[5] Bautista Lara, La urbanización, 59, 107. With Somoza García firmly in charge of the political landscape, Managua recovered. The FSLN overthrew Anastasio Somoza DeBayle in 1979, ending the Somoza dynasty, and established a revolutionary government in its place. Getting at the root of the political responses to natural disasters, how to recover from inequality and poverty? What may well be the final chapter of the Somoza “saga began a few hours before dawn on Dec. 23, 1972, when a violent earthquake reduced downtown … [3] Alongside this extreme poverty, the Somoza clan and its cronies became immensely wealthy, turning Managua into their fiefdom in the same way that the old elites had claimed Granada and León. Seeking advice from a bevy of foreign experts to the exclusion of rival Nicaraguan social factions, Somoza embraced the notion of “decentralization,” a buzzword that came to mean the segregation of the city by class, a pattern not highly evident prior to the Christmas earthquakes. [2]. Defense spending quickly absorbed more and more of the state’s budget until, in fact, the Nicaraguan people tired of war and voted out the revolutionaries in 1990. [13] Urban planning was high on the political agenda for the first time in the country’s history. In the process, they set the course for the future of Managua for much of the twentieth century. Banks, movie theatres, department stores, medical offices, schools, bars, restaurants, and hotels crammed the city. That is what Nicaraguans romantically call their capital city, Managua, because the two are always together, next to each other. It was later claimed that Somoza and his associates had used foreign aid for their own gain. Two days later, the leftist Sandinista guerrillas took power. Nicaragua received a lot of foreign aid after the earthquake, but president Somoza and his cronies took a lot of it for their own use. As a reasonable person can imagine, the citizens of Nicaragua … The earthquake changed the face of Managua during its decades of recovery. Somoza controlled Nicaragua’s politics, military, and much of its economy. Following the assassination of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1956, his son, Luis Somoza, ruled with the title of president, and in 1967 Luis was succeeded by his younger brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Today, in place of the large buildings that used to exist in the centre, the government set up the "Plaza de la Fe" (Faith Square) in honor of Pope John Paul II. Somoza is forced to step down as president, although he remains head of the military. [10] Martyn J. Bowden, “Reconstrucción subsiguiente al desastre: Estructura comercial e industrial de Managua,” in “Perspectivas geográficas y sociológicas sobre la reconstrucción de Managua, Nicaragua, subsiguiente al terremoto del 23 de diciembre de 1972,” Informe de J. Eugene Hass, Martyn J. Bowden, Daniel J. Amaral, Patricia Bolton Trainer, Reyes Ramos (Abril de 1975), 2-14. 4 (October 1990), 379-381. USGS, Department of the Interior (1973). Near where I lived people never tired of telling me about how the national guard used tents for the refugees on beach for vacations. It began in 1995 and was completed in 2005, finally ending the practice of dumping the city’s raw sewage directly into the waters of Managua’s sweetheart. The downtown was almost completely destroyed and more than 10,000 people were killed. [15] That project followed similar tiny reproductions of the country’s churches elsewhere in the park. As in other world disasters, the 1972 earthquakes exposed the shortcomings of the government. 7,000 people died and thousands of others were injured. Nicaragua On December 23, 1972, a massive earthquake devastated the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. Most of its streets were unpaved (Figure 1). While Luis had ruled more gently than their father, Anastasio would not tolerate opposition of any sort. Agüero, who protested, found himself replaced (March 1, 1973) on the triumvirate. The press quoted him as saying that the devastation of Managua represented a “revolution of opportunities,” which he exploited immediately by engaging in shady land deals and setting up his own construction companies.[16]. They made an open dinner for the residents of Bluefields and in a subtle and humane way shared their new hopes and remembered their losses. [Source: https://web-geofisica.ineter.gob.ni//sis/f-mana.html]. In December of 1982 I spent the 10th anniversary of that quake with people from Managua who had made a new life on the Atlantic Coast. Cotton and other exports fueled the growth of the capital through the 1950s and 1960s. What to do with a dusty and weedy capital without a center? The first time was 1931; the second, 1972. The sweetheart of the Xolotlan lake. The downtown lingered, scraped clean of debris save the shells of high rises that stood like zombie buildings, dead yet inhabited by a growing underclass. In 1978, an insurrection called for by a revolutionary coalition named after the anti-imperialist leader from the 1920s, Augusto César Sandino, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) exploded. Unwittingly, president Ronald Reagan determined Managua’s urban history. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 1972 - Managua is devastated by an earthquake that kills between 5,000 and 10,000 people. 4 (2015), 663. [9] The capital’s demise became Somoza’s bonanza. The most enthusiastic boosters remembered Managua then “as the Switzerland of Central America, due to its beauty, ornamentation, and cleanliness.”