Reagan defended the covert war by saying in 1984: The Nicaraguan people are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon by a dictatorship made all the more dangerous by the unwanted presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet block and radical Arab helpers. He went so far as to call the Contras the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. His moral equivalence were responsible for most of the deaths of the 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the war.