Dinorah Sampson, Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s lover who became the most influential woman of her time in Nicaragua

On a road that winds through Miami’s Caballero Rivero Woodlawn North Cemetery, in USA, a gray pantheon with a blue door stands out from the rest of the tombs.

It is not ostentatious or attracts much attention except for one detail: the surname is written on the front Somoza.

There are the remains of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the third leader of the brutal Somoza dynasty – after his brother Luis and his father Anastasio Somoza García – who ruled Nicaragua between 1937 and 1979.

Somoza died on September 17, 1980 in an attack in Asunción, Paraguay, where he was exiled after the Sandinista revolution the previous year.

His five children, all of them born on American soil, decided to take his remains to Miami.

The second surname that appears in the cemetery pantheon is Portocarrero, because there is also the body of the American Hope Portocarrero, who was his first cousin, wife and mother of his children, and who died in October 1991.

Although the marriage lasted almost three decades, the relationship ended in separation in 1976.

And it is that in parallel, for about two decades, Somoza had an affair with another woman: Dinorah Sampson.

At first he kept it hidden, but over the years the relationship became public and she knew how to take advantage of his influence.

Beautiful and superb

Dinorah Sampson was born in León, Nicaragua, on November 23, 1947, in a humble and hard-working family.

“Dinorah was a girl simple in her youth and very beautiful”, Explains the journalist Nicolás López Maltez, director of the newspaper La Estrella de Nicaragua, which is published in Miami.

Others describe it as “Arrogant and arrogant”, According to the book“ From Mrs. Hanna to Dinorah ”, by Viktor Morales Henriquez.

The little that is known about his professional life is that he worked as a telephone operator in a Nicaraguan radio station.

There are at least two versions of how Somoza met who would openly be his lover for almost two decades. Some sources claim that someone introduced them at a party. Others, that it was at a funeral.

The two agree that from the moment he saw her, when she was 17 and he was 39, fell in love immediately.

The contrast between the two women was obvious.

“Hope loved Tacho (as Somoza was called) but spent much of her time trying to soften his rough edges and turn him into a gentleman,” wrote the late New Zealand journalist and historian Bernard Diederich in his book Somoza and the Legacy of U.S. Involvement in Central America (“Somoza and the legacy of the United States’ participation in Central America”).

With Dinorah Sampson, meanwhile, “I had passion”, assures López Maltez to BBC Mundo.

Influence and favors

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was elected president on February 5, 1967, after a bloody political campaign, and ruled until 1972. He then returned to be head of state in 1974 until he was overthrown in 1979.

Meanwhile a crisis was brewing in the country as a result of poverty and violence. Many young people joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) to fight against the Somoza government, among them the current Nicaraguan, Daniel Ortega.

Somoza minimized the situation and continued with his activities, while the presence of Dinorah Sampson was gaining prominence.

“Hope was by her husband’s side during the rallies, but in the front row, in the place of honor, was Dinorah,” wrote Bernard Diederich, who interviewed Somoza on several occasions, in his book.

Dinorah Sampson had a great ability to exploit his privileged position in Nicaragua.

“For years he flew on the airline from Somoza to Miami, always returning with contraband merchandise with which he passed through customs before being received by his bodyguards and a driver in a Mercedes Benz,” Diederich explained.

As the relationship became public, opportunists appeared asking Sampson to intercede for them to get to Somoza.

“But she didn’t need to ask Somoza for those favors. If a friend wanted something from the Managua mayor’s office, she did not speak to Somoza, she spoke directly to the mayor. And he granted the favor, whatever it was, ”says López Maltez.

As a result, Sampson grew in influence and asked for something in return for favors. “Thus, it was acquiring a side power that was growing more and more ”, he explains.

“She appeared as a promoter of those communions for the poor. She once bought 500 dresses and threw a big party. Who pays for this? Where did the money come from? Sin was not communion, the sin was to abuse state funds”Says López Maltez, who hosted a news program in Nicaragua during part of the Somoza government.

Dinorah Sampson also had a familiar side away from the spotlight.

“I met her when I was 9 years old. She lived in the presidential house. Everyone knew it was the mistress. But to me she was the general’s wife“, The writer Ligia Urroz tells BBC Mundo, who has just published the book” Somoza “where she tells how her personal relationship with Anastasio Somoza Debayle and Dinorah Sampson was.

