"I'm the Champ"

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A buzzard, coasting high in the air over Central America last week, would have seen nothing unusual. The mountainous, forest-matted isthmus lay quietly in the greasy November sun. Among the many human realities invisible to the buzzard were the boundary lines--the imaginary but very actual barriers that said: "This is Costa Rica; this is Guatemala; this is Nicaragua."

Far below the coasting buzzard, in the grey-green jungles of northern Nicaragua, more was stirring than his great bird's-eye view could catch. Snaking through the scrub, guerrilla riflemen made short, sharp little raids against government outposts. In & out of the piny mountain country on Nicaragua's northern flank, armed, machete-toting men filtered mysteriously. In Guatemala and Costa Rica dusty little companies, in faded denim and khaki, marked time in the tropic heat.

All this scattered activity added up to one gathering purpose. That purpose called itself the Caribbean Legion. Some of the Legion were political exiles, some were plain mercenaries, but they all had a common object: the overthrow of Caribbean dictators. Around the Caribbean circuit, in Havana, in Caracas, bustling agents were collecting arms, haggling for battle-weary aircraft, signing up an occasional recruit. The Legion's first target: Nicaragua's Dictator Anastasio Somoza.

Meanwhile the object of all this regard, his paunchy body supported in a hammock, was taking his ease at his hilltop finca, Santa Julia. "Tacho" Somoza was nursing a cold and spending as much time as possible with his daughter Lillian Sevilla Sacasa and her four children. Tacho laid his head back, presented his broad, tanned cheeks to his barber.

From under a hot towel the dictator resumed a conversation with some visitors; he rumbled a volley of curses against Guatemala's President Juan Jose Arevalo, Tacho's worst enemy and the Legion's most forthright backer. As Tacho well knows, Arevalo is winking at the arming and training of Nicaraguan exiles to lead a revolution against his Nicaraguan neighbor.

"I wish he'd leave other countries alone," growled Tacho. "He's in no bed of flowers himself. I won't be the first man to fire a shot. Nicaragua has always stood for peace in Central America, and that is more important than any man. But with all this messing around, somebody's going to catch hell."

War Talk. The dictator, now shaven, rolled upright in the hammock and dangled his legs like a man astride a horse. "Nothing," said he, "unites men quicker than a threat, so it was inevitable that we dictators should get together."

Last month the dictators did the inevitable. In the so-called pact of the "Three Ts," Nicaragua's Tacho, the Dominican Republic's bloody little Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, and Honduras' aging Tiburcio Carias made common cause against the Caribbean Legion.

"These guys," Tacho rasped, "want to overthrow Trujillo, and he's on an island. But they've got to have a base, and they've picked Puerto Cabezas [Nicaragua]. That means they've got to knock me out first."

Tacho rammed a Chesterfield into a holder, squinted off toward the Pacific, and grinned. "Arevalo set out to bomb me last spring. Hell, I didn't even move from my house. The trouble with a stunt like that is that the plotter doesn't think it can be turned against him. Right now I'm going to buy the same A20 that Arevalo was going to use against me. I take these boys' toys away from them whenever I can." Tacho's belly shook with laughter as he flopped back into the hammock.

Nicaragua's 52-year-old dictator was not really amused, however, about the possibilities of war in the Caribbean. In Central America this month the rains will end. Since the days of famed Filibusterer William Walker, who tried to take over Nicaragua in the 1850s, the dry season has been the shooting season. Tacho is well aware of it.

Last fortnight, after an unidentified plane buzzed his mosquito-bitten border towns, the dictator ordered his armed AT6 trainers to patrol the Costa Rican border, to shoot down intruders on sight. "I will permit no more violations of the national territory," he thundered. Just in case the Legion should make Honduras the road to Nicaragua, Tacho deployed 500 National Guardsmen along his northern frontier, sent 200 right into Honduras to help his friend Carias.

The Little Machine. Tacho was not too worried. First of all, he had U.S. support; the stability-loving U.S. State Department wants no filibustering in the Caribbean. Besides, the rules of the U.N. and the Pan American system ban direct attacks by any American country against a neighbor. Tacho could also thank the U.S. for the best army in Central America. After the U.S. Marines moved into Nicaragua to protect U.S. interests in the Coolidge administration, they reorganized and trained Nicaragua's army. Before the Marines pulled out in 1933, the crack new Guardia National was the country's police force as well as its army.

Thanks to the Guardia, Somoza can boast: "I know every man in Nicaragua and what he represents." Thanks also to the Guardia, for twelve years he has owned and operated his little country (pop. 1,108,800), with its tiny upper class and sandaled proletariat.

