Somoza's Legacy of Greed

"Sure I've got enough to live on," conceded Tacho Somoza, as he fled Nicaragua for his $1 million home-in-exile in Miami Beach. By his own reckoning, the ex-dictator's uncertain future would be cushioned by about $20 million (out of his $100 million fortune) that he had managed to stash outside the country. To American experts who have studied Somoza's corrupt regime, both estimates, however, appeared surprisingly low. Most valuations of the dynasty's holdings were between $500 million and $1 billion; they included Nicaragua's national air line, Lanica, its major shipping company, the Mamenic Line, perhaps 25% of its best farm land, and an array of other enterprises. Says Richard Millett, author of The Guardians of the Dynasty, a highly critical account of the Somoza family: "It was hard to find any aspect of the economy in which they were not deeply entrenched."

That empire grew from a modest beginning. When he seized power in 1933, Tacho's father, Anastasio Somoza Garcia, had only a near bankrupt coffee farm to his name. Little by little, he added to his holdings. If he saw a plantation he admired, for example, Somoza Garcia made its owner an offer he dared not refuse, usually about half the property's real value. Often as not, the owner presented the land as a gift. By the time of his assassination in 1956, Somoza Garcia was worth about $150 million.

Tacho greatly expanded the family's wealth, although he did not always manage it well; some of his companies were so poorly run that they failed to turn a profit. Moving into the banking field with ownership of the Banco de Centroamerica, he heavily mortgaged his properties in Nicaragua in order to make available large amounts of cash. These funds were then shuttled through a network of interlocking companies in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Through such maneuvering, Somoza acquired his mansion in Miami Beach, which is officially owned by a company based in the Virgin Islands, two posh condominiums in Coconut Grove for his estranged American-born wife Hope, and a luxurious apartment for his girlfriend Dinorah Sampson. Besides this choice real estate, Somoza's enterprises include six companies in Miami that imported a reported $30 million worth of beef last year, a 49% share of two Colombian coal-mining companies, and a controlling interest in Vision, a conservative newsmagazine that is widely circulated in South America.

Somoza's greed eventually cost him the support of Nicaragua's business elite. After the 1972 earthquake that leveled Managua and killed 10,000 of its residents, Somoza began moving into areas that the dynasty had previously left untapped. He set up a company that held a monopoly on supplying paving stones for miles of new roads in the capital. Moreover, Tacho and his cronies made killings by selling land to the government that was used for new developments to replace the residential areas that the quake had destroyed.

Somoza talked of saving Nicaragua from Communism; in fact, he was plundering the country for his own benefit. Among the companies that he controlled was a Mercedes-Benz dealership that sold garbage trucks to Managua's sanitation department. Another firm collected the revenues from the city's parking meters. Such risk-free opportunities, of course, are no longer available to Somoza. But between the assets that he and his mistress brought with them into exile, there could be enough to rebuild his empire all over again, albeit on a lesser scale.

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