With the 1981 bombing of a Nicaraguan plane in Mexico City--a plane Dunbar-Ortiz herself would have been on if not for a delay--the US-backed Contras (short for los contrarrevolucionarios) launched a major offensive against Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, which the Reagan administration labeled as communist. While her rich political analysis of the US-Nicaraguan relationship bears the mark of a trained historian, Dunbar-Ortiz also writes from her perspective as an intrepid activist who spent months at a time throughout the 1980s in the war-torn country, especially in the remote northeastern region, where the Indigenous Miskitu people were relentlessly assailed and nearly wiped out by CIA-trained Contra mercenaries. She makes painfully clear the connections between what many US Americans today remember only vaguely as the Iran-Contra "affair" and ongoing US aggression in the Americas, the Middle East, and around the world--connections made even more explicit in a new afterword written for this edition.

A compelling, important, and sobering story on its own, Blood on the Border offers a deeply informed, closely observed, and heartfelt view of history in the making.