Word: zelaya
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...patrol of the crack "General Somoza" battalion surrounded the village of Varilla in Nicaragua's Zelaya province. With the troops were several jueces de mesta (police magistrates). The official charge that brought them there: five of Varilla's campesino families had aided antigovernment guerrillas. The soldiers shot, bayoneted or strangled four men, eleven women and 29 children. After dumping the bodies in an unmarked pit, the magistrates divided the villagers' land among themselves...
...parish priest who had been in Honduras only eight months, and Ivan Betancourt, 35, of Colombia. Now a special investigating commission set up as a result of church pressure has reported that they too were victims of the ranchers' rampage. The commission has charged José Manuel Zelaya (a wealthy landowner), the provincial army commander and two accomplices with murdering the priests...
...investigators' account is grisly indeed. Cypher had been walking into Juticalpa with a man who needed medical treatment. Soldiers arrested and jailed the priest, then took him to Zelaya's ranch. Betancourt was arrested while driving into town and also taken to the ranch. Both priests were interrogated, beaten and shot to death, and their mutilated bodies were thrown down a 120-ft. well in front of Zelaya's hacienda. Seven other victims were found in the well-five who were presumed to be peasant activists, plus two innocent women visitors who had been riding...