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Death of Somoza
Death of Somoza reveals the inside story of the assassination of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Asuncion, Paraguay in 1980. Alegria and Flakoll, on the recommendation of Julio Cortazar, met "Ramon," a leader in the Argentinian Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT) and with his help were able to interview all the survivors of the commando team that carried out the "bringing to justice" of Somoza. Alegria and Flakoll rewove these testimonies into a narrative that reads like a thriller and gives a vivid picture of the political and social climate of the time. Enlivened by its colorful cast of characters, Death of Somoza is the definitive account of how Anastasio Somoza Debayle was brought to justice. This story is not an apology for terrorism, but rather the chronicle of a tyrannicide.
162 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1996
About the author
Claribel Alegría
74 books32 followersClara Isabel Alegría Vides was a Nicaraguan poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist who is a major voice in the literature of contemporary Central America. She writes under the pseudonym Claribel Alegría. She was awarded the 2006 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 26, 2025
Really moving. My first five star read of the year.
August 5, 2013
When the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua finally succeeded on 19 July 1979, and tens of thousands celebrated in the square in front of Managua’s ruined cathedral, there were nagging worries that the triumph was incomplete. President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, one of the most notorious dictators in the history of Latin America, had left the country two days earlier and escaped to Miami. He hadn’t been brought to justice for tens of thousands of deaths, for the mass imprisonment and torturing of revolutionaries and of suspected sympathisers, for his indiscriminate bombing of built-up areas in the months before he finally gave up power, or for the fortune that he’d amassed at the expense not only of Nicaragua’s poor but even of its middle classes.
The Somoza dynasty lasted 43 years. It began when Anastasio’s father, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who had been responsible for the treacherous assassination of Nicaragua’s emblematic rebel leader Augusto Sandino in 1934, forced his way into office in1936. From the start he had the backing of the US government, which had already had marines stationed in Nicaragua for more than 20 years. Anastasio senior, known as ‘Tacho’, was the subject of President Roosevelt’s possibly apocryphal remark made when confronted by the horror of Somoza’s cruelty: ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. He eventually met his downfall at the hands of an assassin, Rigoberto Lopez Perez, in 1956. But Lopez Perez was a brave individual not a member of a revolutionary vanguard, and Tacho was simply replaced by his eldest son, Luis. The youngest son, known after his father as ‘Tachito’, took power when Luis died in 1967 and held it for 12 years until toppled by the Sandinista uprising.
Although he fled to Miami, the last Somoza had to cancel his plans to stay in Florida when President Carter made it clear that he was unwelcome; Carter might even have responded positively to an extradition request from the Sandinistas. Somoza left quickly for the Bahamas, then moved on to Paraguay, a country quietly festering under the control of the almost equally unpleasant President Alfredo Stroessner. After 25 years in power, he held the distinction of being Latin America’s longest-standing dictator.
In May 1979, a group of revolutionary Argentinians, exiled in Spain, were called on by the Sandinistas to help their final offensive against Somoza’s National Guard. They had been hoping to join the revolutionary struggle at its height, only to see events move far more quickly than anyone thought possible. Five of the group managed to join forces in the south of the country that were fighting their way north. And three women members of the group arrived a few days after Somoza’s departure, carrying medical supplies. In the early stages after the revolutionary takeover, remnants of the National Guard were still fighting on and order needed to be restored on city streets. The experienced Argentinians helped organise commando squads to restore order, a task which continued for several months while the government established new army and police forces.
The Argentinians, led by the charismatic ‘Ramon’ (real name Enrique Gorriaran Merlo), saw themselves as committed to revolution across Latin America. That Somoza was still alive was testament to the continuing power of reactionary forces throughout the continent. Furthermore, counter-revolutionary forces had already started to group on Nicaragua’s northern border. Initially inspired by Somoza and hoping to return him to power, these forces were to become the ‘Contra’ that the Reagan government would finance illegally throughout most of the 1980s and which brought many thousands more Nicaraguan deaths.
Ramon and his compañeros, increasingly convinced that their work inside Nicaragua was complete, and concerned they were losing their skills as active combatants, began to plot to bring justice to Somoza in his retreat in Asunción, capital of Paraguay. Deciding not to compromise the Sandinista government by revealing their p, they transferred to Bogota in Colombia, where the training of the group that would attempt the assassination began. After many weeks, group members began to travel to Paraguay to collect intelligence on Somoza’s movements. Usually they in were ‘couples’ behaving as holidaymakers or honeymooners.
