Nicaragua under the Somozas had been a reliable U.S. ally, but slipped through its grasp as the greediness and ghoulishness of Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza Debayle turned pathological and became a gross liability to the United States.
A typical drill of Somoza's infamous National Guard:
"Who is the Guardia?" "The Guardia is a tiger."
"What does tiger like?" "Tiger likes blood."
"Whose blood?" "The blood of the people."

The counterinsurgency experts in Washington learned from the Cuban experience as well, but were unable to convince President Jimmy Carter that human rights should not become a factor in determining US policy toward its traditional spheres of control. Carter, because it was a matter of faith, made human rights a leitmotif of his foreign policy.

Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza
Somoza was confused by Carter's apparent sincerity on the human rights issue. His family had been installed in power by President Franklin Roosevelt, the man who also had made human rights the center piece of US policy in his Four Freedoms address during World War II. But Roosevelt had never bothered the Somoza clan with complaints about human rights violations. After all, forty-five years of anti-communist obedience should have counted for more than a few cases of maltreating radical trouble makers.
When Somoza finally realized that Carter was serious, he found himself in an impossible position. To lift martial law for the purpose of continuing to receive US aid and legitimation would also mean allowing the FSLN to have the necessary space to organize throughout the country. To abide by Carter's principles would require Somoza to leash and muzzle the National Guard; to remove from it the very instruments by which it had succeeded in terrorizing the population.
Somoza paid lip service to human rights, hoping that it would appease the US ambassador, while at the same time he ordered the Guard to wipe out Sandinista influence in me poor barrios and the Christian based communities where the priests and nuns were applying their revolutionary theology. However, the ambassador did not turn the other way in 1977 and 1978 as Guard members murdered, tortured, raped and looted their way through the barrios and rural areas. US officials denounced the abuses, threatened to cut off aid, and eventually did so in 1978. Subsequently writing from exile in Paraguay in the 1980s, Somoza charged: 'Our nation was truly delivered into the hands of the Marxist enemy by President Jimmy Carter and his administration. I was betrayed by a longstanding and trusted ally.' Somoza had a point. Having labeled the FSLN communists, and received encouragement and support from right-wing friends in the US military and in Congress for forty years, Somoza could not believe that the United States would allow the 'communists' to triumph.
But Carter believed he had a mandate to restore US credibility after the stains left by the Vietnam War and the revelations of CIA shenanigans - including its support for corrupt and brutal dictators. The era of world politics had passed when American presidents could with impunity maintain the Somozas of the Third World as reliable clients.

Since Somoza had no desire to transform himself and his Praetorian Guard into anything that could conceivably qualify as democracy, he chose more repression. He thought that by increasing the level of brutality the Guard could cow the populace back into obedience. He was wrong. The more brutal the Guard's behavior, the more resistant the populace grew. As Guard units marched through the barrios, or randomly shot poor teenagers and middle-class youth, fear turned to outrage. People who for decades had accepted the savageries of the Guard could tolerate no more.
Inside Nicaragua and in the United States, the anti-Somoza forces coalesced. Illiterate peasants and local merchants in Nicaragua found themselves allied in the struggle against Somoza with exiled dish washers in Houston and University of California students. Some became guerrillas, while others served as lobbyists, pamphleteers, or fund raisers in Washington. A group of well known professionals and business executives formed 'Los Doce', a group of twelve reasonable and responsible moderates who appealed to middle-class opinion throughout the world to join in with money and moral support to oust the dictator and his hated Guard.
In January 1978, an event occurred that galvanized the fragmented anti-Somoza opposition. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the dynamic editor of La Prensa, Managua's leading daily, was assassinated. The popular Chamorro had openly published demands for Somoza's removal, and called for broad national unity. Although lacking direct proof, most Nicaraguans assumed Tachito had ordered the slaying. Chamorro, hardly a leftist, had criticized the FSLN 's radical rhetoric, but the Sandinistas, nevertheless, joined other anti-Somoza elements, including labor unions, in organizing mass protests, strikes and demonstrations in response to Chamorro's murder. By mid-1978 the Church had added its weight to the growing demand that Somoza resign.
The US government was in the throes of a decisive policy debate. President Carter faced a choice: Somoza, a flagrant rights violator; or the FSLN, regarded in intelligence and diplomatic circles as communists, or, at best, independent leftists friendly to Castro.
'Another Cuba' in Central America was deemed unacceptable, but the continuation of Somoza rule appeared dubious. National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzinski, feared that by applying human rights criteria to Nicaragua, the United States would strengthen the revolutionaries. Since the Guard was loyal to Somoza, not the Nicaraguan Constitution, Tachito's removal would lead to its disintegration, Brzinksi believed. The only armed force then remaining would be the FSLN. The human rights activists inside the administration downplayed the Sandinista threat and emphasized to the president the importance of maintaining consistency on human rights. Carter compromised between the competing ideological wings of his administration.

