The CIA armed contras to terrorize civilians into withdrawing support for Nicaragua’s government

Evidence

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

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s theme of states using proxy violence and ordinary rationalization of harmful policy
• QUESTION: Bandura frames state proxy terrorism as an example of moral disengagement at institutional scale, yet this chapter excerpt itself stops at description rather than psychosocial analysis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2109