Lawrence Pezzullo | Ushered Somoza out, 91

Lawrence Pezzullo, 91, an American diplomat who brokered the 1979 resignation of Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle, whose family had ruled the country for more than four decades, died July 26 at his home in Baltimore.

The cause was heart ailments, said a son, Ralph Pezzullo.

A career Foreign Service officer, Mr. Pezzullo was known as a straight-talking pragmatist, more interested in facilitating negotiations than relaying threats of military action - a fact that sometimes placed him at odds with his superiors in Washington.

He was serving as U.S. ambassador to Uruguay when President Jimmy Carter reassigned him to Nicaragua in April 1979. His predecessor in Managua, Mauricio Solaún, had abruptly resigned amid the escalating civil war between the left-wing Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Somoza government.

Somoza, a rotund five-star general known as El Jefe, had promised to "fight to the death" rather than relinquish the political power that his family had exerted since the late 1930s, when his father, head of Nicaragua's National Guard, seized power and established the Somoza dynasty.

Mr. Pezzullo, a veteran diplomat with experience in Vietnam, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, and Guatemala, was tasked with persuading Somoza to resign, thereby bringing the war to an end.

He succeeded, with Nicaragua's foreign minister calling him "the best U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua in this century." - Washington Post