Death of Somoza reveals the inside story of the assassination of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Asuncion, Paraguay in 1980. Alegria and Flakoll, on the recommendation of Julio Cortazar, met "Ramon," a leader in the Argentinian Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT) and with his help were able to interview all the survivors of the commando team that carried out the "bringing to justice" of Somoza. Alegria and Flakoll rewove these testimonies into a narrative that reads like a thriller and gives a vivid picture of the political and social climate of the time. Enlivened by its colorful cast of characters, Death of Somoza is the definitive account of how Anastasio Somoza Debayle was brought to justice. This story is not an apology for terrorism, but rather the chronicle of a tyrannicide.

Tells how Somoza's government in Nicaragua fell.

THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning, which can be brought to light by interpreting certain repeated words and images. As the main plot and also the translation of the manuscript advances, there are certain sinister coincidences, and it seems that the text is addressing him personally and in an increasingly menacing manner... THE ATHENIAN MURDERS constitutes a highly compelling, entertaining and intelligent game about the different ways we can see and read reality, about our refusal to take things 'as they are' and our need to interpret hidden meanings into everyday life.

Those who survived the brutal dictatorship of the Somoza family have tended to portray the rise of the women’s movement and feminist activism as part of the overall story of the anti-Somoza resistance. But this depiction of heroic struggle obscures a much more complicated history. As Victoria González-Rivera reveals in this book, some Nicaraguan women expressed early interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination, and this interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for female suffrage and access to education by the 1880s. By the 1920s a feminist movement had emerged among urban, middle-class women, and it lasted for two more decades until it was eclipsed in the 1950s by a nonfeminist movement of mainly Catholic, urban, middle-class and working-class women who supported the liberal, populist, patron-clientelistic regime of the Somozas in return for the right to vote and various economic, educational, and political opportunities. Counterintuitively, it was actually the Somozas who encouraged women's participation in the public sphere (as long as they remained loyal Somocistas). Their opponents, the Sandinistas and Conservatives, often appealed to women through their maternal identity. What emerges from this fine-grained analysis is a picture of a much more complex political landscape than that portrayed by the simplifying myths of current Nicaraguan historiography, and we can now see why and how the Somoza dictatorship did not endure by dint of fear and compulsion alone.

This volume is a valuable re-assessment of the Nicaraguan Revolution by a Marxist historian of Latin American political history. It shows that the FSLN (‘the Sandinistas’), with politics principally shaped by Soviet and Cuban Communism, never had a commitment to genuine democracy either within the revolutionary movement or within society at large; that the FSLN’s lack of commitment to democracy was a key factor in the way that revolution was betrayed from the 1970s to the 1990s; and that the FSLN’s lack of rank-and-file democracy left all decision-making to the National Directorate and ultimately placed that power in the hands of Daniel Ortega. Pursuing his narrative into the present, La Botz shows that, once their would-be bureaucratic ruling class project was defeated, Ortega and the FSLN leadership turned to an alliance with the capitalist class.