Word: somoza
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Wanton Waste. The politics-minded committee called the wartime work a "wanton waste of the taxpayers' money." It cited "flagrant" overpayments to contractors, and a wasteful detour in Nicaragua so that the highway might pass property owned by Dictator Anastasio Somoza. It condemned the poor coordination between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Public Roads Administration. In some places in Guatemala, a junketing subcommittee had found, the road was so rough that pigs wore shoes to protect their trotters...
When Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza forcibly knocked over the Government of his too-independent successor, President Leonardo Argüello (TIME, June 9), the U.S., along with the other nations of the hemisphere, was presented with a neat dilemma. To recognize Somoza's puppet regime would be to condone an irresponsible and undemocratic coup. To refuse to recognize him would mean a departure from the general diplomatic practice of recognizing any government that is clearly in power and that promises to live up to its international obligations...
What optimists now hoped was that international disapproval might goad Somoza into new elections, and that the elections would be honest...
...Then Somoza changed his mind. At the head of 25 men he appeared at the Palacio de Comunicaciones, seized the telephone and telegraph wires. With a radio microphone in one hand to instruct his single tank crew and a telephone in the other to demand surrender, Somoza sent out his troops. By 3 o'clock in the morning he had Congress in session; Congress declared argüello "mentally incompetent." Then Somoza went up the hill, awoke the President, told him he was through. Somoza had won his cheapest victory...
...might turn out to be his most costly. Nicaraguan resistance is becoming more insistent. The resistance is not the formless anger of ragged peasants, but the pocketbook hate of ranchers and businessmen who have seen Somoza muscle into their territory. And after such a bald usurpation of power, Somoza has few friends in the Governments of sister American republics...