Fat Dolly

The big man who was Nicaragua's President this week lolled back happily. To friends who dropped in to pass the hot, sticky hours, he confided that his power was growing daily. The Boss had sent around a car for his very own use and some of the soldiers of the presidential guard now saluted as he passed. The people of Managua called him "La Muneca Gordita" (the Fat Dolly). His belly shook and his great laugh echoed down the empty halls. No one was taking President Benjamin Lacayo-Sacasa* seriously, least of all Lacayo-Sacasa.

But the Fat Dolly was the only comic character on the Nicaraguan stage. In the Officers' Club down the curving street from the palace, The Boss--tired, nervous ex-President Anastasio Somoza--ruled the powerful National Guard and sat on the country's formidable stack of arms. From the haven of the Mexican Embassy, old Dr. Leonardo Argueello, who had been kicked out of the presidency when he turned on The Boss and decided to run the country himself (TIME, June 2), spoke out with surprising boldness. Biding its time was Somoza's real opposition, led by General Carlos Pasos and gimlet-eyed General Emiliano Chamorro.

Stake--$100 Million. The bloodless Nicaraguan explosion had been set off by Arguello's reckless ultimatum to Somoza to get out of the country within 24 hours. Somoza was of a mind to take a powder. After all, he was due for an operation at Rochester's Mayo Clinic, and he was said to have a fat $20 million in the U.S. But he also had $100 million in land, cattle, railways, bananas and coffee in Nicaragua. He would trust that to no one. From Argueello he got an extension of time.

Then Somoza changed his mind. At the head of 25 men he appeared at the Palacio de Comunicaciones, seized the telephone and telegraph wires. With a radio microphone in one hand to instruct his single tank crew and a telephone in the other to demand surrender, Somoza sent out his troops. By 3 o'clock in the morning he had Congress in session; Congress declared argueello "mentally incompetent." Then Somoza went up the hill, awoke the President, told him he was through. Somoza had won his cheapest victory.

But it might turn out to be his most costly. Nicaraguan resistance is becoming more insistent. The resistance is not the formless anger of ragged peasants, but the pocketbook hate of ranchers and businessmen who have seen Somoza muscle into their territory. And after such a bald usurpation of power, Somoza has few friends in the Governments of sister American republics.

In muggy Managua the optimistic proprietor of the Libreria del Sol (Sun Bookstore) dressed his counters with copies of a timely book: How to Run a Revolution. Up on the hill, fat President Lacayo-Sacasa threw back his head and laughed until his sides hurt.

*No kin to Dr. Guillermo Sevilla Sacasa, Nicaraguan Ambassador to the U.S.

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