Nicaragua

Nicaragua, officially the republic, is the largest country of Central America, between Honduras and Costa Rica with both Caribbean and Pacific coasts, and Managua as its capital and largest city. The September 1821 Act of Independence dissolved the Captaincy General of Guatemala, and Nicaragua passed into the First Mexican Empire and then the Federal Republic of Central America. Invited by Liberals in 1855, the American filibuster William Walker made himself president after a farcical election in 1856 and lasted less than a year before the armies of five republics drove him out in 1857, opening three decades of Conservative rule. Mosquitia stayed semi-independent until José Santos Zelaya occupied it in 1894 and renamed it Zelaya Department. The twentieth century brought the Somoza hereditary dictatorship of forty-three years, ended when the Sandinistas deposed the family in 1979, whose fortune was then reckoned between half a billion and a billion and a half dollars.