{"product_id":"2940015109511","title":"Jose Santos Zelaya President of Nicaragua","description":"Nook version of vintage magazine article originally published in 1908.  Contains lots of great info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 100 years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRead excerpt -\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf Zelaya, the youth, we know but little, because there is little of interest to know. He was of \"unmixed blood,\" the son of a wealthy coffee-planter. So he could claim an aristocracy of birth, as such things go in Central America. But much the same as other Spanish-American youths of the upper class, he spent his early days in gambling and cock-fighting. He entered the army at an early age. What special talents he may have possessed still lay dormant. His initiative and executive powers did not show themselves until his vocation of an officer merged by easy and natural transitions into that of a politician. Then the man awa¬kened, the organizer found himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eZelaya also saw that his world was an austerely provincial and isolated one. He felt the necessity for outside ideas, for a saner and wider perspective of things. So for practically ten years he became a looker-on, a student of life beyond his native re¬public. It was a big slice from a predetermined career; but it paid. Zelaya lived and studied in France, in the Lycee of Versailles, in Belgium, in London, in New York. Then he went back to Nicaragua, to the dusty little sun-baked plain and the dirty little city of Managua. He went back more or less of a cosmopolite, a cynical and somewhat hardened student of history, still intent on his original purpose, still ambitious to the uttermost. He had stood by and watched the outside world conducting its vast businesses; he had beheld and probed about the machinery of its great govern¬ments. He had come into touch with the unrest and the individualism of the century end. He had hardened into a Nietzsche-like egoist, intent on his own ends, fixed in his own methods to attain those ends.\u003cbr\u003eIn the Nicaragua of the early nineties the dictator-to-be must have seen a field some¬what to his liking. The son of the soil in that republic is an easy-going and pliant peon, a gentle-natured provincial. He is dominated, for all his admixture of blood and color, by a deep pride of race, leaving him tinder to the flame of the patriotic demagogue. He is meek, but not mean-spirited, and he is reasonably industrious. He is illiterate, for in his land there are no public schools; and he is deeply, if primor¬dially, religious. He is mobile, emotional, excitable, easily led. He is a lover of pomp and of ceremonial; and before a uniform embellished with sufficient gold lace he will invariably prostrate himself. This means that a pilgrimage of a few dashing officers in full uniform through any remoter section of the country will result in an immediate mushroom army, a seemingly miraculous band of patient-spirited conscripts from Heaven knows where, quite ready to face and fight for Heaven knows what. When driven beyond their endurance, it is true, they desert. When conscripted with a fre¬quency that causes even their docile spirits to rebel, they are rounded up and taken by force, and marched to the capital in chains and manacles. Even a lasso is not an un¬heard of thing in the making up of a Cen¬tral American army.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eZelaya, as the returned cosmopolite, was also better able to understand the little pinchbeck aristocracy of Managua. He beheld in it a contentious, ceremonially mendacious, grasping, unscrupulous, and idle band of parasites, each with his eyes on the presidency — for managed with even moderate discretion the rulership of such a republic can be made to yield dividends of bewildering dimensions. If this be so of one republic, ruminated this calm, thought¬ful man of destiny, how much more so it would be of five republics thrown into one. Every machete and car-wheel, bean of coffee and pound of rubber, that comes in or goes out of such a country would have to pay tribute to him. From the Atlantic to the Pacific his hand would surrender every concession and dole out every monopoly. No capital could enter that country, and no enterprise could be set up within it, without his consent thereto and his power of levying thereon. And the union of these five con¬tentious states into one would do infinitely more than obviate the waste ensuing from tribal warfare and internecine aggression. It would do more than leave him at the head of a potentially wealthy and only partially developed country. It would find him the supreme dictator of \"the United States of Central America,\" a formidable nation of millions, of magnificent harbors and im¬pregnable mountain recesses, of a strategic position uniquely enviable, of ample endow¬ments for all movements of defense and offense, when the occasion arose. Mexico need no longer he deferred to; her success and her rivalry need no longer be feared.","brand":"history-bytes","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47084077187312,"sku":"2940015109511","price":5.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940015109511_p0.jpg?v=1763627092","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940015109511","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}