Unlike Dominican Dictator Trujillo, Tacho kills a man only as a last resort. A spell in jail usually brings an enemy around. If jail fails, the Guardia has a little electric device known as la maquinita. A wire is wrapped around the prisoner's scrotum, and if he is stubborn, the current is turned on. There are Nicaraguan exiles in Guatemala who cry in their sleep about the Little Machine. "Oh, hell," snorts Tacho, "that damned thing isn't so bad. I've tried it myself--on my hand."

A Hot Tamale. Tacho says he dislikes rough stuff: when a man is sure of his position, he thinks, it isn't necessary--as the case of General Carlos Pasos shows. Pasos, once a good Somoza man and like him a Liberal, fell out with the dictator in 1944. Nicaragua, Pasos felt, could do with a little more democracy; after a time the Liberals called a convention to talk about it. Some of the cautious ones went to Tacho to get his views. They got them. "Tell Carlos Pasos that I know that twice last night at the home of Castro Wassmer he read the speech he has prepared, and if he insists on reading it at the convention, let him not forget to come armed. I am not the man to let myself be overthrown by speeches. There'll certainly be some gunplay there."

There was no gunplay. Pasos did not make his speech; instead, he went to jail for three weeks. But neither then nor later did Tacho touch the textile mill and other businesses that made Pasos wealthy. General Pasos still hangs around Managua, in halfhearted opposition to Somoza--but Tacho is in wholehearted control.

Once a Nicaraguan Conservative, who had been under house arrest for two months on Tacho's order, charged up to the general at a party and roared: "I want to know why you ordered my house arrest!" Said Somoza, grinning: "I did it to please your wife. She told me she couldn't keep you home nights."

"I want to treat everybody good," says Tacho, wide-eyed. "I once told F.D.R. about democracy in Central America. Democracy down here is like a baby--and nobody gives a baby everything to eat right away. I'm giving 'em liberty--but in my style. If you give a baby a hot tamale, you'll kill him."

"I Never Miss." Though Tacho runs Nicaragua, he has a stooge President, 76-year-old Dr. Victor Roman y Reyes, who happens to be his uncle. Tacho does not live in the presidential palace, but in a grey fortresslike place known as La Curva on the volcanic rim above Managua.

Each morning he is up around 6, breakfasts on steak and cornflakes while aides read him Guardia telegrams and reports on the country. After that, he goes to a desk stacked high with Guardia business and with his own business affairs, mainly coffee and cattle.

For hours Tacho talks with pleaders, politicians, hangers-on. If he agrees to a proposal and gives an order then & there, the proposal will be carried out. If he says he'll think it over, he'll forget about it. If he asks for a memo he'll never read it. When his office work is done, he goes to look at the cattle on his Mercedes ranch down the lake shore from Managua. "I'm no politico," says Tacho, without batting an eyelash. "I'm a farmer."

In profile, the middle-aged dictator looks undertrained and overstuffed. But his boasts about his physical strength, his horsemanship, his swimming, his farming, his pool shooting, his poker playing, his business ability are not altogether idle. When he plays cards, he never loses. "It's fantastic the luck I have. It's that way with anything I want to try--I'm the champ. I'm the champ shot of the Guardia National, didja know that? Pistol or rifle. Jeez, I never miss, it seems."

Though recurrent malaria and stubborn amoebae in his intestines have put Somoza past his physical peak, he still sets a tough pace. At parties he now limits himself to three Scotches & soda, but he can still shake a light foot in the rumba, tango, bolero or samba. If he feels like it, he may dance the whole night through at La Curva, then adjourn the party to a Somoza ranch for another six or eight hours.

Like other successful bullyboys, Tacho has a sort of Falstaffian charm. Said a U.S. mining man in Managua last week. "Nobody can talk to that guy and hate him."

"You Would Do the Same." The person closest to Tacho is his wife Salvadora ("Yoya"), daughter of one of Nicaragua's leading families, who has an astute political brain. After her come daughter Lillian ("She's more like me than any of them"), wife of Nicaragua's ambassador to the U.S.; two sons, Tachito and Luis; and at least one natural son, Jose, who runs Tacho's Montelimar finca. Lillian's picture is on Nicaragua's one-cordoba ($20) note. Tachito, who has shed the democratic ideas he picked up as a cadet at West Point, is Tacho's heir-apparent.

