Word: nicaragua
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Word of Somoza's resignation reached San José at 2:15 a.m. last Tuesday. It was a cause of quiet celebration for the junta, four of whose five members had gathered at the home of Sergio Ramirez Mercado to await the news. With victory seemingly at hand, Nicaragua's new leaders prepared to board two private planes provided by the Costa Rican government. Their triumphant entry into Managua, they announced, would take place "within 24 hours." But that...
...played host to a stream of reporters, blaming "Communist elements" for his ouster. Asked about his fortune, which has been estimated at up to $500 million, the dictator-in-exile allowed that he was worth about $100 million; 80% of his fortune, he claimed, had been left behind in Nicaragua. Before sailing off on a vacation to the Bahamas, Somoza said that he planned, as a private citizen, to carry on the fight against those who ousted him. "I don't feel morally defeated," he said. "I stepped down because of human compassion. I hate to see my people...
...would be hard to imagine a more vivid contrast to strutting President Tacho Somoza than the cool, unflappable man who has taken his place as the dominant figure in Nicaragua's government. Sergio Ramírez Mercado, 36, is a baby-faced intellectual who attracts little attention until he begins to speak, in a soft, nasal voice. But his quiet charisma has enabled the tall (6 ft. 2 in.) writer to win the confidence of all the factions represented on the five-member ruling junta and its 15-member Cabinet, though the ideologies range from the doctrinaire Marxism...
...born in the farming town of Masatepe (pop. 8,000); his parents were loyal members of the pro-Somoza Liberal Party. Ramírez was first exposed to opposition politics as a law student at the National University of Nicaragua in the early 1960s. After graduating, he took an administrative job at the Council of Central American Universities in Costa Rica and seemed to lose contact with the revolutionary movement. He did postgraduate work at the University of Kansas, where he learned English, and taught in West Germany before returning in 1974 to Costa Rica, where he joined the struggle...
...founder of the Somoza dynasty. Instead, with several priests, academics and businessmen, he founded the Group of Twelve, which sought to link the Sandinistas with less radical elements in the opposition to Tacho's government. Last year, for the first time in 14 years, he returned to Nicaragua as a political representative of the Terceristas, one of three rival factions within the Sandinista movement. When the U.S. failed to persuade Somoza to make even modest reforms following last fall's aborted uprising, Ramírez left the country in disgust. For several months he journeyed to South American...