Inspired by national liberation ideology such as that which led to the Cuban Revolution, the Revolutions in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador share some key features in common. All three of these Central American revolutions were anti-imperialist calls for social justice. They all presented serious challenges to the United States, which enjoyed a hegemonic power throughout the region. American foreign policy depended upon the very regimes the people of Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador endeavored to overcome. Nicaragua kick-started the revolutionary fervor among its neighbors when in 1979 the Sandinista National Liberation Front toppled the Somoza family's imperialist dictatorship. The Sandinista revolution was "an extraordinary event that reverberated throughout Latin America and the United States," (Keen and Haynes 438). While this caused "gloom and disarray" among American politicians, the Sandinistas "heartened Latin American revolutionaries,...

The Sandinistas proposed a viable system in which private enterprise could still flourish within a socialist government structure.
El Salvador's target in the revolution was a "military-civilian junta" that was supported by the United States, which gave as much as $4.5 billion dollars to fight the rebels (Keen and Haynes 439). As in Nicaragua, the Salvadorian revolutionaries encountered a formidable enemy. The Frente Democratico Revolutionario and the Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion National (FLMN) did not win as decisive a victory as the Sandinistas did but nevertheless helped transform the social, economic,…