Adolfo Calero was a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair, the scandal that rocked Washington in the 1980s by uncovering the Reagan Administration’s attempts to circumvent a congressional ban on aid to the so-called Contra (ie, counter-revolutionary) rebels fighting against the left-wing Sandinista Government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.
In testimony to a congressional inquiry in 1987, Calero, a prominent Contra leader, gave details of how funding was covertly channelled to his Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN), the largest of several Contra factions, in its campaign to overthrow Ortega, who had seized power in 1979, after a long military campaign against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. Reagan’s advisers decided that Ortega was a communist, and the Administration threw its weight behind the right-wing uprisings against him that dragged on inconclusively for many years. Ortega was eventually unseated by democratic means, in elections in 1990 that carried some of the former rebels to positions of influence in the government of President Violeta Chamorro, the widow of a newspaper editor who had been murdered, probably on the orders of Somoza.
Calero was a leading Contra lobbyist in Washington, and he continued his efforts to secure financial backing for his cause after Congress imposed a ban on aid to the Contras in 1984. His evidence to the subsequent congressional investigation described in detail the complex mechanisms whereby the US Administration contrived to keep funds flowing to the Nicaraguan rebels, whom they saw as bulwarks against Soviet and Cuban attempts to subvert Central America, strategically located in the US’s vulnerable “back yard”.
Most of the cash that reached Calero’s FDN appears to have come from the Saudi Arabian royal family, the US’s fiercely anti-communist ally in the Middle East. But Calero claimed not to concern himself with such details: he told the congressional inquiry into the Iran-Contra affair that he did not care where the money came from as long as it arrived and could be used to bring down Ortega.
To that end he set up a web of secret bank accounts and front organisations to receive private funding after Congress had made clear that it would cut off aid to the rebels. This amounted to some $32 million between July 1984 and March 1985, he told the inquiry. The money, which was used to buy weapons and supplies, was deposited in monthly instalments in an account in the Cayman Islands, the British overseas territory. Some of the cash came from the secret sale of weapons to Iran, in an effort to secure the release of US hostages held by Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon. These machinations brought Calero into contact with arms suppliers who had been senior officers in the US Armed Forces, and notably with the enigmatic figure of Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, an employee of the National Security Council, who was subsequently dismissed from the NSC for his role in the Iran-Contra affair.
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Adolfo Calero Portocarrero was born in the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, in 1931. His wealthy father, Adolfo Calero Orozco, was a prominent figure in Managua literary circles. The younger Calero attended two universities in the US, and became active in both business and conservative politics when he returned to Nicaragua, fired with determination to promote American ideas of freedom and democracy in a country long inured to de facto rule. He was said to have begun supplying intelligence to the CIA in the early 1960s, and he later became involved in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship, which had run Nicaragua for decades. He was briefly imprisoned in 1978, just before the victory of the Sandinista revolution, but by that time Calero was the manager of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Managua, and he had no truck with the Sandinista guerrillas.
Calero stayed on during the early years of the Ortega Government, until, like many other conservative opponents of Somoza, he become disillusioned with Ortega, who was showing dictatorial tendencies of his own, and he went into exile in the US in 1982. He said later: “When Somoza was driven from our country, we had a right to expect that our dreams of democracy would be fulfilled. Instead, we got a Soviet totalitarian regime, an oppressive dictatorship operated by the Soviet Union and its proxy, Cuba.”
In Florida Calero became a front man for the CIA’s operations against Ortega, as political head of the FDN, the largest of a number of fractious Contra armed groups, which claimed to have 22,000 men in arms in its heyday. But by 1988, after the civil war, waged from bases in neighbouring Honduras and Costa Rica, had claimed thousands of lives, Calero had become convinced that the Sandinistas could not be defeated by military means. He agreed to a truce that led eventually to an accord under which the Sandinistas promised to hold free elections in return for a Contra undertaking to demobilise their forces. The Sandinistas kept their word, and in 1990 they were defeated by a broad-based, multi-party alliance led by Violeta Chamorro.
That was the signal for Calero to return to Nicaragua, where he opened a law practice, remained active in Conservative Party politics and published his memoirs of the Contra war in 2011. By that time Daniel Ortega had long since returned to power, winning the 2006 elections and a controversial second term in November last year.
Adolfo Calero was married to María Ernestina Lacayo, a member of another prominent Nicaraguan family, in 1957. The couple had one son (who died in 1994) and one daughter.
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Adolfo Calero Portocarrero, Nicaraguan politician and Contra leader, was born on December 22, 1931. He died on June 2, 2012, aged 80