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Tacho is in on virtually all new businesses starting in the country. Last fortnight he made a new deal for a percentage in a flour mill. He runs the salt and match monopolies, gets a percentage from the electric power companies. Lately, son Tachito has been cut in on the gravy. He got a 40% share in a new airline hauling mining machinery from the U.S. and meat to Cuba. When a Nicaraguan worked up a profitable new business shipping monkeys to the U.S., Tachito heard about it. Now a Somoza is in monkey business.
Says Tacho: "We Nicaraguans are a Spanish and Indian mixture, and that's dynamite. Give us a finger and we take a hand. Give us a hand and we take an arm."
Uncle Bernabé. In such operations, Tacho learned a lot from the history of his great-uncle, the late Bernabé Somoza, who met an untimely death in the igth Century. Bernabé was an outlaw in the Nicaraguan town of Rivas, and he loved cockfighting and roistering even more than Tacho does. He was so handsome, says Tacho, that when he played the guitar, women shivered and swooned. "He could put himself in a yoke and pull like an ox." In a fight over a rooster, says Tacho proudly, Bernabé grabbed a machete and killed 20 men. But a traitor betrayed him. "They hanged Uncle Bernabé," Tacho sighs. "Remembering him, I always try now to avoid provocation. God knows, nobody wishes less bloodshed than I."
Tacho's own father was an honest small farmer who lived in the Nicaraguan town of San Marcos. With the help of a few good coffee crops, he sent his son to a business college in Philadelphia. Young Tacho learned a little bookkeeping, learned a lot about basic advertising appeals. He also went to the ball parks (to this day he is a fan of the Phillies and Athletics).
On a blind date one afternoon he met a girl from Beechwood School (now Beaver College) at Jenkintown, Pa. Often thereafter Tacho, flowers in hand, waited under the eagle in Wanamaker's to take Salvadora Debayle to a tea dance or movie. Later, to be near his Salvadorita, he stayed in Philadelphia for several years as bookkeeper at a Graham-Paige agency on Broad Street.
Privies & Meters. To Salvadora's father, Dr. Luis Henri Debayle, Nicaragua's top surgeon, the grandnephew of a celebrated bandit seemed a poor prospect for a son-in-law. But Salvadorita loved Tacho. Soon after their return to Nicaragua in 1919 they were married.
Tacho opened an agency for Lexington motor cars (he still prides himself that he can take down an engine), but that flopped. He taught boxing, refereed at football matches. In León he was a meter reader. Then, briefly, he got a city job, inspecting privies. It got him the nickname el mariscal, because the long flashlight he carried looked like a marshal's baton.
Those were the years when the U.S. Marines were trying to keep Nicaragua's rival Liberals and Conservatives from using machetes on each other.* In the turmoil a Liberal general named José Moncada rose to the top. He found Tacho's bilingual blarney useful. When Henry Stimson came down to arrange the deal that made Moncada President in 1928, Tacho acted as interpreter. By then Tacho was on the upgrade. "I was lucky," he says. From the start, he knew how to make the most of this luck.