Eventually a plan was put in place. A luxury home was rented a few hundred metres from the Somoza residence, in a residential area full of the houses of Stroessner cronies and where the president himself lived. One group member managed to establish a newsstand almost opposite the Somoza house. He was the one who triggered the final action on 17 September 1980 by alerting the group by radio that Somoza and his bodyguards were heading in two cars along a busy avenue towards the house that held the assassins and their cache of arms. As Somoza’s entourage came into view, one Argentine drove a pick-up through the gates of the house onto the main road to block the traffic, while others opened fire and (at the second attempt) destroyed Somoza’s car with a bazooka. Despite the pick-up then breaking down in a side street and having to be abandoned, most of the group eventually escaped across the borders to Argentina or Brazil. Only ‘Santiago’ (real name Hugo Alfredo Irurzun) was caught and killed in a shoot-out with Paraguayan forces.
The book ‘Death of Somoza’ is dedicated to the fallen Santiago as well as to Rigoberto Lopez Perez, the 1956 assassin of Somoza’s father. The authors met Ramon and the other surviving protagonists in the aftermath of the Falklands war (or more accurately, the war in Las Malvinas), when the Argentine military regimes finally gave way to civilian democracy. For various reasons publication was delayed until 1996. By that time the Sandinistas had lost power in the second general election held after the revolution, but the book was reprinted in 2006, the year when Daniel Ortega recovered the presidency (retaining it in the election of 2011). The revolutionary fervour of the 1980s may have ebbed, but vigilance is still needed against the groups in Latin America that are always looking for opportunities to recover the positions they have lost. The coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009, and the attempted coup in Ecuador in 2010, all against left-wing governments, are forceful reminders of the continuing thirst for power of the oligarchies that were created by and supported the old dictatorships.
I read this book in Masaya, Nicaragua, where I have lived for ten years and where the final insurrections against Somoza began. My wife Abi comes from a divided family: most were and are Sandinistas, and her eldest brother died fighting during the final weeks of the Sandinista offensive; but her father was a sergeant in the National Guard, imprisoned for a short time in 1979 and eventually dying of old age many years later. ‘Death of Somoza’ is about the killing of a man who not only held enormous power and created vast personal wealth in a small and impoverished Central American country, but also held much of the population in a kind of spell. Although the spell was broken when the Sandinistas ceased power in July 1979, it was perhaps only finally destroyed more than a year later and many thousands of kilometres away, by a bazooka fired in a residential suburb of Asunción.
Also posted at http://twoworlds.me/
The Somoza dynasty lasted 43 years. It began when Anastasio’s father, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, who had been responsible for the treacherous assassination of Nicaragua’s emblematic rebel leader Augusto Sandino in 1934, forced his way into office in1936. From the start he had the backing of the US government, which had already had marines stationed in Nicaragua for more than 20 years. Anastasio senior, known as ‘Tacho’, was the subject of President Roosevelt’s possibly apocryphal remark made when confronted by the horror of Somoza’s cruelty: ‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch’. He eventually met his downfall at the hands of an assassin, Rigoberto Lopez Perez, in 1956. But Lopez Perez was a brave individual not a member of a revolutionary vanguard, and Tacho was simply replaced by his eldest son, Luis. The youngest son, known after his father as ‘Tachito’, took power when Luis died in 1967 and held it for 12 years until toppled by the Sandinista uprising.
Although he fled to Miami, the last Somoza had to cancel his plans to stay in Florida when President Carter made it clear that he was unwelcome; Carter might even have responded positively to an extradition request from the Sandinistas. Somoza left quickly for the Bahamas, then moved on to Paraguay, a country quietly festering under the control of the almost equally unpleasant President Alfredo Stroessner. After 25 years in power, he held the distinction of being Latin America’s longest-standing dictator.
In May 1979, a group of revolutionary Argentinians, exiled in Spain, were called on by the Sandinistas to help their final offensive against Somoza’s National Guard. They had been hoping to join the revolutionary struggle at its height, only to see events move far more quickly than anyone thought possible. Five of the group managed to join forces in the south of the country that were fighting their way north. And three women members of the group arrived a few days after Somoza’s departure, carrying medical supplies. In the early stages after the revolutionary takeover, remnants of the National Guard were still fighting on and order needed to be restored on city streets. The experienced Argentinians helped organise commando squads to restore order, a task which continued for several months while the government established new army and police forces.