[5] If that energetic example of peripheral capitalism was not the picture of recovery after disaster, nothing is. [15] Yader Padro Reyes, “Instalan réplica de Avenida Roosevelt en el Paseo del Xolotlán,” El 19 Digital, July 17, 2014, https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:20649-instalan-replica-de-avenida-roosevelt-en-el-paseo-xolotlan- . By the 1970s, in the aftermath of the earthquake, the FSLN exploded onto Nicaragua’s political scene as a fully-armed rebel group with the backing of a huge number of poor Nicaraguans. In other words, Managua would be subject to earthquakes forever (Figure 5). The earthquake left approximately 10,000 dead and some 50,000 families homeless, and destroyed 80 percent of Managua's commercial buildings. The earthquake severely damaged 27 square kilometres (10 sq mi) and destroyed 13 square kilometres (5.0 sq mi) in the city centre. Nicaragua gained independence from Spa Detail of mural about the 1972 earthquakes in the Palacio Nacional, painted by Felipe Castellanos Centurion. Learn how your comment data is processed. Managua, which lies on the southern shore of Lake Xolotlán, near the western coast of Nicaragua, is situated within an active volcanic zone known as the Central American Volcanic Chain. La Prensa is a Nicaraguan newspaper, with offices in the capital Managua.Its current daily circulation is placed at 42,000. On December 22, 1972, as the city glowed in the bright colors of Christmas lights, a tremor occurred around 10 p.m., a pre-shock that Managuans could not know presaged a calamity. A final crackdown on civil liberties by Tachito Somoza in 1978 led to full on civil war, followed by Somoza’s resignation in 1979. Two-thirds of Managua's 1,000,000 residents were displaced and faced food shortage and disease, and dry-season winds worsened the problem with fires created by the disaster. The dictator demolished the city further but did not manage to destroy the spirit of its population. The earthquake left approximately 10,000 dead and some 50,000 families homeless. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. The government, thus, came up with projects to turn the downtown area into green parks and open spaces while it drew up “ambitious plans” to address the housing shortage, improve low income neighborhoods, regulate urban land use, systematize property titles, and more. The city centre is no longer clearly defined, as buildings have been constructed away from the city centre. Somoza reacted to the uprising by ordering the air force to bomb Managua, that is, the poor neighborhoods easily identifiable in the capital under the class-segregationist reconstruction scheme he had approved and supervised (Figure 3). Media related to 1972 Nicaragua earthquake at Wikimedia Commons. With the personal fortune of the strongman at stake, there was no doubt that Managua would recover. The zone of dipping is initiated at the surface of the Middle America Trench, which extends 4 to 5 kilometers deep along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Costa Rica. Examination of the fault lines indicated a lateral motion moving in a northeasterly direction and aftershock data has revealed at least one of the faults extends from the surface to a depth of 8 to 10 kilometers beneath the city of Managua. On his death in 1967, his brother, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, became the next dictator of Nicaragua. The Nicaraguan government appealed for aid, and the government accepted aid from countries like the United States and Mexico and some 25 other countries, worth millions of dollars. 1974 - 1979: Anastasio Somoza Debayle: Second term. Visitors make much of the peculiar way in which Nicaraguans give directions. ( Log Out /  [17] Stephen Kinzer, “A Faded City Brightens in Nicaragua,” New York Times, February 17, 2002. The return of anti-Sandinista exiles from the United States after 1990 reinforced class segregation in residential housing development and commercial mall construction as well. Support for the Sandinistas ballooned after the earthquake, especially when U.S President Jimmy Carterwithdrew American support for the regime for human rights reasons. [11] D. Brown and L. Bornstein, “Whither Managua? [7] George Black, “The 1972 Earthquake and after: Somocismo in Crisis,” in Nicaragua: Unfinished Revolution: The New Nicaragua Reader, Peter Rosset and John Vandermeer, eds. The reconstruction of the city became “collateral damage” of Cold War high politics, condemning Managua, in the judgment of The New York Times, to be “still among the ugliest capital cities in the hemisphere.”[17] It all goes to show that the recovery and reconstruction process after an earthquake can be as unpredictable as the movements of the Earth itself. The replay of 1931 was uncanny and magnified, although not unexpected. [4] But rather than a simple crustal movement between the two plates the earthquake was believed to have been caused by a shallow adjustment to geological pressure at the south western corner of the Caribbean plate. At least 20,000 people suffered serious injuries; some 250,000 Managuans lost their homes. One might ask, for instance, if the 1931 earthquake had the unanticipated political consequence of helping the Somozas come to power. [13] Dennis Rodgers, “An Illness Called Managua,” Crisis States Working Papers Series, No. [6] Hundreds of smaller aftershocks shook the detritus of the capital in the weeks and months to come, while the fires that erupted in the aftermath of the three earthquakes razed everything in their path. Despite this and the magnitude of the devastation, the aid was not distributed well and the ruling Liberal-Conservative Junta, led by President Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was the target of criticism and was accused of stockpiling foreign aid which never reached the victims of the earthquake. Sandino was replaced by his son Luis Somoza Debayle. This grew into a revolt that became the Nicaraguan Revolution, in which Somoza was overthrown in 1979. When this embezzlement became apparent, it helped fan already existing opposition to the regime throughout all levels of the Nicaraguan society. Established a revolutionary government could not ignore knew the city rested on active! 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