here's some more meat for those of you who bought hurricane trump's campaign promises to focus on our home and forget about mucking about in the affairs of other countries;

A largely ignored story reported by the Lebanese magazine “Ash Shiraa” on November 3, 1986, soon blossomed into a major scandal involving the covert sale of US weapons to the government of Iran and the illegal supply of weapons to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels. The Lebanese magazine was the first to reveal that the Ronald Reagan administration was covertly selling arms to Iran in exchange for the release of seven American hostages by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon.

On November 25, 1986, three weeks after the exposé by “Ash Shiraa,” US Attorney General Edwin Meese announced to a stunned nation that profits from the sale of American weapons to Iran were used to buy and ship weapons to the Contra rebels battling against the socialist government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The covert Reagan administration operation violated at least two laws. The first was breaking a US arms embargo on Iran. The second was a violation of the 1982 congressional Boland Amendment, which prohibited US taxpayers’ funds being used to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. The scandal almost resulted in Congress’s impeachment of Reagan and his vice-president, George H. W. Bush, from office.

Today, in a period of déjà vu, the Donald Trump administration has embarked on a Reaganesque policy of covertly shipping arms to Venezuelan rebels, based in Colombia and Brazil, readying for an insurrection against the government of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela. At the same time, US covert operators have been caught in the act of mounting operations directed at the governments of Haiti and Nicaragua, both members of the increasingly-shrinking Latin American camp of Maduro allies........https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/02/22/trump-contra-war-redux-in-latin-america.html