Word: somozaism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...green fatigues and black berets, the uniform of the National Guard training school, drew up in trucks. "Make way. Here comes el Hombre," snapped one of the soldiers as he ran to a side entrance and opened a path in the crowd. Bystanders expected to see General Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza, Latin America's most notorious strongman. But the soldiers, as it soon became clear, were not National Guardsmen at all. They were commandos of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a leftist guerrilla organization dedicated to the overthrow of the feudalistic Somoza dynasty. They were about to launch...
...Deputies was under way. The session, dealing with taxes, was being covered by 24 reporters. "Suddenly we heard shooting coming from outside," Journalist Luis Manuel Martinez recalled later. Martinez, a Cuban exile and a well-known antiCommunist, regularly covers the legislature for Novedades, the official newspaper of the Somoza regime. "A few minutes later, a man dressed in a uniform walked into the middle of the room carrying a submachine gun. Without warning, he fired into the ceiling and shouted: 'Everyone on the floor!' We all dived down. We could see there were eight other armed men and one woman...
...especially worried about the regime of Nicaraguan Strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle, who is using torture to combat leftist guerrillas. Pérez has proposed an economic boycott against Somoza. According to a U.S. official, Carter told Pérez the U.S. is "not going to take actions that are going to get us in a position of bringing about the downfall of a leader of a country." But Carter did call for an investigation of the situation in Nicaragua by the United Nations or the Organization of American States...
...much different election that occurred last week in neighboring Nicaragua. Instead of crowds dancing in the streets, there were sullen troops guarding polls from which Nicaraguans chose to stay away in droves. The election, which was for municipal offices, was the setting for a grim confrontation between President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, 52, and an odd but increasingly potent anti-Somoza coupling of radical guerrillas of the Sandinista movement and conservative Nicaraguan businessmen. Together the groups intend to bring Somoza down and end 42 years of dictatorial Somoza family rule...
Though anti-Somoza forces in Nicaragua have long been active, the agitation against the third in the line of family dictators increased dramatically last month following the still unexplained murder of La Prensa Editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a longtime Somoza foe. In protest, business groups launched an employers' strike, and they and other dissidents urged voters to boycott the elections. No fewer than 52 candidates pulled out of the campaign, and only a third of Nicaragua's 700,000 voters cast ballots. Somoza's candidates won, but the extent of the boycott was one more sign that...