Anastasio Somoza

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was the dictator of Nicaragua whose family ruled the country for forty-six years.¹ His overthrow by the Sandinistas in July 1979 triggered the events that led to the Contra war and the Dark Alliance drug trafficking network.

Relationship with the United States

For the forty-six years the Somoza family ruled Nicaragua, they did nearly everything the U.S. government asked.¹ Somoza personally participated in the Central Intelligence Agency's overthrow of a liberal Guatemalan government in 1954. He provided the secret base for the Bay of Pigs operation against Cuba in 1961. He sent troops into the Dominican Republic in 1965 to help the U.S. quell a leftist uprising, and sent Nicaraguans to fight in Vietnam.

Fall from Power

In July 1979, as Sandinista forces closed in on Managua, Somoza met with U.S. ambassador Lawrence Pezzullo in his mountainside bunker and recorded the conversation.¹ Somoza reminded Pezzullo of his family's decades of service to American interests and argued that the Nicaraguan National Guard, which the U.S. had created in the 1930s and trained at Fort Gulick, Fort Benning, and Leavenworth, should not be abandoned. Of approximately nine hundred National Guard officers, "eight hundred or so belong to your schools," Somoza told Pezzullo.

Pezzullo assured Somoza the U.S. was "willing to do what we can to preserve the Guard" but insisted Somoza and his top generals needed to step down to give the Guardia "a clean break."¹

Exile

In the predawn hours of July 17, 1979, Somoza and his closest associates — top generals, business partners, and their families — boarded two jets and flew to Homestead Air Force Base in Florida to begin exile.¹ The National Guard collapsed within hours, and Sandinista columns swarmed into the defenseless capital.

Legacy

The dispersed National Guard officers became the founding cadre of the Contras, reassembled by the CIA under Enrique Bermúdez starting in 1980.¹ Officers from the Somoza-era National Guard, trained at U.S. military schools and steeped in anticommunism, formed the leadership of every major Contra faction.