Word: somoza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...goner," said President Anastasio Somoza to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Whelan the night Somoza was shot down by a 27-year-old gunman (TIME, Oct. 1). "They got me this time, Tommy," he added. Rushed from Nicaragua to the Canal Zone, the 60-year-old strongman withstood a four-hour bullet-removing operation and later a windpipe incision to ease his labored breathing. But he never fully regained consciousness in the U.S.-owned Gorgas Hospital. Late last week, just seven days after the shooting, he began to sink fast. A few hours later, as he had foreseen, Tacho Somoza...
...White House Acts. At 1 a.m. U.S. Ambassador Thomas Whelan, a poker-playing personal friend of Somoza, got the news and urgently notified Washington. The White House moved fast. A radio flash to the Panama Canal Zone awakened U.S. doctors, ordered them to fly to Nicaragua. A U.S. helicopter took off to whisk the wounded President back to Managua, the Nicaraguan capital, at first light. Then President Eisenhower, who met Somoza at last July's conference of Presidents in Panama, sent off another plane from Washington carrying Major General Leonard D. Heaton, commanding officer at Walter Reed Hospital...
...bullets hit Somoza in the right forearm and broke it. Two others lodged painfully in his right shoulder and right thigh. The fourth, Dr. Heaton found, was the most serious: it had entered through the upper right thigh and stopped at the base of the spine. The doctor's recommendation was an operation at the Canal Zone's famed Gorgas Hospital. At 3 a.m. a blue ambulance crept through the lonely, moonlit streets of Managua. Only four hours after Heaton's Constellation reached Managua, it was headed toward Panama with Somoza, his wife, and the task force...
...that hinted at an obsession for martyrdom. In a piece of literary criticism written ten days before for the León Cronista, López Pérez said: "Immortality is the aim of life and of glorious death." His acquaintances said that he grumbled incessantly against President Somoza. His act was patently suicidal, and his motive may well have been an itch for self-glorification...
...Nicaraguan Cabinet declared a state of siege, but no sign of revolution appeared to make the shooting seem like part of a large plot. Instead, Somoza's elder son Luis, President of Congress, smoothly took on his father's powers, with the complete support of the chief of the Guardia Nacional (army), Anastasio Somoza...