NICARAGUA: Leave of Absence

Apparently he was not so ill after all. In Boston’s Baptist Hospital, President Anastasio (“Tacho”) Somoza recovered rapidly this week from a major intestinal operation. Nicaraguans had learned in the dictator’s month-long leave of absence that his strong hand was over them, even from a foreign sickbed.

Minister of the Interior Victor Román y Reyes had passed the word to innumerable Somoza relatives in important Government posts, and the tight machine that combined local military and civil governorships in one henchman’s hands executed the dictator’s orders as smoothly as ever. It was still Somozaland.

Dictator Tacho, who of late had been a target for some of the U.S. State Department’s glassiest stares, announced before leaving Nicaragua that he would not be a candidate in the February elections. He bestowed his official favor on Dr. Leonardi Argüello, a 71-year-old druggist with a deep-dyed goatee. The other candidate. Dr. Enoc Aguado, a prepossessing lawyer with few relatives, was named by the opposition in Somoza’s absence. An American in Nicaragua described him as “the kind of man who. if he were a candidate for President of the U.S.. would get my vote.” But Aguado was president of the 1939 Congress that extended Tacho’s dictatorial powers.

Said one Managua observer: “[The election] is already stolen.” Asked his choice of the two candidates, a Nicaraguan exile said: “It is like being asked which you would rather use to eat soup, a knife or a fork.”