Word: somoza
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THIS POEM, WRITTEN by a Nicaraguan woman named Christian Santos de Praslin, recently appeared in a Managua newspaper. Its publication dramatizes the fact that revolution in Nicaragua, a country whose people have long been silent under the oppressive dictatorship of President Anastasio Somoza, is alive and flourishing. Freedom of the press is a relatively new development in this Central American nation of 2.5 million--opposition to the 42-year-old Somoza dynasty has only surfaced in print within the last year, in the wake of President Carter's proclamations about human rights...
...events of the last few months have revealed just how widespread opposition has become to Somoza, whose family exercises virtually absolute control over the political, military and commercial affairs of the country. Outspoken resistance to the regime had traditionally been confined to members of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a 16-year-old underground socialist group named for General Augusto C. Sandino, a Nicaraguan Military commander who fought for the ouster of U.S. Marines from the country in the 1930s. But in recent weeks and months, scores of businessmen, "legal" political groups, journalists, and of course the overwhelming mass...
...point of this widespread effort has come in response to the January 10 machine-gun slaying of the very popular Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the opposition newspaper La Prensa. As news of the murder spread, thousands took to the streets in Managua, burning, looting and angrily chanting "Muera Somoza!" (Die Somoza!). Authorities estimated damages incurred by the rioting at $7 million. In the next few days, a national strike was organized to protest the continued rule of Somoza. The strike lasted 17 days, ending on Feburary 7, during which time three quarters of the country's businesses shut down...
...MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS of February 5 further exposed the pervasiveness of the anti-Somoza consensus. In that election, 52 of the 132 candidates of the Conservative Party, the country's only legal opposition group (characterized by one Nicaraguan national at Harvard as "His Majesty's loyal opposition"), withdrew their candidacy in protest against the regime. And despite reported offers of free food and liquor in return for a pro-Somoza vote, government figures showed that only 143,000 out of 700,000 eligible voters voted...
Chamorro's supporters blamed Somoza for the shooting. They had good cause to suspect him. Ever since the two were eight-year-old schoolboys, Chamorro and Somoza had been enemies. In those days, Somoza told TIME last week, they fought because Chamorro's family paper "kept attacking my dad, and I couldn't stand for that." Dad was Anastasio the elder, who took over the country in 1936. After his assassination in 1956, his son Luis became Jefe, and after Luis' death in 1967, Tacho succeeded him. Those childish schoolyard battles were merely the start...