Word: somozas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Under the nom de guerre Commander Zero, Pastora became a revolutionary superstar in 1978 after leading a raid on the National Palace that helped topple the Somoza regime a year later. Partly because he was unhappy with the Sandinistas' growing dependence on Moscow, he quit as Vice Minister of Defense and in 1983 launched a guerrilla war against his former comrades. But he rejected CIA pressure to join the main contra faction and was finally forced to quit fighting...
...alternative is Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widow of the venerated Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal, the La Prensa newspaper publisher whose assassination by the right-wing Somoza dictatorship in 1978 touched off the uprising that led to the Sandinistas' elevation to power. Since winning the nomination of the United Nicaraguan Opposition (U.N.O.) coalition last September, she has managed to improve on a thoroughly inept start. But her campaign still lacks both substance and imagination. Dona Violeta does not discuss issues. She appears. She smiles. She presses flesh. She departs. Her stump speeches are long on teary references to her late husband...
They were wrong. After ten years of rule by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.), the misery that marked life for most of the country under Somoza is, if anything, worse. The red and black anniversary valentines that bedeck roadside billboards aptly reflect what has always been the regime's strong suit: romantic rhetoric, not reality. The sole success of the F.S.L.N. is holding on to power, despite an eight-year war by the U.S. and its contra rent-an-army. Says Alfredo Cesar, a former contra director and now an opposition political leader in Managua: "The Sandinistas are good...
Victims of illness or accident who cannot afford treatment outside Nicaragua must rely on scandalously inadequate health care. The leading cause of death among children is diarrhea. Dysentery, malaria, tuberculosis and hepatitis plague communities. Dengue fever, wiped out in Somoza's day, is again a common menace. Malnutrition is a growing killer...
Once welcomed as liberators of a land enslaved in Somoza servitude, the revolutionary F.S.L.N. has proved adept at only one thing: holding on to misused power. -- Leaders of Israel's Labor Party threaten to pull out of the national-unity government. -- By meeting with Botha, South Africa's Mandela gives his blessing to direct talks between blacks and the government...