Escape from Managua

Our TAHAL team was completing five irrigation projects in Nicaragua, while all around the war was going on. That was in the end of 1979. Our leader, Chaim Ben Ezra, told me that the payment was conditional to the delivery of the drawings and documents, and I was determined to get the project over the end line. We were told to hoard food and I bought in the market a sack of beans and a sack of rice, enough for several months. The house I was living in Ticomo, near the university, had been robbed one night and the cleaning girl was missing with her things. I remember that I went to the central police station in Managua to receive a paper for the insurance, although I found nothing missing. No body asked me anything as I went in, there were some people asking to visit detainees, but nothing hysterical nor a warlike environment. There was no one to receive my complaint. Later in the office they told me that I have been in the "boca del leon", people was dead afraid of the place, known as the main torture center. I saw nothing out of the usual.

Then we were told that the team was going to be evacuated and each Israeli had to be at the airport next morning at 0500 AM. At that stage there were already shooting in the streets. The very same afternoon I took three copies of the plans and the files and went to the Central Bank to deliver the project papers. No one told me to do it, I did it because I loved Ben Ezra. There was no one to receive it, at last I found a frightened secretary and made her sign an ad-hoc receipt. Then next morning drove through the deserted streets of the capital to the airport. There was large plane that was being loaded with a piano and wooden boxes. Our plane arrived and next we landed in San Jose de Costa Rica. Ben Ezra and the Israeli Ambassador Olami were waiting for us and we were let in without border police checks and visas. Later we realized that the plane being loaded had been Somoza's escape plane to Miami, probably sent by the Americans to ease the transfer the power to the Sandinista rebels favored by Jimmy Carter. Later, Somoza found refuge in Paraguay, where he was killed in a faux-Parisian whorehouse.