From Publishers Weekly: In 1979, the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua was overthrown and replaced by the radical regime of the Sandinistas. Almost immediately the Sandinistas themselves faced armed rebellion from a group that became known as the Contras. Supporters as well as detractors assumed the Contras to be merely a U.S.-funded mercenary force of former soldiers of the Somoza era. Brown, senior liaison to the Contras for the State Department from 1987 to 1990 and now a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, contends the Contra uprising was primarily a peasant rebellion among the long-neglected and discriminated-against indigenous people of Nicaragua's Segovian highlands, or as one of Brown's interviewees put it, "a whole bunch of really pissed off peasants."

From the Introduction by Timothy C. Brown, “A Whole Bunch of Really Pissed-Off Peasants.”

“… at the height of the controversy, the Contras were regularly maligned as being no more than a mercenary gang of former Guardia soldier thugs of Nicaragua’s odious Somoza dictatorship, hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under orders from reactionary American President Ronald Reagan to fight the popular Sandinista Revolution. In reality, more than 80 percent of the Contras were highland peasants and the remainder were tribal Indians or Black Creoles trying to defend themselves against what they saw as an attempt to destroy their ways of life.”

“In public, President Ronald Reagan called the Contras Freedom Fighters, but in private, even Reagan and his insiders apparently shared the darker vision of the Contras. Even though the CIA spent about $250 million for covert military aid to the Contras and worked with them daily for almost a decade, it now seems evident that they never really understood who the Contras were….”

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