Word: guardsmen
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Somoza was vacationing in Florida with his children. The country he had left behind was in chaos: teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, unable to secure loans from international banking organizations, bitterly estranged from its onetime supporters in Washington. Despite the ruthlessness with which Somoza's Guardsmen had suppressed last year's rebellion, in which at least 2,000 people were killed, he has been unable to contain the guerrillas. In the past few weeks, rebels have wiped out a small government garrison in El Jicaro and shot down an armed C-47. In response, the dictator beefed...