Urroz is the granddaughter of Humberto Argüello, who was Nicaraguan consul general in Mexico for 16 years. During her childhood, she spent vacations with the couple on the beaches of Nicaragua.

“Era an extremely intelligent and seductive woman. To all the people around the general, she he could handle it as he pleased”, Urroz describes.

Earthquake and separation

On December 23, 1972, a series of earthquakes shook Managua. The consequences were catastrophic.

An estimated 20,000 people died and as many were injured. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless.

This natural disaster added to poor and slow government assistance made the social crisis deepen throughout the country.

By 1974, “the daily plight of the peasants can be summed up in misery, hunger, malnutrition, fear, night blindness (the product of malnutrition), premature death and illiteracy,” wrote journalist Alan Riding in the New York Times on 31 December of that year.

Meanwhile, Somoza reformed the Constitution to retain the presidency until 1981 and had ordered the construction of “El Retiro” in Managua for Dinorah, a Texas-style ranch.

“When the wife and mistress attended the same party in the early 1970s, the crowd (which used to be) around Hope gradually narrowed and came closer to the circle around Dinorah. Politicians and seekers of favors asked for invitations to private parties in the town of Dinorah ”, detailed in his book Bernard Diederich.

Hope Portocarrero decided to move to London in 1976. Later, after Somoza’s death, she married American millionaire Archie Baldocchi.

Dinorah Sampson became the unofficial first lady.

It was she who was with Somoza when he suffered a heart attack in 1977 that caused him to be rushed to Miami. She was also the one who always accompanied him in front of the acceptance gaze of his children.

Exile

Somoza downplayed the situation in Nicaragua and, at the same time, said that he was the victim of “international communist aggression.”

But the social crisis, the tens of thousands of deaths, and the Sandinista revolution meant that left the country on July 17, 1979, considered by many Nicaraguans as “the day of joy” because it signified the end of the Somoza dynasty.

Several articles in the Miami Herald newspaper of the time describe Somoza’s exile in that American city as full of eccentricities.

It should be remembered that Somoza spent much of his childhood in the US He even studied at the West Point American Military Academy and his English was better than his Spanish.

He also had close ties with Cuban exiles and businesses in Florida, as part of a family fortune that before exile ranged from US $ 100 million to US $ 1 billion, according to the same newspaper.

But things did not go as he had planned and he had to leave the United States. His exile took him to Asunción, Paraguay. Dinorah Sampson, at that time, was still by his side.

the murder

Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated on September 17, 1980 in the Paraguayan capital. He was 54 years old.

He was always guarded and moved with an armored car. Except for that day when he went out with his driver and his financial advisor to the bank.

“I asked him if he was going to come back for lunch and he said yes: ‘I always come back to your side. I will always be by your side Dinita. I’ll be with you my whole life, ‘”Dinorah Sampson said days after Somoza’s death, according to an article in the Miami Herald on September 21, 1980.

That morning the unarmored Mercedes Benz car was ambushed by an armed group. Somoza was shot at least 18 times. Then a bazooka wrecked the vehicle.

The attack was awarded by an Argentine guerrilla group the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), led by Enrique Gorriarán Merlo.

“Let me see it, let me see it, I want to see it (…) Tell me it’s not true,” cried Dinorah Sampson sobbing in the middle of the street in front of the destroyed car.

According to press reports at the time, she cried over the coffin in which there was a wreath of red flowers with a note: “Adorable Tacho, only death can separate us. Your love, Dinita ”.

Later he would have said: “The loss of my 18-year-old friend has devastated me … I feel very lonely.”

Somoza’s children, who had flown to find her body, agreed with her to take it to the United States.

Life in the US and anonymity

Since Anastasio Somoza Debayle was assassinated more than 40 years ago, Dinorah Sampson remains anonymous.

He has not given interviews and only spoke to the press in 1997 when he appeared spontaneously at an auction of Somoza belongings.

She had kept memorabilia that included photos, intimate diaries and even a pistol in a warehouse in Miami. But he stopped paying and things ended.

“I want it to be publicly known that in no way am I selling the things that belonged to the general (Somoza) and the story of my life with him,” said Dinorah Sampson, as published in the Miami Herald on May 23, 1997.

“I feel as hurt and hurt as when the general was assassinated”, he claimed.

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