Word: nicaragua
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...Managua, Nicaragua is a beautiful...
MANAGUA was never quite as idyllic as the pop hit of the postwar 1940s made it out to be. Until last week, Nicaragua's capital (pop. 400,000) was a city of sharp contrasts: of wood and tin shacks in the crowded downtown slums, of office towers and modern middle-class apartments along Avenida Central, of sprawling homes and haciendas owned by the rich atop the low volcanic hills on the city's outskirts. As Christmas 1972 approached, the main preoccupation of the city's relaxed, resilient and notably hospitable people was the 20th Amateur Baseball World...
...this time, much more was to rock Nicaragua's carefree capital. In less than two hours of violent seismic shocks two days before Christmas the city was virtually destroyed. At least 20,000 people were injured. Perhaps 6,000 or so dead were carted to mass graves and buried under the falling rubble that had killed them in the city's devastated center; many corpses were cut open, doused with gasoline and set afire in the streets where they had fallen, in order to prevent contamination...
...broke out frequently between troops and bands of looters who roamed the savaged city. Emergency hospitals set up to care for quake victims treated at least 32 Managuans for bullet wounds. In a radio broadcast, General Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza, 47, the strongman head of the family that has ruled Nicaragua for more than 30 years, despairingly said that his capital's biggest immediate problem was not hunger or the threat of disease but the "abominable beings" scouring the dead city...
There have been many more tragic earthquakes in this century (see box, page 27). Nonetheless the destruction of a capital, millions of dollars in physical damage and an immeasurable toll in human capacity and aspirations would necessarily have a traumatic impact on Nicaragua, a nation...