Word: somozaism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...years Chamorro had been a relentless critic of Strongman Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza and his family, who have ruled the nation for more than four oppressive decades. His death caused a political earthquake in Nicaragua, and his funeral quickly dissolved into a political event. A crowd swelling to 40,000 followed the coffin from the hospital mortuary to Chamorro's home and then to La Prensa's office. The angry marchers moved on to burn a Somoza-owned textile mill and a commercial blood bank that Chamorro had exposed for selling Nicaraguan blood abroad at a lucrative profit. Some...
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...
...objective, then, is to prohibit alliance of anti-communist and anti-Somoza forces that could rob Nicaraguans of what may be the most significant opportunity for social advancement in their history. The FSLN has shown clearly that the armed struggle will continue if Somoza is merely replaced by a military junta, or if any sort of political arrangement is worked out with opponents of the regime which does not include the Sandinista representatives of the mass of dispossessed Nicaraguans...