Arturo Cruz

Arturo José Cruz Porras (December 18, 1923 – July 9, 2013), sometimes called Arturo Cruz, Sr. to distinguish him from his son, was a Nicaraguan banker and technocrat. He became prominent in politics during the Sandinista (FSLN) era. After repeatedly resigning from positions in protest, opinion divided between those who lauded him as a statesman and man of principle, and those who derided him as an ineffectual hand-wringer.

Cruz grew up in Jinotepe, Nicaragua. His father despised Anastasio Somoza García, despite the family's traditional Liberal loyalties. Cruz graduated from the military academy in 1944, but refused his commission rather than serve Somoza's dictatorship. He went on to attend Georgetown University in the United States. Cruz participated in a 1947 coup plot against Somoza, for which he was imprisoned for four months. After joining the April Rebellion of 1954, together with his brother-in-law, Adolfo Báez Bone, and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, he was jailed again for about a year, while Báez was executed. However, his wife persuaded him not to join Edmundo and Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro in their November 1960 rising, which included an attack on the Jinotepe barracks. He would avoid rebel politics for nearly two decades.

In 1969, Cruz became an official at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C.. There, he was approached by the FSLN in 1977. He became a member of Los Doce, the Group of Twelve establishment figures who voiced support for the Sandinista struggle against dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Their backing of the Sandinistas' popular front convinced many Nicaraguans that the FSLN's appeal had broadened beyond its communist roots, and moved the country towards the full-scale insurrection that toppled the régime in July 1979.

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