Word: seguridad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stoned Vice President Richard Nixon last spring and rumbled menacingly when their candidate lost a free election in December, the new notion is taking hold. In the squat white building that 16 months ago housed the dreaded cops of ousted Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez' Seguridad National, a branch of the Education Ministry was quietly at work last week. Lavender city buses cruised lazily down Avenida Sucre, where the Nixon limousine was trapped...
Pedro Estrada, 48, had headed the strongman's secret police, the Seguridad National, for five years. Rising from a gumshoe job under an earlier dictator, Estrada perfected the arts of spying, bribing, the third degree and rebellion spotting, and thus made himself an invaluable prop for Perez Jimenez. Caraquefios said that he "sleeps with his eyes open." Widely feared and hated among his own fellow citizens. Estrada ingratiated himself in slangy English with foreigners, especially U.S. citizens. "We have no political prisoners," Estrada liked to explain, "just people caught in terroristic activities...
...worn, jittery and angry, called in reporters. From the head of a huge table, he presented the new Cabinet, including eight high officers and five holdovers. They were, he said glumly, designated "in accord with the feelings of the national armed forces." With the new Cabinet came a new Seguridad chief. Significantly, he was a colonel, which in effect gave the army control of Seguridad. Almost at once, 300 youths surged into downtown Plaza Silencio, staged a window-smashing demonstration for liberty for political prisoners. But even before the demonstration the new Seguridad chief freed the five jailed priests...
...ground forces, was on his way to the President's reception when secret police arrested him. Grabbed at the same time was Colonel Jesús Maria Castro León, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. An agent of the internal spy net, the Seguridad Nacional, posing as an air force officer, had tabbed Colonel Castro León as leader of the plotting airmen, and General Fuentes head army plotter. The arrests did not unduly alarm President Pérez Jiménez. At the reception, strutting and cocky because he had efficiently re-elected himself...
...clouds and buzz the city low across rooftops. "Those crazy cowboys!" remarked a watching Pan American pilot from his poolside deck chair at the Hotel Tamanaco, a mile or two away. In the afternoon, as a more urgently signaled plea for army help, the airmen strafed the palace and Seguridad headquarters, dropped four bombs (only one burst, killing no one). A Vampire, hit, trailed black smoke, landed at a nearby commercial airport...