Word: somoza
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...elevated Mexico into the ranks of what National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "the regional influentials," with an increasingly activist foreign policy. Last spring Mexico led the opposition that defeated a U.S. plan for an inter-American peace-keeping force to intervene in the uprising against Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza Debayle; instead of supporting Washington's effort to find a compromise solution, Mexico broke relations with the dictator and recognized the revolutionary junta that soon overthrew...
...with a battery-powered bullhorn and three Red Sox banners. "You can't come up with winners all the time...It's been a great year for the Red Sox...It's been a great year for the Red Sox..." And it's been a great year for Anastasio Somoza...
...policy. Support for many of these regimes is widely accepted as necessary in a divided and dangerous world. Since the height of the cold war, American policymakers have been saying of one right-wing despot or another, as Franklin Roosevelt is supposed to have said of Somoza's dictatorial father "Tacho" in the late 1930s, & "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch...
...spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses...
Carter Administration officials vehemently reject Kissinger's complaint that they overthrew Somoza. The Sandinistas did that themselves. All the U.S. did was to administer a diplomatic coup de grâce in order to end the civil war. To preserve the status quo in Iran or Nicaragua-i.e., keep the Shah or Somoza in power-would probably have required direct military intervention, with G.I.s fighting alongside the Shah's imperial troops and Somoza's national guard. Even then, the Islamic and Sandinista revolutions might well have triumphed, leaving American prestige and strategic interests far more badly...