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Tacho rammed a Chesterfield into a holder, squinted off toward the Pacific, and grinned. "Arévalo set out to bomb me last spring. Hell, I didn't even move from my house. The trouble with a stunt like that is that the plotter doesn't think it can be turned against him. Right now I'm going to buy the same A20 that Arévalo was going to use against me. I take these boys' toys away from them whenever I can." Tacho's belly shook with laughter as he flopped back into the hammock.
Nicaragua's 52-year-old dictator was not really amused, however, about the possibilities of war in the Caribbean. In Central America this month the rains will end. Since the days of famed Filibusterer William Walker, who tried to take over Nicaragua in the 1850s, the dry season has been the shooting season. Tacho is well aware of it.
Last fortnight, after an unidentified plane buzzed his mosquito-bitten border towns, the dictator ordered his armed AT6 trainers to patrol the Costa Rican border, to shoot down intruders on sight. "I will permit no more violations of the national territory," he thundered. Just in case the Legion should make Honduras the road to Nicaragua, Tacho deployed 500 National Guardsmen along his northern frontier, sent 200 right into Honduras to help his friend Carias.
The Little Machine. Tacho was not too worried. First of all, he had U.S. support; the stability-loving U.S. State Department wants no filibustering in the Caribbean. Besides, the rules of the U.N. and the Pan American system ban direct attacks by any American country against a neighbor. Tacho could also thank the U.S. for the best army in Central America. After the U.S. Marines moved into Nicaragua to protect U.S. interests in the Coolidge administration, they reorganized and trained Nicaragua's army. Before the Marines pulled out in 1933, the crack new Guardia National was the country's police force as well as its army.
Thanks to the Guardia, Somoza can boast: "I know every man in Nicaragua and what he represents." Thanks also to the Guardia, for twelve years he has owned and operated his little country (pop. 1,108,800), with its tiny upper class and sandaled proletariat.
Unlike Dominican Dictator Trujillo, Tacho kills a man only as a last resort. A spell in jail usually brings an enemy around. If jail fails, the Guardia has a little electric device known as la maquinita. A wire is wrapped around the prisoner's scrotum, and if he is stubborn, the current is turned on. There are Nicaraguan exiles in Guatemala who cry in their sleep about the Little Machine. "Oh, hell," snorts Tacho, "that damned thing isn't so bad. I've tried it myself—on my hand."