Word: somozaism
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...offensive began, government forces reeled before the onslaughts of the Sandinistas and their allies, disaffected urban teen-agers known as los muchachos. Firing from barricades built of street paving stones (made by a company that Somoza controls), the guerrillas forced small government outposts in La Trinidad and San Isidro to surrender. A major battle shaped up in León, Nicaragua's second largest city (pop. 44,000), where the Sandinistas surrounded a national guard installation, drew up a captured armored car and prepared to storm the garrison...
...Somoza's forces fought back with savage efficiency. His strategy was to let the Sandinistas take temporary control of the cities, "using up their ammunition first," then to deliver a devastating counterpunch of firepower. Such tactics made a huge toll of innocent noncombatants inevitable. In the bloodiest fighting of a civil war that has simmered along for 18 months, many thousands died, most of them civilians. Carrying white flags, at least 200,000 refugees poured out of the barrios in Managua, León, Masaya and Matagaipa to escape the indiscriminate raids by government T-33 jets, rocket-equipped...
...violence touched off a mass exodus of foreign nationals. Somoza permitted a U.S. Air Force transport plane to land at the airstrip near his seaside villa at Montelimar, 40 miles from the capital, and provided an escort of national guardsmen, reinforced by armed U.S. Marines, to protect fleeing Americans. By week's end about 290 American citizens had departed on four evacuation flights...
...strike, thousands of Managuans turned to looting. People were seen carrying away sides of beef, cases of rum, huge bags of coffee and flour. "We will exchange what we have for what we need later," one woman looter ex plained. "We had nothing before." Swigging bottles of stolen beer, Somoza's guardsmen tried to direct the looters toward stores owned by opponents of the regime. Other shopkeepers simply threw their doors open to the pillagers, hoping that they could at least dissuade the mobs from destroying expensive equipment. Said a poultry dealer after the pillagers stole more than...
...mounting carnage served only to strengthen Somoza's determination to hang onto the presidency. "I have no reason to abandon my constitutional post," he declared from his bunker last week. The uprising, Somoza maintained, "was the work of Cuba and Panama," which he claimed had armed and trained the guerrillas. To prove the point, Somoza brandished the identification papers of three Panamanians, including a former Deputy Minister of Health, who was said to have been slain last week by national guardsmen near the Costa Rican border...