Somoza runs Nicaragua, and he runs it for Somoza. Tacho has the country's best cattle land, the best coffee fincas; he has cut himself in on the mines, transport, lumber--everything except a few scattered items like General Pasos' textile mill. Somoza is probably the richest man in Central America, with an income estimated at more than $1,000,000 a year. One count puts the number of his enterprises at 117. Somoza himself does not seriously deny that he has a well feathered nest: "You would do the same thing yourself if you were in my place."

Some of his 50-odd cattle ranches and 45 coffee fincas he got by "smart buying." "My father taught me that it was wiser to buy from heirs," he grins. "They rarely know the true value of their inheritance." That, as Tacho tells it, is how he came by the huge British-owned La Fundadora finca. "I offered the heirs the first silly price that popped into my head, $25,000. Then I added $800 to make it look serious. By God, those people in England didn't know what they had. They took my offer, and I'm sure the $800 did it. The first year's crop brought me $28,000."

A Good Racket. One of Tacho's best rackets, smuggling cattle into Costa Rica, was broken up by the Costa Rican revolution. Now he butchers his cattle at home, and flies the meat to Cuba. He corners the supply by a simple expedient: no cattle can be moved in Nicaragua without government permit. A rancher bringing cattle into the capital from the east, for instance, always gets stopped at the Tipitapa River, 18 miles from Managua, and is asked to show his permit. He wires to Managua for it, then waits. Meanwhile, either he pays for pasturage or the cattle grow thin. About the time the rancher gets desperate, one Ponciano Munoz turns up, offers a ridiculously low price for the critters. The rancher has no choice but to sell. Once he sells, the permit arrives. Munoz then starts the beef to market. Munoz is Somoza's top cowhand.

Tacho is in on virtually all new businesses starting in the country. Last fortnight he made a new deal for a percentage in a flour mill. He runs the salt and match monopolies, gets a percentage from the electric power companies. Lately, son Tachito has been cut in on the gravy. He got a 40% share in a new airline hauling mining machinery from the U.S. and meat to Cuba. When a Nicaraguan worked up a profitable new business shipping monkeys to the U.S., Tachito heard about it. Now a Somoza is in monkey business.

Says Tacho: "We Nicaraguans are a Spanish and Indian mixture, and that's dynamite. Give us a finger and we take a hand. Give us a hand and we take an arm."

Uncle Bernabe. In such operations, Tacho learned a lot from the history of his great-uncle, the late Bernabe Somoza, who met an untimely death in the igth Century. Bernabe was an outlaw in the Nicaraguan town of Rivas, and he loved cockfighting and roistering even more than Tacho does. He was so handsome, says Tacho, that when he played the guitar, women shivered and swooned. "He could put himself in a yoke and pull like an ox." In a fight over a rooster, says Tacho proudly, Bernabe grabbed a machete and killed 20 men. But a traitor betrayed him. "They hanged Uncle Bernabe," Tacho sighs. "Remembering him, I always try now to avoid provocation. God knows, nobody wishes less bloodshed than I."

Tacho's own father was an honest small farmer who lived in the Nicaraguan town of San Marcos. With the help of a few good coffee crops, he sent his son to a business college in Philadelphia. Young Tacho learned a little bookkeeping, learned a lot about basic advertising appeals. He also went to the ball parks (to this day he is a fan of the Phillies and Athletics).

On a blind date one afternoon he met a girl from Beechwood School (now Beaver College) at Jenkintown, Pa. Often thereafter Tacho, flowers in hand, waited under the eagle in Wanamaker's to take Salvadora Debayle to a tea dance or movie. Later, to be near his Salvadorita, he stayed in Philadelphia for several years as bookkeeper at a Graham-Paige agency on Broad Street.

Privies & Meters. To Salvadora's father, Dr. Luis Henri Debayle, Nicaragua's top surgeon, the grandnephew of a celebrated bandit seemed a poor prospect for a son-in-law. But Salvadorita loved Tacho. Soon after their return to Nicaragua in 1919 they were married.

Tacho opened an agency for Lexington motor cars (he still prides himself that he can take down an engine), but that flopped. He taught boxing, refereed at football matches. In Leon he was a meter reader. Then, briefly, he got a city job, inspecting privies. It got him the nickname el mariscal, because the long flashlight he carried looked like a marshal's baton.

Those were the years when the U.S. Marines were trying to keep Nicaragua's rival Liberals and Conservatives from using machetes on each other.* In the turmoil a Liberal general named Jose Moncada rose to the top. He found Tacho's bilingual blarney useful. When Henry Stimson came down to arrange the deal that made Moncada President in 1928, Tacho acted as interpreter. By then Tacho was on the upgrade. "I was lucky," he says. From the start, he knew how to make the most of this luck.

