Luis Somoza Debayle
Luis Somoza Debayle was president of Nicaragua from September 1956, when his father was shot and the Congress he presided over named him the same week, to May 1963. He was the elder son, the mild one, the engineer trained at Berkeley and Louisiana State who thought the family should govern through others and said so. He died of a heart attack at forty-four. His brother, who did not think so, then took everything. The first year was the revenge for the father. There were three thousand arrests, the torture of the poet's supposed accomplices in the Guard's cells under the presidential hill, the military courts, the Conservative leaders jailed. Then, from 1957, came the loosening, the amnesty, the constitution amended in 1959 to bar the president's relatives from succeeding him and to bar re-election, which he meant, and the election of 1963 that he did not stand in, handing the presidency to the family's lawyer René Schick while his brother Anastasio kept the Guard. The years were the cotton boom that made the Pacific plain the country's money and the Central American Common Market of 1960 that gave it factories. There was the Alliance for Progress money spent on roads and the Guard. There was the Cuban revolution, which he answered by lending the Bay of Pigs its launching point, at Puerto Cabezas in April 1961, from which the brigade sailed and to which his brother came down to see them off, saying to bring him a hair from Castro's beard. There were the first guerrilla bands in the northern hills, students who called themselves the Sandinista front from 1961 and whom the Guard killed at Río Coco and Bocay in 1963. He had said, in 1961, that the Somozas would not govern again. It was the one promise of the dynasty that the country was inclined to believe, since it was he who made it. His death in April 1967, three months after the Guard had shot into a Conservative demonstration in Managua and killed forty, and a month before his brother's inauguration as president, removed the one Somoza who had thought the family could last by governing less, and the country got the other kind for twelve years, until 1979. He was born in León. He married Isabel Urcuyo. He is buried in the family vault the Sandinistas opened, beside the father who had been shot and the brother who was blown up in Asunción.
- Lived: 1922 CE – 1967 CE
- Nationality: Nicaraguan
- Roles: president, politician
