Word: somoza
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...President's position swung full circle since he backed the deadweight Shah in the showdown in Iran a few months ago. In an act of rare decisiveness, Carter made it clear to President Anastasio Somoza that despite his appeals, the only aid he could hope for from the U.S. was as a refuge...
...case is that the U.S. participated in negotiations felling the government it had carefully planted there in 1934. That year, as U.S. Marine boats reluctantly pulled away from Mosquito Coast after 25 years of virtual control in the area, a U.S.-educated National Guard remained. That officer, Anastasio, "Tacho" Somoza Garcia, after nearly disposing of Nicaragua's President, established the iron-fisted dictatorship which he passed down to his sons, Luis and Anastasio Somoza Debayle...
...fondness for the militia it trained and assembled, the U.S. negotiated the hardest with Sandinista leaders last week to preserve the National Guard, fearing the radical and Communist persuasion of some members of the Sandinista Liberation Army and ignoring the symbolic ties of the National Guard to Somoza's government. But these attempts were as unsuccessful as appeals to include more conservatives in the forming junta...
...Somoza's greed eventually cost him the support of Nicaragua's business elite. After the 1972 earthquake that leveled Managua and killed 10,000 of its residents, Somoza began moving into areas that the dynasty had previously left untapped. He set up a company that held a monopoly on supplying paving stones for miles of new roads in the capital. Moreover, Tacho and his cronies made killings by selling land to the government that was used for new developments to replace the residential areas that the quake had destroyed...
...Somoza talked of saving Nicaragua from Communism; in fact, he was plundering the country for his own benefit. Among the companies that he controlled was a Mercedes-Benz dealership that sold garbage trucks to Managua's sanitation department. Another firm collected the revenues from the city's parking meters. Such risk-free opportunities, of course, are no longer available to Somoza. But between the assets that he and his mistress brought with them into exile, there could be enough to rebuild his empire all over again, albeit on a lesser scale...