Chile: The Secrets the US Government Continues to Hide

[Judi Lynn]

4. What created a desperate need for a new leader was the decades-old, vicious Somoza dictatorship

which only a revolution could remove.

Here's a quick grab which looks useful. It crams a lot of information into one article, and after you've read it, if you didn't know anything about the 40+ years of hell the Samozas put Nicaraguans through, you definitely will realize why a revolution was unavoidable. The people couldn't live another day under this deadly regime:

The Deaths of Somoza
May 2007 WLT

Don’t think I believe the people erected this statue to me
because I know better than you that I commissioned it myself.
Nor do I pretend to pass into posterity with it
because I know the people will tear it down someday.
Nor do I wish to give myself in life
a monument you would never raise to me in death:
I erected this statue because I knew you would hate it.
—Ernesto Cardenal, “Somoza Unveils the Statue of
Somoza in Somoza Stadium”

Three Somozas ruled Nicaragua in the twentieth century, each a dark persona magnified and diminished by personal infamies and self‑interests that crushed their small, immensely complex nation into a mass of social, economic, and political wreckage it is still sorting out. During a familial succession unique in Latin America, backed by the gangster-like National Guard (Guardia Nacional), essentially a private army, plus dependable financial and military support from the U.S. government, the triad dominated Nicaragua from 1936 to 1979, monopolizing nearly every industry and natural resource in the country, from railroads to the skin trade, while looting it from the peaks of its volcanoes to the dirt floors of its poorest farmers. Only a deep‑rooted, relentless spirit of survival and resistance native to its citizens kept the country (the largest but poorest in Central America) from being swallowed whole.

The Somozas survive in triple vision (a sort of historical triplopia), brought into focus through tales of their rise to power, shared incidents in their overlapping lives, and narratives attempting to disentangle the interconnected nightmares they wrought. Among the most engaging examples of the last is Death of Somoza, by Nicaraguan-Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegría and her husband, writer Darwin Flakoll, a grim but colorful account of the third Somoza’s 1980 assassination in Asunción, Paraguay by a covert squad of Argentine revolutionaries following the triumph of the Nicaraguan revolution.

One of many Alegría‑Flakoll collaborations (which include fiction, nonfiction, and translations), the account is a cross‑genre tour de force that weaves a mesmerizing chronicle from fact, informed speculation, historical documentation, and interviews with participants in the operation. Challenged by subject matter with potential to lapse into rhetoric or political diatribe at any juncture, the authors never allow the story to become superficial or strained, balancing their resources for the sake of a credibility. Ostensibly centered on a particular episode and individual, Anastasio Somoza Debayle (Somoza III), the work incorporates a wide range of background information, including startling details about clandestine operations.

The interviews begin with “Ramón,” commander of the seven‑member squad (four men and three women), revealed to be Enrique Haroldo Gorriarán Merlo, a founder and prominent leader of Argentina’s People’s Revolutionary Army (erp). The book then switches back and forth between his memories and those of other squad members, linked and framed by historical context, capturing the political and social moods of the period with lively energy drawn from the power and drama of the last phase of Nicaragua’s forced, macabre dance with the treacherous family that held it in a death grip for over four decades.

More:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/deaths-somoza-george-evans

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Somoza dictatorship, facts, photos, well arranged collection:

The Somoza Dynasty





Anastasia Somoza Garcia

(1st Somoza "President" )

https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/somoza.htm