"Enough for My Family"

Central America's heady unrest swept into Nicaragua, rippled ominously around the white hilltop palace of Dictator Anastasio Somoza. In his spacious office, flanked by two ack-ack guns, a grand piano and a juke box, shrewd "Tacho" Somoza might well wonder if the jig were up. For seven years he had been Central America's most genial, least bloodthirsty dictator. But he had made all Nicaragua his racket, with opera-bouffe trimmings. He had justified his record with a plaintive: "Godammit, I want to make sure that my family has enough to live on after I die."

The Politician. In Nicaraguan politics Tacho was a natural from the start. After a lean youth which included a spell of meter-reading, residence in the U.S., and marriage into Nicaragua's potent Debayle family, Tacho entered public life via civil war. In the troubles of 1926-27, notable for the intervention of U.S. Marines,

Tacho took part in one skirmish, was defeated, thereupon gave himself the title of General. His fluency in English, which he speaks with a tough accent, won him a job as an interpreter for the sharp-tongued Liberal politician, Jose Maria Moncada. When Moncada became President in 1929, Tacho became Subsecretary of Foreign Affairs.

Subsecretary Somoza's slick, smiling, kinetic personality won over U.S. Minister Matthew Elting Hanna. His graceful dancing entranced Mrs. Hanna. The Americans pushed Tacho's fortunes, were gratified when President Moncada put him at the head of the National Guard. In good time, Tacho used the National Guard to liquidate his most formidable rival: Augusto Sandino, the pint-sized, ferocious patriot whose ragged guerrillas never yielded to the U.S. Marines. In 1936, Tacho took the Presidency for himself in a phony election, won immediate U.S. recognition.

The Dictator. So long as he can operate his dictatorship in his unique way, 'Somoza prefers to avoid violence. "I want to treat everybody good," he says. "But if they don't come across, Godammit, they better remember I got an iron fist under my silk glove. I pray to God that the glove never rips."

"Coming across" has been the leitmotiv of the Somoza regime. Cattlemen pay through import-&-export levies, marketing and slaughtering licenses. Gold-mine operators pay through special "taxes." Those who deal in mahogany, cinchona bark, milk, hides, tallow, cement and liquor pay in devious but nonetheless painful ways. Nicaraguans quip about an alphabetical list of Somoza rackets running from A to Z; they say that X stands for rackets unknown to the public.

The dictator usually lets his opponents beef loudly & publicly. He beefs right back at them just as loudly. "How many years as president will satisfy you?" shouted one political critic. Answer: "No less than 40!"

Often the dictator has put his adversaries in jail, but seldom for more than a month at a spell. He controls the press, but lets a muffled opposition exist.

Somoza makes it his business to turn his effervescent charm full-faucet on U.S. diplomats and officials. James Bolton Stewart, now U.S. Ambassador in Nicaragua, speaks up stoutly for Somoza's "stable" administration. Tacho, who likes a pun, has amiably referred to the Ambassador as "my steward."

In some ways, mostly personal, Somoza is a more attractive character than his visible opponents. Some of them fed at his trough until recently. Now that they have left him, they find his excesses hard to stomach. Old Jose Moncada, lately in retirement, is credited with saying: "While I was President, they called me a thief. Alongside this man I am an angel."

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