Blood on the Border : A Memoir of the Contra War

By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Book Overview

Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as "a force of nature on the page and off." That force is fully present in Blood on the Border, the third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Dunbar-Ortiz's firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua.

With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City--a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay--the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra "affair" and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world--connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition.

A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806153849
• ISBN13: 9780806153841
• Release Date: August 2016
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Casts a Light on Indigenous Politics

"US officials railed against the Sandinistas for nationalizing property, but they had never criticized the dictator Somoza for personally owning much of the country..." Blood on the Border is Roxanne Dunbar-Oritz's maddening search for identity amidst the life-or-death Sandinista Revolution and collapsing social movements in the U.S. during the Ronald Reagan `80s. As a witness to many great crimes against humanity, the author deftly balances between her own struggles with alcohol, humanizing the Nicaraguan people (especially the misunderstood and maligned indigenous Miskitu people) and recounting harrowing run-ins with "the other side" in the form of CIA agents, State Department officials, mercenary guns-for-hire, Christian fundamentalists and Somozistas. This is a well-written, important contribution to the history of the Sandinista Revolution and the U.S. Left in the 1980s. Specifically, its unique focus on the role of indigenous people in a wider social revolution is invaluable. The misunderstandings with the Sadinistatas and manipulation of the Miskitu and other Atlantic Coast Indians by the U.S./Contras is telling of the present war on Iraq's ethnic conflict. The author's post-Maoist politics shine through her actions--including her obsession with the United Nations--and leads one to wonder if her tremendous knowledge, talents and convictions might have been more helpful had they not brought her to UN conference after conference? The better we understand Nicaragua and the United States' dirty war against the Sandinistas, the better we will be poised to confront today's imperialism. After all, the author observes, from then-U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte to then-Reagan advisor Donald Rumsfeld, it's a lot of the same cretins running the show today.

great for the college classroom

I used this book for my U.S. history course on American Foreign Policy. I loved the book, but more importantly my students enjoyed it. It was a great source for debate within the class. I used it in conjunction with Smedly Butlers "War is a Racket" These two books gave the class a different perspective on U.S. intervention. The importance is that Blood on the Border puts a human toll on U.S. action abroad. Great book for the classroom if you are a teacher and you want to stir critical thinking in your students this is the book for you

Radical Okie does it again!

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has a remarkable ability to tell her personal story in a broader historical context--the mark, I suppose, of a good memoir. This is her third such volume. The first, RED DIRT: GROWING UP OKIE, is still my favorite, but that may just be in part because I have the experience of trying to be a radical in Oklahoma. That book traces her life from poor, part Native American roots to 60s radicalism (including wonderful stories about her Wobbly--IWW, International Workers of the World--grandfather. The second volume, OUTLAW WOMAN: A MEMOIR OF THE WAR YEARS, 1960-1975, focused on Dunbar-Ortiz's involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the feminist movement. Now, she has completed the series (but not, hopefully, the peace and justice work she so obviously passionately believes in) with BLOOD ON THE BORDER: A MEMOIR OF THE CONTRA WAR. Dunbar-Ortiz is brutally honest about the problems in her life, including relationships and alcoholism. She is also brutally honest about the role of US imperialism in Latin America. Just one of the revelations for me was the recycling of figures from this era such as Negroponte by the current Bush. This is a very interesting, even important book. Read it. And weep? For Dunbar-Ortiz sounds a bit pessimistic at the end, one might say. "Nicaragua was the last great hope for national liberation movements to succeed in breaking free from imperialism," she writes. But she continues (and concludes the book): "The historical process of nation building that occcurred with the rise of capitalism in Western Europe has reached its limits. Had the West, particularly the United States, nourished the struggles of peoples for the development of authentically independent nations out of the ruins of colonialism in Africa and imperialism in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Caribbean, perhaps the dream of a United Nations could have become a reality. Today, that dream does not appear possible, making indigenous movements ever more fundamental to humanity in reaching a different conclusion than a nuclear war or environmental disaster." Is there hope there? I hope so....

Contra-indications

A Review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Blood on the Border Contraindications By RON JACOBS To many of us in the United States, the US contra war against the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s seems like very long ago. Since the CIA-manufactured defeat of the revolutionary government in Managua--a defeat that included mercenary war, media manipulations, CIA and Special Forces covert ops, drug-running and arms smuggling by people paid by the US government, and a sham election staged by Washington--the US has militarily invaded Iraq twice, Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. A mere three months before that sham election, Washington invaded and overthrew the Panamanian government as if warning Nicaraguans what was in store for them should they vote against the US-sponsored candidates. In addition, Washington has instigated and assisted regime change in El Salvador, several countries in the former Soviet Bloc, and a few nations in Latin America, to name just a few regions of the world that come immediately to mind. Besides these "successes", Washington has failed to overthrow the Bolivarian government in Venezuela or the governments of its eternal enemies--Cuba and northern Korea. One can be certain, however, that these attempts are ongoing. On top of all this, Washington has forced so-called free trade agreements on most countries around the world, especially those in what global capitalists like to call the developing word. These agreements are designed, of course, to maintain Washington and Wall Street's neocolonial hold. Given all of this, it is good to see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's latest effort Blood on the Border hit the bookstores. Her memoir of her experience as a leftist indigenous activist during the contra wars in Nicaragua is not only a well-told tale of those times, it is a primer on US intentions in the 21st century. Expansion and control, by whatever means necessary. The manipulation of local distrusts, both ethnic and religious; and the transformation of those mistrusts into armed conflict. All with the only real beneficiary being the economic and political masters in Washington. Dunbar-Ortiz places the struggle of the Miskito people on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast firmly in the greater context of the struggles of all the western hemisphere's indigenous nations to determine their own destinies and maintain their own cultures and ways of life. As she details in Blood on the Border, her acknowledgment of her own native heritage and its relationship to her involvement in leftist revolutionary movements in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s put her in a unique position to understand the situation faced by both sides in the debate in Nicaragua between the revolutionary Sandinista government and the indigenous nations within Nicaragua's borders. In addition, her role lobbying various United Nations commissions dealing with indigenous issues gave her a mobility and a degree of independence that enabled her to hear from many sides of the debate

fighting (against) the contra war

Rarely does the personal and the political blend so seamlessly as Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz recounts her tireless efforts to oppose US imperialism during and after Nicaragua's Contra War of the 1980s. Along the way she introduces a fascinating cast of characters that range from Rigoberta Menchú, Bella Abzug and Bianca Jagger to Oliver North and the Moonies. Dunbar Ortiz's life and work in this period foreshadow today's struggles over issues as diverse as terrorism, governmental press manipulation, engaged scholarship, activism, alcoholism and even identity politics. This captivating blend of personal memoir and political/intellectual history could not be more timely.