From 1909 until 1933, the United States grew in influence in Nicaragua. Conservatives immediately asked for help from Washington. The United States placed an American agent in the customhouse in 1911, and US banks extended considerable credit to the bankrupt Treasury. US marines and warships arrived in 1912 in support of president Adolfo Díaz. US forces remained active in Nicaraguan politics and administered the country directly or through handpicked rulers until August 1925. During this period, the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1914 allowed the United States to build a canal across Nicaragua. After the marines withdrew, the liberals revolted against the US-backed conservative government of Diego Manuel Chamorro and established a government on the Mosquito Coast. The marines returned in 1926 to reimpose Díaz.
In November 1928, the marines supervised the electoral victory of the liberal José María Moncada, with whom the conservatives had made peace. The guerrilla hero Gen. Augusto César Sandino began organizing resistance to the marine occupation force in 1927, and fought the US troops to a standstill. With the inauguration of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “good neighbor” policy in 1933, the marines were pulled out for the last time. But the marines left a legacy, having built the Nicaraguan National Guard, headed by Anastasio (”Tacho”) Somoza García.
In the following year, the liberal Juan B. Sacasa was elected to office. Also during 1934, officers of the National Guard shot Sandino after offering to negotiate a settlement with his forces. The National Guard was now unchallenged in Nicaragua, and three years later, Somoza unseated Sacasa and assumed the presidency. Somoza and his family were to rule Nicaragua directly or indirectly for the next 42 years.
Somoza was president until 1947, making constitutional changes as necessary to prolong his term. Although he retired in 1947, he returned in 1950, and was assassinated in 1956. “Tacho’s” son, Luis Somoza Debayle, was president of Congress, and immediately became president under the constitution. The next year, he was elected by a rather suspicious 89% of the vote.
In 1962, a law was passed prohibiting relatives within four generations from immediately succeeding Luis Somoza as president. Accordingly, in February 1963, René Schick Gutiérrez of the National Liberal Party was elected president for a four-year term. Schick died in office in August 1966 and was succeeded by his first vice president, Lorenzo Guerrero. The presidential election of February 1967 returned the Somozas to power with an overwhelming victory for Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the younger brother of Luis.
According to Nicaraguan law, Anastasio’s term in office was due to end in May 1972. But by March 1971, Somoza had worked out an agreement allowing him to stand for reelection in 1974, ruling in the interim with a three-man coalition government. Anastasio and his triumvirate drew up a new constitution, signed by the triumvirate and the cabinet on 3 April 1971. Then, after declaring nine opposition parties illegal, Somoza easily won the September 1974 elections.
While Somoza consolidated his hold on Nicaragua, an insurgent organization, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional—FSLN), began to agitate against his rule. At first, the group was small and confined to the foothill and mountain regions of Nicaragua. But domestic opposition to Somoza mounted, driven by the family’s monopolistic and corrupt economic practices. One powerful example of the corruption was the disappearance of half the US relief aid extended to Nicaragua after a devastating 1972 earthquake. Most of the rebuilding of Managua was done by Somoza-controlled firms on Somoza’s land. Throughout the 1970s, Somoza’s opposition grew, and US support began to dissipate.
In December 1974, guerrillas kidnapped 13 prominent political personalities, including several members of the Somoza family. The group secured a ransom of US$1 million and the release of 14 political prisoners. Somoza responded by declaring a martial law and unleashed the National Guard. The Guard’s repressive tactics created even more enemies of the Somoza regime. Repression continued throughout the 1970s, and climaxed in January 1978 with the assassination of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor and publisher of the opposition newspaper La Prensa. The assassins were never found, but most felt that Somoza and the National Guard were behind the killing of this moderate leader from a prominent family.
Nicaragua was now ruled by a coalition Government of National Reconstruction, made up of various religious and political leaders, but dominated by the Sandinista leadership. That coalition had unraveled by mid-1980, when Alfonso Robelo and Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, widow of Pedro Chamorro, resigned from the government. Chamorro continued publishing La Prensa and preserved the paper’s reputation for independence, while Robelo went into exile and supported the resistance. The Sandinistas dissolved the National Guard, and in 1982 a number of anti-Sandinista guerrilla groups (broadly referred to as the “contras”) began operating from Honduras and Costa Rica. These groups consisted of former Guard members and Somoza supporters (”Somocistas”) who engaged in guerrilla-style offensives, aimed at disrupting Nicaragua’s agriculture and oil supplies. By 1979, loss of support from the Church and the business community left Somoza without domestic allies. He had become isolated diplomatically, and after the Carter administration cut off military aid, his ability to remain in power further weakened. In May 1979, the Sandinistas launched a final offensive. By July, Somoza had fled the country (he was assassinated on 17 September 1980 in Asunción, Paraguay). By this time, an estimated 30,000–50,000 people had died during the fighting.
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