The Argentinians, led by the charismatic ‘Ramon’ (real name Enrique Gorriaran Merlo), saw themselves as committed to revolution across Latin America. That Somoza was still alive was testament to the continuing power of reactionary forces throughout the continent. Furthermore, counter-revolutionary forces had already started to group on Nicaragua’s northern border. Initially inspired by Somoza and hoping to return him to power, these forces were to become the ‘Contra’ that the Reagan government would finance illegally throughout most of the 1980s and which brought many thousands more Nicaraguan deaths.
Ramon and his compañeros, increasingly convinced that their work inside Nicaragua was complete, and concerned they were losing their skills as active combatants, began to plot to bring justice to Somoza in his retreat in Asunción, capital of Paraguay. Deciding not to compromise the Sandinista government by revealing their p, they transferred to Bogota in Colombia, where the training of the group that would attempt the assassination began. After many weeks, group members began to travel to Paraguay to collect intelligence on Somoza’s movements. Usually they in were ‘couples’ behaving as holidaymakers or honeymooners.
Eventually a plan was put in place. A luxury home was rented a few hundred metres from the Somoza residence, in a residential area full of the houses of Stroessner cronies and where the president himself lived. One group member managed to establish a newsstand almost opposite the Somoza house. He was the one who triggered the final action on 17 September 1980 by alerting the group by radio that Somoza and his bodyguards were heading in two cars along a busy avenue towards the house that held the assassins and their cache of arms. As Somoza’s entourage came into view, one Argentine drove a pick-up through the gates of the house onto the main road to block the traffic, while others opened fire and (at the second attempt) destroyed Somoza’s car with a bazooka. Despite the pick-up then breaking down in a side street and having to be abandoned, most of the group eventually escaped across the borders to Argentina or Brazil. Only ‘Santiago’ (real name Hugo Alfredo Irurzun) was caught and killed in a shoot-out with Paraguayan forces.
The book ‘Death of Somoza’ is dedicated to the fallen Santiago as well as to Rigoberto Lopez Perez, the 1956 assassin of Somoza’s father. The authors met Ramon and the other surviving protagonists in the aftermath of the Falklands war (or more accurately, the war in Las Malvinas), when the Argentine military regimes finally gave way to civilian democracy. For various reasons publication was delayed until 1996. By that time the Sandinistas had lost power in the second general election held after the revolution, but the book was reprinted in 2006, the year when Daniel Ortega recovered the presidency (retaining it in the election of 2011). The revolutionary fervour of the 1980s may have ebbed, but vigilance is still needed against the groups in Latin America that are always looking for opportunities to recover the positions they have lost. The coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009, and the attempted coup in Ecuador in 2010, all against left-wing governments, are forceful reminders of the continuing thirst for power of the oligarchies that were created by and supported the old dictatorships.
I read this book in Masaya, Nicaragua, where I have lived for ten years and where the final insurrections against Somoza began. My wife Abi comes from a divided family: most were and are Sandinistas, and her eldest brother died fighting during the final weeks of the Sandinista offensive; but her father was a sergeant in the National Guard, imprisoned for a short time in 1979 and eventually dying of old age many years later. ‘Death of Somoza’ is about the killing of a man who not only held enormous power and created vast personal wealth in a small and impoverished Central American country, but also held much of the population in a kind of spell. Although the spell was broken when the Sandinistas ceased power in July 1979, it was perhaps only finally destroyed more than a year later and many thousands of kilometres away, by a bazooka fired in a residential suburb of Asunción.
Also posted at http://twoworlds.me/
May 5, 2019
Where does all the money come from to pay for the expensive safe houses, multiple trips between Colombia, Paraguay, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Cuba... the food, the hotels, the weapons?
This book reads like a thriller, but Alegria and Flakoll are purposely leaving out key details to paint their revolutionary “heroes” as ideologically pure. I suspect that the real truth is more complicated and that understanding the funding of the operation would create a very different nonfiction novel.
This book reads like a thriller, but Alegria and Flakoll are purposely leaving out key details to paint their revolutionary “heroes” as ideologically pure. I suspect that the real truth is more complicated and that understanding the funding of the operation would create a very different nonfiction novel.
