Somoza Debayle

In 1983, he starred with Fanny Ardant in filmmaker François Truffaut’s final credit, the tepid mystery-comedy “Confidentially Yours,” and took a small role in the Nick Nolte film “Under Fire,” as a shady Frenchman on the CIA payroll in dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s Nicaragua.

Reichler considers Ortega “even more effective” at stifling opposition than Anastasio Somoza Debayle had been.

Before he was murdered in 1978, journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro wrote an open letter to Nicaragua's dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Although less well-known than fellow guerrilla leader and current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, Edén Pastora, who died June 16 at 83, was one of the leading figures of the left-wing Sandinista revolution that toppled the U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979.

Pastora, in a life of danger and adventure that stretched from the jungles of the Miskito Coast to the halls of Congress in Washington, was instrumental in toppling the military dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza DeBayle, the last of the line in a repressive family dynasty that had ruled their Central American country for nearly a half century.