hace 1 semana
6
Humberto Ortega Saavedra participated in only two major guerrilla operations in his lifetime, and both went very wrong. The first was in 1967, when a Sandinista commando unit attempted to attack the convoy of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in Managua. Ortega Saavedra was arrested. The second was in 1969 in Alajuela, Costa Rica, when he devised and led a plot to try to free Carlos Fonseca Amador, a hagiographic figure of Sandinismo, from prison. Again, everything failed and not only was he arrested, he was seriously wounded by two .38 and .45 caliber bullets: one went through his chest, grazing his heart, and the other, the larger round, hit his right shoulder. It paralyzed him and he began to bleed to death. He was saved at the San Juan de Dios Hospital in San José, but he lost the use of his hands and fingers. The aftereffects proved fatal for his life as a guerrilla. He was left unfit for combat, something that was decisive for his political and military career: he became an insurrectional and warlike “strategist” that led him to become the head of the Sandinista Popular Army (SPA), after the Somoza dynasty was overthrown in 1979. He became an unavoidable and feared Sandinista figure in the following decade, and the first military chief in democracy who was key to the professionalization of the armed forces in the 1990s.
English (US) · 
Spanish (CO) ·