Anastasio Somoza Debayle
Anastasio Somoza Debayle was president of Nicaragua from 1967 to 1972 and from 1974 to 1979, and the commander of the National Guard throughout, the last of the family that had run the country since his father took it in 1936, the West Point graduate whom the Americans called Tachito and whose father Roosevelt was supposed to have called our son of a bitch. He lost the country by the greed the earthquake of December 1972 exposed, when Managua was flattened, ten thousand died, and the Guard sold the relief supplies and the family's companies took the reconstruction contracts. The business class that had lived with the Somozas turned against them, and the Church turned. The editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was shot in the street in January 1978 and the country rose. The Sandinista guerrillas whom the Guard had nearly destroyed in the 1960s took the towns one by one in the summer of 1979 while his aircraft bombed his own cities. He fled to Miami on 17 July 1979 with the treasury and his father's coffin. The Guard dissolved two days later. He was born in León in 1925, the younger son, was sent to military school in the United States and to West Point, where he graduated in 1946. He was given the Guard by his father at twenty-one, holding it while his brother Luis held the presidency after the father's assassination in 1956. He took the presidency himself in 1967 in an election the Guard supervised, and left it in 1972 for a triumvirate that he controlled. He took it back in 1974. The family's holdings by the end, a quarter of the arable land, the airline, the shipping line, the cement, the sugar, the blood-plasma export company that took the poor's blood for sale abroad and that Chamorro's paper called the house of vampires, were the case the revolution made. The Guard's shooting of the ABC correspondent Bill Stewart on camera in June 1979 was the moment Washington stopped taking his calls. Carter's government refused him asylum beyond a few weeks. He went to Paraguay, where Stroessner took him in. On 17 September 1980 an Argentine guerrilla team stopped his Mercedes in Asunción with a bazooka and machine guns and killed him and his driver and adviser. The body went to Miami. He had written a book called Nicaragua Betrayed, which blamed Carter. The country he left spent the next decade in the war his fall began.
- Lived: 1925 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Nicaraguan
- Roles: president, dictator
