This is the second entry in a series titled, “Tyrants of the Caribbean”. And sure, Nicaragua isn’t really in the Caribbean, but it’s close enough to be included in this anthology. This is a story of family — loads of family — betrayal and how choices can come back to bite you in the hiney.
Anastasio Somoza Garcia was the first of 3 dictators in a dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for 43 years. At the time, Nicaragua was dubbed “Somoza’s hacienda,” and it was said the family owned everything that was worth owning in the country.
Nicaragua is the largest country in Central America and is famous for its lakes, volcanoes and cigars. Image courtesy of Britannica
SG’s Early Life
Somoza García (let’s call him SG) was born on 1 February 1896 to upper-crust parents: a Senator and the heiress to a coffee fortune.
SG was educated in the USA before returning to Nicaragua where he took on several odd jobs. These included car salesman, boxing promoter, meter reader for an electric company, and toilet inspector. Yes, you read that right. He even tried forging money but was arrested and only avoided being put in the slammer because of family connections.
At the same time, the US was getting its dirty paws involved in Nicaraguan politics. As far back as 1909, they had backed a rebellion against President Jose Santos Zelaya. In 1912, they went further and sent soldiers to prop up the conservative government.
Fed up with the grating sounds of Texan accents in his motherland, Augusto César Sandino, a vigilante of sorts, led a revolt against the Nicaraguan government in 1927. Sandino’s beef was with the authorities allowing gringo forces, whom he referred to as “morphine addicts”, to do as they pleased within the country.
If John the Baptist was Nicaraguan, he’d have probably looked like this. Augusto Cesar Sandino in 1928 and fully within the revolution. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
How SG climbed to power
The crisis was a perfect opportunity for SG. With his fluent English and knowledge of the conflict, he helped the USA to broker a truce between the 2 sides. The terms of the agreement stated that the Americans would leave the country after “overseeing” democratic elections.
In 1933, Juan Batista Sacasa, who just so happened to be SG’s wife’s uncle, was elected President. The Americans persuaded Sacasa to appoint SG as the Commander of the National Guard as a token of appreciation.
When the Americans left, Sandino kind of lost interest in fighting and struck a deal with SG and the National Guard: he would lay down his weapons in exchange for land and amnesty for his men.
SG and Sandino after calling a truce. Those pants though!
SG took this agreement about as seriously as that Derrick Jaxn guy took his marriage vows. Just a year later, the National Guard arrested Sandino and slit his throat by the side of a road, letting his blood and entrails fertilize the indigenous flora. Sandino’s body was never found, but rumour has it that he was dismembered and his severed head was delivered to the USA as a symbol of SG’s loyalty.
Admittedly, that story has a bit of a Fake News feel to it, but it does make for a wildly captivating narrative.
Anyway, the very next day SG’s men raided the lands that had been given to Sandino’s men after the peace settlement, face-spearing and burninating the former rebels in a massacre of Columbine High School proportions.
Sandino, it turns out, was not to be the last victim of SG’s duplicity.
Boys and their machine guns, amirite? SG walked so JZ could run. Image courtesy of alamy.com
By 1935, Uncle Sacasa’s government was in disarray. The Great Depression had Nicaragua by the gonads and the people were, well…depressed. Furthermore, Sacasa’s administration was knee-deep in corruption scandals. SG took advantage of Sacasa’s vulnerability and forced him to resign, replacing him with Carlos Alberto Brenes — a guy who was about as useful as the vowels in the word ‘queue’.
In 1937 SG decided to turn from kingmaker to King and run for president himself. After winning a shady election, he set himself up as a fully-fledged tyrant.
While opposition parties weren’t banned, they were much like the terms and conditions of a clunky iPhone app: there for show but not much else. SG also repressed the press and crammed his family and comrades into every important government role.
And importantly, to guarantee that he’d never be deposed, he sucked up to the USA: declaring war on Germany, Italy, and Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbour. Cute, but c’mon — Hitler probably wasn’t losing sleep at the prospect of an attack by little Nicaragua.