Reversing nearly a century of tradition, President Carter asked Somoza to step down as a way of ending the civil war, while retaining intact the National Guard, whose loyalties should logically rum from Somoza to its next benefactor, the United States. It was not an act of idealism, but rather a realistic judgment on the part of the president. US intelligence reports agreed that the tide had turned in Nicaragua and that the dictator's days were numbered. But Carter's decision came too late for the national security apparatus to save the Guard. The action on the battlefields had ensured the Sandinistas their rightful place as heads of State.
The battlefield included the very center of government in Managua. On 23 August 1978, eleven months before Somoza fled and the Guard collapsed, Sandinista soldiers dressed in Guard uniforms arrived in army trucks at both entrances of the National Palace, where Somoza's legislature convened. Using their best imitation of Guard officer speech, they deceived the troops stationed at the doors and other posts. Once inside, the Sandinistas held captive Somoza's friends, allies and even family members. For Tachito it was supremely humiliating.
A demoralized Somoza yielded to the Sandinistas' demands for the release of the Nicaraguan glitterati: $500,000 in exchange for safe conduct from the palace to the airport, where the captors would be flown to Cuba, plus the release of fifty-nine political prisoners. Even National Guard officers winced when Somoza caved in. Morale sank for a short time.
To revive the fighting spirit of his men, Somoza ordered unprecedentedly vicious levels of reprisals against the revolutionaries. Inspired by their palace victory, the Sandinistas called for uprisings. In Matagalpa. according to the Nicaraguan press, 'armed youths in rebellion' took over thirty city blocks. The Guard responded with artillery, armored vehicles and heavy machine-gun fire to retake the neighborhood. On August 27, the Catholic Church called upon Somoza to resign as 'the only way to end the current political violence'.
In the final days of August the depressed Tachito regained the ruthlessness that had made him the scourge of the nation. He purged Guard officers who had criticized his weakness in bargaining with the rebels. Charged and found guilty of conspiring to overthrow the government were eighty-five Guardsmen, including twelve officers. As for the 'communists and subversives', his name for all revolutionaries, Somoza told his generals to show no mercy. Sandinisus or suspected sympathizers were rounded up, tortured, interrogated and then killed. The Guard carried out fishing expeditions in the barrios, targeting especially the youth. Thousands of men and women were arrested and shot simply because they were young. Instead of submitting, the public were spurred to uncontainable rage.

While the human rights advocates and the national security hawks debated policy in Washington, the Guard's ferocity claimed the attention of the world's media. And the Sandinistas, feeling the public pulse, struck. On 7 September 1978 guerrilla units descended from the mountains to launch a major offensive, attacking and holding parts of five major cities. Several thousand Sandinistas took part in the offensive, sending the Guard reeling. Los muchachos (teenagers and children) spearheaded the barrio insurrections.

Susan Meiselas's "untitled" 1979
In Leon, Grenada, Diriamba, Chinandega, Matagalpa and Managua, the muchachos joined the uniformed guerrillas. They fought with weapons stolen from the Guard, sticks, stones and home-crafted Molotov cocktails. Faced with the wrath of the people, the Guard did not flee, but counterattacked with artillery and aeria1 bombing. When the smoke finally cleared and the Guard regained control, the bodies of young boys and girls were strewn across the makeshift barricades and trenches. Commercial and residential areas, schools and churches, looked like Coventry after days of Axis bombing during World War II. Those edifices that remained structurally in tact bore the scars of bullets and shells.
The neighborhood of Monimbo, in the city of Masaya, rose up and with home-made weapons and rocks held off the heavily armed troops, then suffered the retaliation. 'We fought against the Guard to save our lives,' recalled Ernesto Rodriguez Zelaya, a Monimbo mechanic. 'We realized that after the [Guard's} "mopping up" operation life wasn't worth anything. Whoever stayed home would be killed! It was easier for us to grab a rifle and fight with the muchachos than stay home where we would be just a target for the Guard. So it was the repression that made us fight, because we didn't want to die.'
In February 1978, Monimbo residents rose again, fought with unbelievable courage, using paving stones from Somoza's own factory as weapons, and then faced the renewed vengeance of the Guard. But even after the continued bombing and shelling of the area, the Monimbo dwellers refused to submit. The Guard could not regain control.
The behavior of the Monimbo populace dramatized a larger reality, one that even jaded members of US intelligence could not escape: the vast majority of Nicaraguans were prepared to endure immense pain and suffering to rid themselves of the Somoza family and their Guard.
Tachito understood the people's loathing and responded accordingly. He ordered his air force to bomb and strafe guerrilla-held cities. Even after the FSLN had retreated, the air force continued to bomb, to ensure that the populace would get the message. When the bodies were counted, the Red Cross announced that over five thousand had perished from Esteli, Masaya and Leon alone. A further 10,000 were missing; 15,000 were wounded; 30,000 were homeless. Refugees poured into improvised camps just across the frontiers.