Dancing Partner. Once Moncada sent him out with $75,000 to pay off people whose property had been damaged by the rampaging campaigns of the famed revolutionary Augusto Sandino. Moncada, hearing that most of the money was going into Tacho's pockets, called him back. "Listen, Tacho," said Moncada, "you are not even a thief; you are a pickpocket. Get out of here." Somoza landed on his feet, became a consul in Costa Rica. Soon he was back in Managua, as Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

In that post Somoza got very chummy with U.S. Minister Matthew Hanna. It was the smartest move he ever made. Both the minister and his wife were charmed by Tacho's effervescence. Before long, Hanna was urging that when the Marines pulled out, Tacho should be made chief of the Guardia Nacional. Sixteen years ago this week, Somoza took over that job. He has been the Guardia's boss ever since.

After the Marines left, Sandino came down from the mountains to make peace with Moncada's successor, President Juan Bautista Sacasa. Sacasa, worried about Tacho's growing power, decided to cultivate Sandino as a counterforce. On the night of Feb. 21, 1934, he asked him to dinner in the presidential palace overlooking Managua. Somoza spent the evening at a party in the Guardia's barracks.

The Sign. On the way home from dinner, Sandino, a Freemason, was seized by a group of armed men, and hustled away. Soon after, a Guardia officer called the barracks, reported that Sandino had given the Masonic sign of distress. Freemason Somoza, unmoved, roared: "Carry out your orders!" At La Aviacion field, on the southeast edge of Managua, guns cracked. Sandino is buried, say Nicaraguans, just under the runway TACA planes now use.

Somoza no longer had a rival. Within two years he was ready to strike for the top in a revolution that was quick and successful. In 1936 he put a stooge in office, then had himself elected President. Though the Marines had laid down the rule that the Guardia be half Liberal, half Conservative, Tacho kicked out the Conservatives, put his own pals in key spots. In 1939 he got himself elected for eight more years. And he went to Washington.

To prime President Roosevelt for the visit, Sumner Welles sent him a long solemn memorandum about Somoza and Nicaragua. According to a story told around Washington, Roosevelt read the memo right through, wisecracked: "As a Nicaraguan might say, he's a sonofabitch but he's ours."

In a sort of dress rehearsal for the impending visit of Britain's George VI and Elizabeth, F.D.R. gave Tacho and Salvadorita the full treatment. The President (with all his Cabinet, congressional leaders and top brass) met them at Washington's Union Station, dined them, put them up at the White House.

That Washington visit was a landmark in Nicaraguan history. It helped take away much of the bitter feeling left over from dollar diplomacy days. It cemented Tacho's affection and admiration for the U.S. Throughout World War II, the U.S. had no stauncher friend than Somoza's Nicaragua.

Night Flight. When World War II's democratic wave washed out dictators in El Salvador, Guatemala and Cuba, Tacho had some anxious moments. The U.S. was talking about Latin American dictatorial regimes, and Tacho, who once said he intended to rule for 40 years, decided that it was time to put on a democratic show. He would let the country choose his successor.

Somoza may wonder now why he ever got involved in such a silly business. Over in the Dominican Republic, Dictator Trujillo brazened it out, elected himself a fourth time. Somoza, on the other hand, found that Leonardo Argueello, the stooge he had got elected, did not intend to be a stooge. Argueello began calling on Guardia officers to declare their loyalty to him. Almost half of them did. Then Argueello overreached himself: he gave Tachito Somoza a dressing down, banished him from the capital. Papa Tacho moved in. Argueello fled to the Mexican embassy, then to Mexico, where he died. Growled Tacho, who finally decided that Uncle Victor Roman y Reyes was a safe man for the presidential palace: "Some day I may meet Argueello in hell, and then I'll give him an uppercut."

Though a bit shocked at the casual way Tacho switched Presidents, the U.S. State Department recognized the regime (TIME, May 17). Thus Somoza was in a position to buy U.S. warplanes and to start closing the lead gained by Guatemala's air force during his stay in the doghouse. He was also busily spreading the word that the Guatemalans, the Caribbean Legion and everybody else conspiring against him were Communists.

Tacho, his wide-brimmed campaign hat jammed on his balding head, was characteristically cheerful. "I like a fight," he roared. "I'm not afraid of anything ahead. If I didn't have the strength to stay here, then I'd get the hell out!"

* Twice the U.S. Marines landed in Nicaragua, first in 1912 for a stay that lasted until 1925. In 1927 they came back again for six years more.

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