Word: somozaism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...THESE EVENTS point up the dwindling U.S. influence in an area where it once enjoyed nearly complete control through complaisant leaders. But U.S. withdrawal from its traditional position supporting Somoza, even though dictated by the determination of Nicaraguan rebels, is a fundamental step in the right direction, a basic prerequisite to reestablishing the trust of a people whose skepticism of U.S. motives towards its country runs in the blood, and with good reason...
...Nicaraguans, Somoza represented the U.S. economic exploitation which has overshadowed Nicaragua since the U.S. raced the U.K. for transition rights in the 1830s, and which continues today. Nicaraguans threw their own President, Jose Zelaya, out of office in 1909, because he had stirred up U.S. hostility when he told the U.S. that it would have to stop elsewhere for a site for the canal it planned to build. Zelaya refused to sign a treaty which he felt was unfairly advantageous...
Since then, U.S. businessmen have managed to make do by exploiting Nicaragua's gold mines and controlling its benking industry. All brought to you through the courtesy of the Somoza government, which made exploitation easy. When things got hot, he declared all nine opposition parties illegal, including a tiny band of radicals who called themselves Sandinistas, and had their members arrested and tortured...