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The chaos wrought by the fighting was aggravated by severe shortages of food and water and an electric-power blackout. Unable to purchase food at stores shuttered by the general strike, thousands of Managuans turned to looting. People were seen carrying away sides of beef, cases of rum, huge bags of coffee and flour. "We will exchange what we have for what we need later," one woman looter ex plained. "We had nothing before." Swigging bottles of stolen beer, Somoza's guardsmen tried to direct the looters toward stores owned by opponents of the regime. Other shopkeepers simply threw their doors open to the pillagers, hoping that they could at least dissuade the mobs from destroying expensive equipment. Said a poultry dealer after the pillagers stole more than 42,000 chickens: "I no longer have feed. The poor people can have them."
The mounting carnage served only to strengthen Somoza's determination to hang onto the presidency. "I have no reason to abandon my constitutional post," he declared from his bunker last week. The uprising, Somoza maintained, "was the work of Cuba and Panama," which he claimed had armed and trained the guerrillas. To prove the point, Somoza brandished the identification papers of three Panamanians, including a former Deputy Minister of Health, who was said to have been slain last week by national guardsmen near the Costa Rican border.
There was in fact some truth in Somoza's charges. Among those helping the Sandinistas were 80 members of an "international brigade" of Panamanians. But Somoza's argument that the armed rebellion was nothing more than a Communist conspiracy was rejected by foreign diplomats. They attribute the anger of Somoza's opposition to his ruthless suppression of all political dissent.
Opposition to Somoza has been hardening since the murder in early 1978 of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the stridently antigovernment Managua daily La Prensa, which was burned to the ground last week by Somoza's troops. The resentment flared into a full-fledged civil war in which at least 2,000 died after a Sandinista force led by the now legendary Comandante Cero (zero) briefly seized the National Palace in Managua last fall. Since then political moderates have reluctantly rallied to the Sandinista cause. As one businessman told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich: "If the FSLN wins I don't know what our fate will be, but frankly I would rather see Somoza leave now and worry about that later."
But Somoza has no disposition for compromise. Earlier this year he curtly rejected a U.S. proposal for a plebiscite to decide his government's future. Moderates argue that since the U.S. was instrumental in putting Somoza's family in power, Washington should do more to force him to step aside. They charge that a cutoff of military and economic assistance ordered by Washington to back up its proposal was a futile gesture that could have little impact on a "feudal" leader like Somoza.
Events have seemingly justified the moderates' pessimism. Somoza has beefed up his national guard from 8,100 to more than 12,000 men and armed them with Israeli assault rifles and machine pistols. The national guard has devoted so much attention to fighting the guerrillas that common criminals have had a field day.