Abandoning Central America
Where’s the Left’s Central American altruism?

Back during the Reagan years, few things so exercised self-styled idealists of the left as the fate of Central America. They bewailed its civil wars, and the way its governments allied with the U.S. were supposedly autocratic and abusive. When “Sandalistas” — the archetypical Birkenstock-wearing friends of Nicaragua’s left-wing government — urged people to “think globally, act locally,” they were mostly thinking of Central America.