NICARAGUA: 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 José Arévalo, Tacho's worst enemy and the Legion's most forthright backer. As Tacho well knows, Arévalo 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."