December 24, 2013
This reader is woefully unknowledgeable about Latin American history or politics. Thus, I could have benefitted from 20-30 pages more explanation of the players here. But even without that, I was completely sucked into the story of the planning and execution of the assassination of Somoza. Part of what amazed me about this tale is that the revolutionaries who carried out this plan were Argentinians, not Nicaraguans. They were enlisted because of their solidarity with the revolutionary Sandanistas in Nicaragua and had planned to come to help with the fight, then decided to extract justice for Somoza's crimes. The epilogue in which one of the group describes their dedication to the cause is one of the most moving pieces of nonfiction I have read in quite some time. I'm really glad to have stumbled onto this book.
December 27, 2024
“We were able to make contact with all the survivors of the commando team. The book you hold in your hands is not an apology for terrorism, but rather the chronicle of a tyrannicide.”
I. Enter without arousing suspicion.
II. Do the job without getting caught.
III. Get away without leaving a trace.
“It shouldn’t call for more than a three-month course of eight hour days for classroom work and field practice, with no days off.”
“All we have to teach them is how to create and document a false identity and then to live that identity without slip-ups for X period of time while zeroing in on the target without attracting the attention of national security police, local police, Somoza's bodyguards and nosy neighbors. Then, how to set an infallible trap, bring in the arms and other technical equipment needed to accomplish the job, use it swiftly and efficiently at the proper moment, gather everything up without leaving behind any scrap of evidence and disappear smoothly and silently along a prearranged escape route.”
2 automatic rifles, one with sniper scope.
2 Browning 9mm. pistols.
2 Ingram submachine guns with silencers.
1 RPG-7 bazooka with two projectiles.
4 fragmentation grenades.
“I had very little military experience, Susana recalls, and had hardly ever fired a gun. One time we were engaged in target practice there in the mountains. Santiago was behind me, and I had to fire an M-16 from a kneeling position. Something was wrong with the ammunition, and when I pulled the trigger the cartridge blew up in the chamber. I dropped the rifle instinctively.
I was deafened and my cheek was burning. The weapon was red hot and smoking, and the cartridge chamber was ruined.
Santiago grabbed me from behind and lifted me to my feet.
He wrapped his arms around me, gave me a big bear hug and told me everything was all right. I was scared stiff, but I got over it quickly because Santiago had done exactly the right thing at the right time, and I wasn't traumatized by the experience.”
“Only a few months earlier, Santiago, using a FAL combat rifle with grenade launcher, kept an entire company immobilized for more than an hour.”
“The improvised school had a small but select library featuring titles such as: The Day of the Jackal, and The House of Garibaldi Street which dealt with the operation against Eichmann.”
“It was time to put an end to the unwritten law that “dictators get off scot-free. When free forms of expression do not exist, armed struggle is the only valid response to oppression.”
“We don’t search for personal thrills. This happens in societies where there are limited horizons. The individual in that kind of society, where values are twisted, seeks strong emotions to exalt his own existence. This sort of thrill-seeking doesn’t exist in Latin America. I’ve never heard of anyone throwing himself out of a plane or anything like that. Life, for us, is very difficult. Simply to be born a working stiff or an ordinary person in Latin America is enough of an adventure. One has to struggle in order to eat, in order to stay alive from day to day. This is what motivates us.”
“We would be much happier if imperialism didn’t exist, if exploitation didn’t exist. For us, this isn’t thrill-seeking; it’s a deep conviction that we have to do something about the situation; it is a social necessity. As long as tiny minorities flourish at the cost of hunger, suffering and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, we have to do something. This isn’t a romantic experience. We cannot tolerate the existence of millionaire playboys while thousands are dying of hunger. We don’t like to kill. If we do it, it is to put an end to the killing. People talk about who die in military confrontations; talk about people who die in battle, in what they call Wars, but what about the children who die of hunger and disease? Aren’t they just as dead? We have to put an end to all… of this.”
“I think it’s very important that you understand this: we who executed Somoza are not highly-trained super agents; our motive was not to live in luxury hotels, sleep with ten different women, travel around in airplanes. No. We are compañeros who experience fear and whose fearlessness does not lie in thrill-seeking nor in taking risks in order, as those people would say, to relish the flavor of life. For us, the flavor of life is that there be no more hunger, no exploitation, no misery. We aren’t adventurers. We are revolutionaries with all the fears, doubts, failings, and problems that everyone else has. We quarrel and our legs tremble. Not in the moment of action, but ten minutes later, our legs tremble.”
