Word: somozas
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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...
...guerrillas took their names, tied them up, and began photographing them with a Polaroid camera. When the woman commando asked Martinez his name, she shouted: "Cero! Cero! Martinez is here!" Cero,* later identified by authorities as a "militant" named Eden Pastora, 42, turned to Martinez and said: "If the Somoza forces attack, you will be the first shot...
Elsewhere in the building, other commandos rounded up government employees and officials. Among those caught: Interior Minister José Antonio Mora, his chief assistant, and several relatives of Somoza, including Luis Pallais, publisher of Novedades. Somoza had never bothered to occupy the presidential offices, preferring more secure quarters in his bunker on the grounds of the nearby National Guard training center. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Managua, Miguel Obando y Bravo, and the bishops of León and Granada, who earlier in the month had demanded Somoza's resignation, immediately offered their services as mediators. So did the ambassadors of Costa...
...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...