Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...President of Nicaragua last week challenged the President of Costa Rica to meet at the border and duel to the death with pistols. "If he hates me, then why not settle it this way?" grumbled Nicaragua's Anastasio ("Tacho'') Somoza, who claims to be the best shot in his tough, U.S. Marine-trained Gnardia National. "He's crazier than a goat in the midsummer sun," replied Costa Rica's José ("Pepe") Figueres. an M.I.T.-trained coffee planter...
...Nicaragua (pop. 1,200,000) is the more or less contented plantation of Dictator Somoza, who owns perhaps one-tenth of the country's best farm land. Somoza escaped a Costa Rica-born assassination plot just in time to provide airbases for the planes that won the anti-Communist revolution in Guatemala last June. He stood accused last week of trying to do as much for rebel Costa Ricans...
...pulling back, under a dictator, from the brink of a revolution that threatened when no candidate got a majority in a three-way election (TIME, Dec. 20). Thus distracted, Honduras let some of last week's invaders of Costa Rica gather there and move on to Nicaragua...
...Managua, Teodoro Picado, the Costa Rican President that Figueres toppled in 1948 and since then the ward of Nicaragua's President Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza, readily admitted that the attackers were headed by his son Teodoro Jr., a 1951 graduate of West Point. It was an open secret that anti-Figueres expatriates had been training on Somoza's roomy estates for months. Geography indicated, moreover, that the air raiders came from one of Nicaragua's bases. For the record, however, Somoza emphatically denied...
Dishwashing & Diplomacy. Costa Rica went to war with zooming spirits to fight what Figueres called "the unhappy mercenaries from Nicaragua." Boy Scouts took over traffic direction to set the cops free, and the Civil Guard freely handed out Mausers and officers' commissions (instead of pay) to the volunteers. The President's U.S. -born wife Karen lent a hand with the dishwashing at the general staff headquarters mess, and President Figueres himself broadcast a heads-up message to the people: "We don't scare with the splattering of bullets...