I. Enter without arousing suspicion.
II. Do the job without getting caught.
III. Get away without leaving a trace.
“It shouldn’t call for more than a three-month course of eight hour days for classroom work and field practice, with no days off.”
“All we have to teach them is how to create and document a false identity and then to live that identity without slip-ups for X period of time while zeroing in on the target without attracting the attention of national security police, local police, Somoza's bodyguards and nosy neighbors. Then, how to set an infallible trap, bring in the arms and other technical equipment needed to accomplish the job, use it swiftly and efficiently at the proper moment, gather everything up without leaving behind any scrap of evidence and disappear smoothly and silently along a prearranged escape route.”
2 automatic rifles, one with sniper scope.
2 Browning 9mm. pistols.
2 Ingram submachine guns with silencers.
1 RPG-7 bazooka with two projectiles.
4 fragmentation grenades.
“I had very little military experience, Susana recalls, and had hardly ever fired a gun. One time we were engaged in target practice there in the mountains. Santiago was behind me, and I had to fire an M-16 from a kneeling position. Something was wrong with the ammunition, and when I pulled the trigger the cartridge blew up in the chamber. I dropped the rifle instinctively.
I was deafened and my cheek was burning. The weapon was red hot and smoking, and the cartridge chamber was ruined.
Santiago grabbed me from behind and lifted me to my feet.
He wrapped his arms around me, gave me a big bear hug and told me everything was all right. I was scared stiff, but I got over it quickly because Santiago had done exactly the right thing at the right time, and I wasn't traumatized by the experience.”
“Only a few months earlier, Santiago, using a FAL combat rifle with grenade launcher, kept an entire company immobilized for more than an hour.”
“The improvised school had a small but select library featuring titles such as: The Day of the Jackal, and The House of Garibaldi Street which dealt with the operation against Eichmann.”
“It was time to put an end to the unwritten law that “dictators get off scot-free. When free forms of expression do not exist, armed struggle is the only valid response to oppression.”
“We don’t search for personal thrills. This happens in societies where there are limited horizons. The individual in that kind of society, where values are twisted, seeks strong emotions to exalt his own existence. This sort of thrill-seeking doesn’t exist in Latin America. I’ve never heard of anyone throwing himself out of a plane or anything like that. Life, for us, is very difficult. Simply to be born a working stiff or an ordinary person in Latin America is enough of an adventure. One has to struggle in order to eat, in order to stay alive from day to day. This is what motivates us.”
“We would be much happier if imperialism didn’t exist, if exploitation didn’t exist. For us, this isn’t thrill-seeking; it’s a deep conviction that we have to do something about the situation; it is a social necessity. As long as tiny minorities flourish at the cost of hunger, suffering and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, we have to do something. This isn’t a romantic experience. We cannot tolerate the existence of millionaire playboys while thousands are dying of hunger. We don’t like to kill. If we do it, it is to put an end to the killing. People talk about who die in military confrontations; talk about people who die in battle, in what they call Wars, but what about the children who die of hunger and disease? Aren’t they just as dead? We have to put an end to all… of this.”
“I think it’s very important that you understand this: we who executed Somoza are not highly-trained super agents; our motive was not to live in luxury hotels, sleep with ten different women, travel around in airplanes. No. We are compañeros who experience fear and whose fearlessness does not lie in thrill-seeking nor in taking risks in order, as those people would say, to relish the flavor of life. For us, the flavor of life is that there be no more hunger, no exploitation, no misery. We aren’t adventurers. We are revolutionaries with all the fears, doubts, failings, and problems that everyone else has. We quarrel and our legs tremble. Not in the moment of action, but ten minutes later, our legs tremble.”
March 26, 2025
So moving, and human, and impactful.
January 23, 2014
The plot of this book could be a major story arc on The Americans, substituting the Russian spies for Argentinian revolutionaries. It's a short book that clips along but still gives a bit of personality to the players involved. And the epilogue is not to be missed.
July 1, 2012
I loved this book, but the last 2 pages really changed my heart. What expression and passion. What an articulate way to describe the difference between Latin America and North America.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews