Anastasio Somoza García

Anastasio Somoza García was the ruler of Nicaragua from 1936, when he deposed his wife's uncle, to September 1956, when a poet shot him at a dance in León. He was the founder of the dynasty that governed the country for forty-three years, the commander of the National Guard the American marines had trained and left behind, and the man who had Sandino murdered. He was a used-car dealer and latrine inspector from San Marcos who had been to business school in Philadelphia and married Salvadora Debayle, of one of the families that mattered. His English made him the marines' interpreter and, in 1933, the Guard's jefe director when they sailed home. Sandino, who had fought the marines for six years from the Segovias, came to Managua in February 1934 under a safe-conduct to dine with the president Sacasa, and was taken by Guardsmen on his way home from the palace and shot at the airfield, on Somoza's order. Sacasa, who was Salvadora's uncle, was removed in June 1936 and Somoza elected in December with all but a few hundred of the votes. The twenty years were the family business. The presidency was held directly from 1937 to 1947 and from 1950 to 1956, and through two puppets in the three years between, one of whom, Argüello, tried to govern and lasted twenty-six days. The Guard was the family's private army. The country's land, cattle, gold, coffee, the airline, the shipping line and the only pasteurised milk acquired, so that the family owned a tenth of the arable land by his death. The German properties were confiscated in the war and kept. The Liberal party was the state's. The Conservatives were given a third of the seats by the pact of 1950 so that they would stop asking for more. There was Washington's friendship. That was the point, and to which Roosevelt's remark that he may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch is attached, whether or not Roosevelt said it. He sent the Guard against Costa Rica's Figueres in 1948 and 1955 and lost both times. He lent the airfields for the Guatemala coup of 1954. He was shot in the chest at a party in the Casa del Obrero in León on 21 September 1956 by a poet of twenty-seven who had written to his mother that he was going to do it and was killed on the spot. Eisenhower's own surgeons flew to the Canal Zone hospital where he died eight days later. His sons Luis and Anastasio took the presidency and the Guard between them the same week. That was the succession he had planned. The country buried him in a mausoleum the Sandinistas emptied in 1979.

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