Word: moncada
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Those were the years when the U.S. Marines were trying to keep Nicaragua's rival Liberals and Conservatives from using machetes on each other.* In the turmoil a Liberal general named José Moncada rose to the top. He found Tacho's bilingual blarney useful. When Henry Stimson came down to arrange the deal that made Moncada President in 1928, Tacho acted as interpreter. By then Tacho was on the upgrade. "I was lucky," he says. From the start, he knew how to make the most of this luck...
Dancing Partner. Once Moncada sent him out with $75,000 to pay off people whose property had been damaged by the rampaging campaigns of the famed revolutionary Augusto Sandino. Moncada, hearing that most of the money was going into Tacho's pockets, called him back. "Listen, Tacho," said Moncada, "you are not even a thief; you are a pickpocket. Get out of here." Somoza landed on his feet, became a consul in Costa Rica. Soon he was back in Managua, as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs...
After the Marines left, Sandino came down from the mountains to make peace with Moncada's successor, President Juan Bautista Sacasa. Sacasa, worried about Tacho's growing power, decided to cultivate Sandino as a counterforce. On the night of Feb. 21, 1934, he asked him to dinner in the presidential palace overlooking Managua. Somoza spent the evening at a party in the Guardia's barracks...
Subsecretary Somoza's slick, smiling, kinetic personality won over U.S. Minister Matthew Elting Hanna. His graceful dancing entranced Mrs. Hanna. The Americans pushed Tacho's fortunes, were gratified when President Moncada put him at the head of the National Guard. In good time, Tacho used the National Guard to liquidate his most formidable rival: Augusto Sandino, the pint-sized, ferocious patriot whose ragged guerrillas never yielded to the U.S. Marines. In 1936, Tacho took the Presidency for himself in a phony election, won immediate U.S. recognition...
...some ways, mostly personal, Somoza is a more attractive character than his visible opponents. Some of them fed at his trough until recently. Now that they have left him, they find his excesses hard to stomach. Old Jose Moncada, lately in retirement, is credited with saying: "While I was President, they called me a thief. Alongside this man I am an angel...