Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America

No single name better evokes what ‘progress’ has meant to Nicaragua and the rest of Central America than Somoza. In the first full-length biography of the assassinated dictator, Anastasio Debayle Somoza, Bernard Diederich examines Somoza's extraordinary career and the invidious nature of his close ties with the US government. American support for Somoza’s repressive Nicaraguan regime was bitterly criticised at the time and is now widely recognised as the tragic prototype for US involvement in El Salvador and other Central American countries. In this timely book, Diederich chronicles the rise and fall of a South American dynasty and argues that Nicaragua's future has yet to be finally decided — that there is a crucial need for an informed, intelligent response to the mistakes of history, before those same mistakes are repeated in Nicaragua's troubled Central American neighbours, El Salvador and Guatemala.