The Conservative Party, the only legal opposition, told the Associated Press that 52 of its 132 candidates had withdrawn voluntarily in protest of the Somoza regime. A government spokesperson said early returns show that only 143,000 of the 700,000 eligible Nicaraguans voted.

The elections took place on the fourteenth day of a general strike that has posed the most powerful challenge to the Nicaraguan government since the beginning of the Somoza family rule in 1933.

The upsurge began January 11, when more than 30,000 people gathered in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua to attend the funeral of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was murdered the previous day. Chamorro was the editor and publisher of La Prensa, the most prestigious capitalist daily in the country.

Chamorro’s assassination was widely considered the work of the regime, anxious to slap down a potential challenger in the 1981 presidential elections and a popular critic of government corruption and tyranny.

Chamorro’s funeral was followed by forty-eight hours of demonstrations, burning of automobiles, and sacking of various Somoza clan businesses.

By January 23, the protests had grown to a general strike supported by unions and businesses. The strike has paralyzed 90 percent of Nicaragua’s commerce and industry.  
 
February 16, 1953
NEW YORK--Victorious settlement of the ten-day tugboat strike of the Marine Division of the Int’l Longshoremen’s Ass’n AFL, was announced this morning. The strike was highlighted by the dramatic action of the ILA rank and file, which walked off the docks in support of the strike and utilized their time off to conduct mass demonstrations demanding the ouster of ILA president Joseph Ryan and his cohorts.

The dock workers shut down most of the port for several days in support of the legitimate demands of the tugboat workers, despite their hatred of Captain Wm. Bradley, president of the striking local. In 1951, when the ILA membership shut down the port for twenty-five days in a movement to scrap Ryan’s sellout contract, Bradley ran full-page ads in the press denouncing them as "communists" and attempted to run scabs through their picket lines in support of Ryan’s effort to smash the strike.

The action of the men in extending support to the strike and at the same time intensifying their struggle against the corrupt Ryan leadership did much to affect a rapid settlement. The tugboat workers have been living under a contract that provided a pay scale of $1.36 an hour for deck hands to a maximum of $2.35 for captains. When the strike was declared the operators stood firm on their offer of an eight-cent-an-hour increase. Within hours after the general walkout and the demonstrations the operators and union officials went into virtually uninterrupted negotiations and emerged with an agreement for a seventeen-cent-an-hour increase, plus seven new fringe benefits.  
 
 
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