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Adolfo Diaz

Adolfo Diaz (15 July 1875 – 29 January 1964) was President of Nicaragua from 9 May 1911 to 1 January 1917 (succeeding Juan Jose Estrada and preceding Emiliano Chamorro Vargas) and from 14 November 1926 to 1 January 1929 (succeeding Sebastian Urriza and preceding Jose Maria Moncada). He was a member of the Conservative Party of Nicaragua.

Biography[]

Adolfo Diaz was born in Alajuela, Costa Rica in 1875, the son of Nicaraguan parents. He worked for an American mining company and helped channel funds to the revolt against Liberal president Jose Santos Zelaya. He became Vice President in 1910 and President a year later, and he was forced to rely on the US Marine Corps to put down a Liberal revolt. A contingent of Marines remained in Nicaragua for over a decade, and, in 1914, Diaz thanked the United States by giving them sole rights to the building of the Nicaragua Canal. After his term as president ended in 1917, he briefly lived in the USA, but he returned in 1926 after a coup by Emiliano Chamorro Vargas failed to win support. During his second term, the Liberals almost seized the capital of Managua, but the USA brokered a power-sharing agreement between the Liberals and the ruling Conservatives. In 1928, after elections supervised by the Marines, Jose Maria Moncada was elected to succeed Diaz, who took up permanent residency in the USA after Anastasio Somoza Garcia's seizure of power in a 1936 coup. He lived in New York City, Miami, and New Orleans before finally settling in Costa Rica, where he died in 1964.

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