ABSTRACT
Each major Nicaraguan social class made significant contributions to the breakdown of the Somoza dynasty regime. The regime—Somoza, his cohort, the Liberal Nationalist party, and the National Guard—had become so isolated that eventually only brute military force held the government in power. By exposing its activists to repression, the Independent Liberal party (PLI) radicalized several individuals who later came to play a major historical role against the Somoza dynasty. By its early and persistent opposition to the Somoza dynasty, the relatively small PLI catalyzed major opposition coalitions that demonstrated the futility of peaceful struggle against Somocismo and socialized many rebels and revolutionaries. University students, and sometimes secondary school students, provided a nearly constant thorn in the side of the Somoza dynasty. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, leaders of the 1944-1948 generation together with the early 1950s Matagalpa contingent helped forge a second generation of student opponents to the Somoza dynasty.