This show of support did yield some benefits. For one thing, the country received shiploads of military aid from the States. It also saw its exports of timber, gold, and cotton to the USA and its allies soar.
And nobody benefitted more than SG himself.
American President Franklin Roosevelt allegedly once said of him: “Somoza may be a son-of-a-b****, but he’s our son-of-a-b****.”
Again, this feels a lot like Fake News and there’s actually no direct proof of this quote.
But also again: agenda > facts.
Apart from winning the glowing admiration of the Americans, SG’s financial status also improved as a result of the war. The government confiscated properties owned by Germans — because screw the Nazis — and then sold them to SG and his family at ridiculously low prices. Eventually, SG owned textile companies, sugar mills, rum distilleries, ships, the national airline and the country’s only pasteurized milk facility.
That’s not even taking account the profits SG accrued from the kickbacks, bribes, gambling and prostitution rings that he secretly ran. And of course just good old-fashioned stealing from the state treasury. By the end of World War II, SG had amassed a tidy fortune of about US$60 million, making him one of the richest people in Latin America.
Presidential musical chairs
When the President is ingesting caviar off Swarovski diamond-encrusted plates as a mid-morning snack while you, the ordinary citizen, are wondering where your next meal is gonna come from, you naturally start asking questions.
And indeed, opposition to SG increased after the war. The tyrant reacted to this criticism by creating a puppet government to salvage his rule. SG declined to run for re-election. Instead, he nominated the elderly Santa-Clause-like Leonardo Argüello to take over as President, believing that he could control him from behind the scenes. Argüello was sworn in on 1 May 1947, and SG remained chief director of the National Guard.
The handshake of death. Leonardo Arguello becomes President of Nicaragua on 1 May 1947. He didn’t last a whole month. Image courtesy of laprensa.com
But Argüello let his ambition get the best of him. When Argüello’s proposed policies — like freedom, justice and all that drivel — began to threaten SG’s power, the National Guard staged a coup and installed another of SG’s wife’s uncles, Benjamín Lacayo, as President.
Argüello had been President for a whole 26 days.
The USA responded by withholding diplomatic recognition from the “new” Nicaraguan government. Apparently, they don’t like coups that they don’t sponsor. To sanitise the new regime and win back American support, SG named a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution.
The new Constitution was heavily laced with anti-communist language, which left the Americans happier than a blind dog trapped in a butchery. But the Assembly sneakily appointed yet another of SG’s uncles, Víctor Román Reyes, as the President.
Reyes was as good at being President as Kermit the Frog but at least he towed the family line. Sadly, Reyes passed away in 1950. This opened the door for SG to reclaim the top spot — after intimidating voters and rigging the ensuing election, of course.
An unverified snap of SG after the death of Uncle Reyes. Looks legit though.
How SG Lost Power
Power not only corrupts, but it’s also delicious. SG found that letting go of the Presidency was harder than getting a container ship unstuck from the Suez Canal. And so in 1955, SG’s cronies engineered the constitution to allow him to run for another term.
This was probably the last straw for the struggling citizens.
Just a year later, a poet named Rigoberto López Pérez shot SG in the chest at a party in the city of León. I guess you could call that…poetic justice.
SG’s wounds proved fatal and he died a few days later. Such was the jubilation at SG’s death that López was declared a national hero by a later government.
The Marathon Continues
Like loadshedding during a house party, the joy was short-lived. Waiting in the wings to take over were SG’s sons, Luis Somoza Debayle (or LSD for short) and Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza Debayle — dudes so mean they made Kane and Undertaker look like Alvin and Theodore.
How it started vs how it (was) going. On the left, the older SG and his boys. On the right, the boys became men. Images courtesy of latinamericanstudies.org
SG had done a stellar job of building up the Nicaraguan looting machine into a powerhouse capable of rivalling the best in the world. But now it was up to LSD, who took over as President, to solidify the family legacy.
