The CIA armed contra rebels who deliberately attacked civilian schools and clinics

Evidence

The United States has also had a hand, mainly through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in supporting terrorist activities by insurgents serving as proxy terrorists. This was especially the case in Latin America, where the CIA orchestrated covert operations designed to curb the spread of leftist regimes in the wake of Castro’s successful 1959 revolution in Cuba. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, officials in the Reagan administration secretly and illegally sold arms to Iran with the long-term goal of freeing American hostages who had been captured by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. They then diverted funds from the weapons sales to support a guerilla war against the leftist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The CIA trained and armed the right-wing rebels, known as contras, who conducted terrorist activities designed to undermine public support for the leftist Sandinista regime. The contras targeted schools, health clinics, agricultural cooperatives, and other public services. The contra leader Horacio Arce described the strategy: “We attack a lot of schools, health centers, and those sorts of things. … We have tried to make it so that the Nicaraguan government cannot provide social services for the peasants, cannot develop its project… . [T]hat’s the idea” (Erlich, 2010). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2109

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the moral disengagement theme — state-sponsored proxy terrorism as a mechanism for doing harm at a distance, which parallels how institutions disengage moral agency.
• SEED: An article angle on how democracies outsource morally dubious violence to proxy actors, using the contra case as the exemplar of moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility.