A "final offensive " throws country into chaos
It would be, the guerrillas vowed, their "final offensive," an all-out push that would topple Nicaragua's military strongman, President General Anastasio ("Tacho") Somoza Debayle. Bands of well-armed insurgents of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) slipped across the border from Honduras and Costa Rica. The rebels first struck in half a dozen cities in the interior, bottling up government garrisons with torrents of bullets from Belgian-made automatic rifles. Then they moved into the capital of Managua, which had been paralyzed by a general strike. While Somoza's air force wheeled overhead, raining down barrages of machine-gun fire, the Sandinistas* fought their way to within blocks of the President's fortified command bunker, where the mustachioed dictator was directing a desperate counterattack.
As the offensive began, government forces reeled before the onslaughts of the Sandinistas and their allies, disaffected urban teen-agers known as los muchachos. Firing from barricades built of street paving stones (made by a company that Somoza controls), the guerrillas forced small government outposts in La Trinidad and San Isidro to surrender. A major battle shaped up in León, Nicaragua's second largest city (pop. 44,000), where the Sandinistas surrounded a national guard installation, drew up a captured armored car and prepared to storm the garrison.
Somoza's forces fought back with savage efficiency. His strategy was to let the Sandinistas take temporary control of the cities, "using up their ammunition first," then to deliver a devastating counterpunch of firepower. Such tactics made a huge toll of innocent noncombatants inevitable. In the bloodiest fighting of a civil war that has simmered along for 18 months, many thousands died, most of them civilians. Carrying white flags, at least 200,000 refugees poured out of the barrios in Managua, León, Masaya and Matagaipa to escape the indiscriminate raids by government T-33 jets, rocket-equipped Cessnas and lumbering C-47 "Puff the Magic Dragon" gunships. "I really think Somoza is trying to kill every able-bodied Nicaraguan," concluded a wealthy businessman in Managua.
The skirmishing in the countryside was less conclusive. National guardsmen intercepted 350 Sandinistas as they crossed the border from Costa Rica; the government claimed that 120 of the insurgents were killed and the remainder forced to flee back across the border. Despite that setback, a column of vehicles carrying 300 guerrillas approached the town of Rivas in southeastern Nicaragua at week's end. Their objective, charged Foreign Minister Julio C. Quintana, was to declare Rivas the capital of a liberated zone and "seek international recognition" for an alternative government.
The violence touched off a mass exodus of foreign nationals. Somoza permitted a U.S. Air Force transport plane to land at the airstrip near his seaside villa at Montelimar, 40 miles from the capital, and provided an escort of national guardsmen, reinforced by armed U.S. Marines, to protect fleeing Americans. By week's end about 290 American citizens had departed on four evacuation flights.