LSD consolidated power by torturing and imprisoning political opponents. One of the opposition outfits, The Conservative Party, refused to participate in the 1957 elections in protest. The Somoza brothers responded by forming a sham opposition party to project a democratic facade and keep the Americans happy.
The Brothers took their appeasement efforts further in 1959 when Nicaragua was one of the first nations to condemn Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. And the Americans ate this up like a triple cheese Big Mac. LSD’s government also played a crucial role in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. They failed miserably, but at least they tried. And earned more brownie points from America in the process.
Sadly, by the mid-1960s, LSD’s ill health rendered him too sick to participate in the presidential election. Tachito, who up to that point had been lording it over the National Guard, ran in his brother’s place.
And because this isn’t a fairy tale, he won. Easily.
With his election, Tachito became both President and Chief of the National Guard. This was like the Mind Stone in Thanos’s glove and gave him absolute political and military authority. In short, he could do whatever the heck he wanted.
Nothing much changed though. I mean, sure state-sanctioned beatdowns of defenceless civilians and government critics escalated. And of course, corruption was as much a part of the culture as movie reruns are to DSTV, but there was nothing particularly untoward about Tachito’s totalitarianism.
That was until late 1972.
On 23 December, an earthquake decimated most of the capital city. About 10,000 people died and some 50,000 families left homeless. Instead of assisting the injured and displaced, the National Guard swept in like TMZ on a celebrity scandal and looted stock from the businesses that had survived.
That’s…not good. The 1972 earthquake registered 6.2 on the Richter scale — which is pretty severe. Image courtesy of imgur.com
Naturally, none of the looters were charged. It’s not even entirely clear that the orders didn’t come directly from Mr Head Honcho himself. The “international community” was left with its jaws scraping the pavement when the scale of the theft and the later mis-appropriation and mismanagement of relief aid was exposed.
But they weren’t shocked enough to do anything about it. It would be another 6 years before the end of the Somoza dynasty.
The Dynasty Crumbles
Bythe late 1970s, condemnation of Somoza rule was spreading like mould on a 43 year old loaf of bread. Tachito’s situation was worsened by the fact that support for the Sandinistas was rising both inside and outside Nicaragua.
Who on earth were the Sandinistas?
Remember Augusto Sandino? The guy who SG had double-crossed like Brutus did Julius Caesar and then brutally murdered…well…like Brutus did Julius Caesar. It turns out that killing a person doesn’t get rid of their revolutionary ideas.
Sandino had become an underground cult hero. But for the last 40 odd years, the block had been too scorching for his followers to come out. As the political and economic conditions started to mimic Joe Biden trying to climb a flight of stairs, the Sandino Fan Club (ergo “the Sandinistas”) openly made themselves a nuisance.
In 1979 they led a full-on national revolution. And like a viral Tik Tok video, somehow it caught on to America’s politicians, who revoked their support to Tachito. And we all know what that meant.
Soon after, Tachito ditched the Presidency and hightailed it to Miami, taking his dad and brother’s remains with him. And, of course, some travel money (which happened to be most of Nicaragua’s national treasury), leaving the country broke and with the highest foreign debt in Central America.
American President Jimmy Carter wasn’t ecstatic about housing the deposed Somoza and politely told him to get lost. Tachito settled in Paraguay, which was ruled by Alfredo Stroessner at the time. Birds of a feather and all that.
You’d be forgiven for assuming this story, like so many others, has a happy ending for our dictator. But that’s not how the Sandinistas rolled. In 1980, Tachito met his end when his guts were loaded with lead bullets by Sandinista assassins in a mission aptly named “Operation Reptile.”
The results of Operation Reptile. The Sadinistas were pretty sadistic — they also blew up Tachito’s Merc. Image courtesy of latinamericanstudies.org
The moral of the story is that generational wealth comes in many forms; passing down a dictatorship is as legitimate as any but comes with safety risks. Oh, and if you’re gonna screw people over, don’t leave loose ends.
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