Editing Mercenary (section)

====Nicaragua====
In 1855, during a civil war in Nicaragua between the Conservatives and Liberals, the latter recruited an American adventurer named [[William Walker (filibuster)|William Walker]] who promised to bring 300 mercenaries to fight for the Liberals.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 97">Axelrod, Alan ''Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies'', Washington: CQ Press, 1989 p. 97 {{ISBN?}}</ref> Through Walker only brought 60 mercenaries with him, to be joined by another 100 Americans together with the Belgian mercenary [[Charles Frederick Henningsen]] who were already in Nicaragua, he was able to defeat the Conservatives at the [[Battle of La Virgen]] on 4 September 1855 and by 13 October, Walker had taken [[Granada, Nicaragua|Grenada]], the Conservative capital.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 97"/> After his victories, Walker became the ''de facto'' dictator of Nicaragua, which many both inside and outside of the country soon started to call "Walkeragua".<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98">Axelrod, Alan ''Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies'', Washington: CQ Press, 1989 p. 98</ref>

At the time, Nicaragua was an extremely important transit point between the [[Western United States|Western]] and [[Eastern United States]]. In the days before the [[Panama Canal]] and the [[first transcontinental railroad]], ships from the Eastern United States would sail up the [[San Juan River (Nicaragua)|San Juan River]] to [[Lake Nicaragua]], where passengers and goods were unloaded at the port of Rivas and then made the short journey via stagecoach to the Pacific coast, to be loaded onto ships that would take them to the west coast of the United States.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 97"/> One of the most important companies of the Nicaraguan stagecoach business was the Accessory Transit Company owned by Commodore [[Cornelius Vanderbilt]] of New York.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> Walker confiscated the Accessory Transit Company's assets in Nicaragua, which he handed over to the Morgan & Garrison company, owned by rivals of Vanderbilt.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> As Vanderbilt happened to be the richest man in the United States, he launched a lobbying campaign against Walker in Washington, D.C., and was able to pressure President Franklin Pierce into withdrawing American recognition of Walker's regime.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/>

Once it was understood that the US government was no longer supporting Walker, Costa Rica invaded Nicaragua with the aim of deposing Walker, whose ambitions were felt to be a threat to all of Central America.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> The Costa Ricans defeated Walker at the [[Battle of Santa Rosa]] and the [[Second Battle of Rivas]].<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> The beleaguered Walker sought to appeal to support in his native South by restoring slavery in Nicaragua, making English the official language, changing the immigration law to favor Americans, and declaring his ultimate intention was to bring Nicaragua into the United States as a [[Slave states and free states|slave state]].<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> By this point, Walker had thoroughly alienated public opinion in Nicaragua while he was besieged in Grenada by a coalition of Guatemalan, Salvadorian, and Costa Rican troops.<ref name="Axelrod, Alan p. 98"/> The decision by Henningsen to burn down Grenada enraged Nicaraguan people and in March 1857, Walker, with his dreams of an empire in tatters, fled Nicaragua.<ref>Axelrod, Alan ''Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies'', Washington: CQ Press, 1989 p. 99</ref>

In the 1980s, one of the Reagan administration's foreign policy was to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government by arming guerrillas known as the Contras. Between 1982 and 1984, Congress passed the three Boland amendments which limited the extent of American aid to the Contra rebels. By the late 1970s, the popularity of magazines such as ''Soldier of Fortune'', which glorified the mercenary subculture, led to the opening of numerous camps in the United States designed to train men to be mercenaries and also to serve as guerrillas in case of a Soviet conquest of the United States.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Burke |first1=Kyle |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=University of North Carolina Pres |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469640747 |pages=149–152}}</ref> The vast majority of the men who trained in these camps were white men who saw para-military training as a "reverse the previous twenty years of American history and take back all the symbolic territory that has been lost" as the possibility of becoming mercenaries gave them "the fantastic possibility of escaping their present lives, being reborn as warrior and remaking the world".<ref name="Burke">{{cite book |last1=Burke |first1=Kyle |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=University of North Carolina Pres |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469640747 |page=151}}</ref>

Owing to the legal problems posed by the Boland amendments, the Reagan administration turned to the self-proclaimed mercenaries to arm and train the Contra guerrillas.<ref name="auto5">{{cite book |last1=Burke |first1=Kyle |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=University of North Carolina Pres |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469640747 |page=152}}</ref> In 1984, the CIA created the Civilian Military Assistance (CMA) group to aid the Contras. The CMA were led by a white supremacist from Alabama named Tom Posey, who like all of the other members of the CMA were graduates of the mercenary training camps.<ref name="auto5"/> [[John Negroponte]], the American ambassador to Honduras, arranged for permission to be given for the CMA to operate from Honduran territory.<ref name="auto5"/> However, the operation collapsed later in 1984 when the Nicaraguans shot down a CMA plane carrying arms to the Contras, killing two Americans.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Burke |first1=Kyle |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=University of North Carolina Pres |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469640747 |pages=152–153}}</ref> [[Sam Hall (diver)|Sam Hall]], a self proclaimed mercenary hero and "counter-terrorist" who joined the CMA entered Nicaragua with the aim of performing sabotage operations.<ref name="auto3">{{cite book |last1=Burke |first1=Kyle |title=Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War |date=2018 |publisher=University of North Carolina Pres |location=Chapel Hill |isbn=978-1469640747 |page=153}}</ref> In 1986, Hall was captured by the Sandinistas, who held him for four months before releasing him under the grounds that he was not a mercenary, but rather a mercenary imposer.<ref name="auto3"/> [[John K. Singlaub]] who worked alongside Hall described him as suffering from a "Walter Mitty type complex".<ref name="auto3"/>