. The decade-long war cost over 30,000 Nicaraguan lives. The nation's economy was left in ruins, and its society was deeply fractured.
As the Cold War thawed and the scandals grew, US support vanished. In a shock 1990 election, the war-weary Nicaraguan people voted the Sandinistas out of power.
The war officially ended. The Contras disarmed. But peace didn't heal the deep scars of a generation lost to a conflict fueled by foreign powers.
The Contra story is a stark lesson in unintended consequences. It reveals the hidden machinery of geopolitics and how the secret wars of superpowers are paid for with the lives of ordinary people.
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