Background
Anastasio Somoza García was born on 1 February 1896 in San Marcos. He was a son of prosperous middle-class landowners.
Anastasio Somoza García was born on 1 February 1896 in San Marcos. He was a son of prosperous middle-class landowners.
He attended the Intituto Nacional de Oriente at Granada, Nicaragua, and later graduated front the Pierce Commercial College in Philadelphia, where he studied bookkeeping, baseball and English.
On his return to Nicaragua, his experience, assumed abroad, helped ingratiate him with influential Americans for whom he acted as interpreter during the Marine occupation of 1926-1932.
In August 1926 “General” Somoza, only 30 years old, commanded a Liberal force that occupied San Marcos on behalf of Liberal “General” Benjamín Moneada, in revolt against the government of Conservative General Emiliano Chamorro Vargas. Going into hiding after a defeat, Somoza accepted a pardon in return for a promise "not to join any other subversive activities.” When Moneada later became president. Somoza was his subsecretary for foreign affairs and acting foreign minister.
After Liberal Juan Bautista Sacasa won the presidential election conducted under U. S. supervision in 1932, he appointed his nephew-in-law Anastasio Somoza to head the National Guard. However, relations between the two deteriorated after the U. S. Marines left in 1933, and Somoza ousted his uncle from the presidency in 1936—after having permitted the assassination of Augusto César Sandino,the Liberal guerrilla leader, in Managua under a flag of truce.
Inaugurated president in January 1937, Somoza reorganized the Liberal Party into a personalist party to maintain his family’s control. Making himself a general, he ruled directly (1937-1947 and 1950-1956) or through puppets until his death.
On September 21, 1956, Somoza was shot. He died on September 30 in a U. S. Army hospital in Panama, to which he had been transported under orders of President Dwight Eisenhower. He succeeded by his son, Luis Somoza Dcbayle.
One of the first things Somoza did upon his return from Philadelphia was to marry Salvadora Debayle, whom he had met in Philadelphia. She was daughter of one of Nicaragua’s leading families, and niece of Liberal politician Juan Bautista Sacasa.