Anastasio Somoza Debayle

President of Nicaragua

5 December 1925 León, Nicaragua

17 September 1980(1980-09-17) (54) Asunción, Paraguay

1 December 1974 – 17 July 1979

President of Nicaragua from 1974 to 1979 This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in Spanish. (May 2020) Click for important translation instructions. Machine translation like DeepL or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 4,492 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary Content in this edit is translated from the existing Spanish Wikipedia article at ]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated page}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.This article includes a list of general references, but it remains largely unverified because it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (September 2013 ) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Somoza and the second or maternal family name is Debayle. Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza Debayle (Spanish:  ; 5 December 1925 – 17 September 1980) was a Nicaraguan dictator and officially the President of Nicaragua from 1 May 1967 to 1 May 1972 and from 1 December 1974 to 17 July 1979. As head of the National Guard, he was de facto ruler of the country between 1972 and 1974 even during the period when he was not the de jure ruler. Somoza Debayle succeeded his older brother in office. He was the last member of the Somoza family to be president, ending a dynasty that had been in power since 1936. After insurgents led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (Spanish: Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional; FSLN) were closing in on Managua in July 1979, Somoza fled Nicaragua. Power was ceded to the Junta of National Reconstruction. He was assassinated in 1980 while in exile in Paraguay.