By May 1979 Somoza and his generals decided that the situation looked bleak, and that if they were to reassume control of Nicaragua, Masaya was the strategic place to begin. On June 9 the National Guard began intensive bombing and strafing of Monimbo, 'the pissed off barrio', as it became known. Following the bombing, a column of Sherman tanks led Guard foot soldiers through the Sandinista controlled neighborhoods to retake portions of Masaya.
The guerrillas beat a strategic retreat, but returned unexpectedly three days later and retook most of the city. For two weeks the battle raged, block by block. 'The Guard didn't push us out: a Sandinista officer reported, 'because they didn't receive reinforcements, nor did we take them out since we didn't have any ammunition.'
On June 24 Guard officers and men abandoned their Masaya command post, using hundreds of political prisoners as a shield to cover their retreat. The Sandinistas were in undisputed control of the city, twenty miles south of Managua. Somoza spent his days in the bunker, built on top of a Managua hill overlooking the Intercontinental Hotel. One June evening he met members of the media in an 'off the record' session. One reporter, nevertheless, recorded the conversation. Why was he bombing his own people, destroying Nicaraguan property, he was asked. 'What do you know about underdevelopment?' he slurred, showing the effects of a day of drinking. 'My people are a bunch of lazy, stupid, underdeveloped assholes.'
In late June, Tachito ordered his bombers to drop 500 pounders on densely populated Managua neighborhoods. The Sandinistas, who had taken the poor barrios from the Guard, immediately retreated to Masaya, but the muchachos who survived the bombings continued to snipe at and ambush the Guard in the capital. The US ambassador demanded that Somoza resign, hoping that it was still not too late to save the Guard except for its most notorious officers. Apart from unwavering support from the Israeli government - of which Somoza had been a loyal supporter - and a few cohorts among the remaining Latin American dictators, Tachito was isolated.

He knew the war was over, but nevertheless ordered his air force to continue bombing. His family had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the Nicaraguan people, and Tachito expressed his attitude toward his victims as if to make a final statement that would etch into Nicaraguan memory the essence of the cruelty that had characterized the forty-five years of Somoza clan rule.
On July 17 the Somoza family fled to Miami, Florida. Without Somoza's presence, there was nothing to hold the Guard together. Overwhelmed and demoralized, the once invincible National Guard collapsed. Some units surrendered to FSLN commanders, others fled as one or in ragtag fashion to borders north and south. On July 19 the Sandinistas held state power.
The Nicaragua Revolution triumphed, like the Cuban one twenty years earlier, not just because of the Sandinistas' astute military strategy and tactics employed, or the mistakes of the National Guard. A peculiar conjuncture of events and times also created a setting on which the decisive battles were fought. In Washington, the human rights element in the administration temporarily obstructed national security interventionists; Costa Rica provided unusual levels of help for the Sandinistas, thanks to Somoza's 'bad neighbor' policy toward the San Jose regime; in Cuba, a Solomon-like Fidel Castro persuaded the rival factions of the FSLN to bury their ideological differences and unify.
The revolution could not have triumphed without the ambivalence of President Carter, just as its subsequent programs could not be realized without a similar kind of vacillation from the Reagan administration. The Sandinistas captured world opinion, an intangible factor that nevertheless wove its way through White House thinking and mass media concepts and images. Somoza had made fundamental errors in judgment. His tactics had alienated even the wealthy, who had for decades accepted the caprices of his family rule. The Somozas had accumulated more than 5500 million during their dynastic rule. They possessed one fifth of Nicaragua's arable land and more than one hundred and fifty businesses. In addition, the family had accounts and assets in the United States and Europe that were believed to be more than double what they owned in Nicaragua. Somoza believed that as long as the United States was interested in maintaining its hegemony, the US government would protect him. Tachito's contempt for his own countrymen and women was so great that it did not occur to him that Nicaraguans could play a role in determining the fate of their nation.