Living the Good Life: Leon

Hey Guys!

Our first stop in Nicaragua was the city of Leon. Leon was a cool university town, lots of young people around. One of the things we heard was a 'must-do' was to go sand boarding down a volcano! They dress you up in a big orange jump suit and you slide yourself down on a toboggan/board. In theory, I could have stood up and boarded down, but it was all I could do to ride down on my butt/back. They gave prizes for the fastest guy and girl, sadly neither Jared nor I took home those honors. However, it was a fantastic time. The pictures are stolen from the internet because we didn't want to bring our cameras up there. It was a dusty/ashy extravaganza.

After some adrenaline, it was time for me to do a city tour and get some history in. With all the things that have happened in Nicaragua in the last century, this was a great place to do it. Leon has always been the intellectual heart of the country, and it was the capital for many years.

Nicaragua fell to a similar fate as many Latin American countries, in that it was besieged by a military dictatorship for many years. The Somoza's kept Nicaragua in it's iron grip for 40 years. However, this was not without resistance from the people. The revolutionary hero was Augusto Sandino, and he commanded a large rebel army. The US government had interests in the area (bananas, coffee and the Panama Canal). Augusto Sandino fought for years against US Marines to keep American interference out. The US eventually left the region around the time of the Great Depression, and this is also when a democratic election was successfully carried out in Nicaragua. Augusto Sandino was put in charge of brokering peace between the rebels and the newly elected government.

However, this peace did not last as Sandino was executed by Anastasio Somoza Garcia. He had been put in control of the National Guard (at the insistence of the US Ambassador to Nicaragua). Somoza then hunted down all the leaderless rebels and had them executed too. Then that crafty Somoza used the National Guard to oust the President two years later. And this is how a 40-year dictatorship starts. It helps when you are fully backed by the US Government. From this rubble emerged the Sandinistas, a rebel force that opposed the dictatorship. Their symbol was the silhouette of Sandino, with hat and boots, and their flag was red on top of black.

Now it gets really interesting. A poet by the name of Rigoberto Lopez Perez shot Somoza in Leon on September 21, 1956. Somoza's eldest son took over, and he was no better. On July 23 1959, he ordered the National Guard to fire on a group of peaceful protesters at a university in Leon. I stood on the spot where it happened. The picture below commemorates the four students that were killed.

That Somoza died of a heart attack in 1967, and another really rude family member took over. Apparently he was the most vicious of all. We toured a volcano while in Nicaragua, and it is widely accepted that he threw his dissidents into the hot magma from a helicopter!

However, this madness was fortunately coming to an end. In 1975, Jimmy Carter decided he was no longer going to support a regime with such horrible human rights infractions. By 1979, the Sandinistas were in power. Somoza had tried to flee to USA (Jimmy said no), then Paraguay. However, a team of Sandinistas found him there and blew him to smithereens. Literally, they had to identify him by his feet. You can't make this stuff up. Apparently Somoza relatives are exiled all over the world, with changed names and new identities. And that was the end of the Somozas.