Do we like them?

Do we like José Santos Zelaya?

Our score: 4 out of 10. A 16-year strongman with real reforms and a contested human cost, on a thin record we could only partly read.

José Santos Zelaya ran Nicaragua for 16 years, from 1893 until he quit in December 1909. He was a Liberal strongman in the age of canal politics, and that is what made him a problem for Washington. One account says he angered the US by seeking more independence, courting European investment and weighing a Nicaraguan canal to rival Panama.

The story that ended his rule is a grim one. Two Americans, Leonard Groce and Lee Roy Cannon, joined a US-backed rebellion led by Juan José Estrada. They were caught mining the San Juan River in an admitted attempt to sink a Nicaraguan troop transport, then shot at El Castillo. Executed Today says Zelaya ordered it; the page is a historical summary, not a court finding.

The US Secretary of State, Philander Knox, called his regime “a blot upon the history of Nicaragua” and used the killings as a pretext to step in. Knox's legal opinion held that the two men were entitled to prisoner-of-war status, which made Zelaya a war criminal in Washington's eyes. By late December, after US marines landed, Zelaya resigned. Whether you read it as a justified execution of men caught in the act or as an excuse for imperial muscle depends on where you stand.

On our harm test, there is nothing in what we could read about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and it would be unfair to hold a 19th-century politician to modern culture-war yardsticks. What counts here is the authoritarian rule and the shooting of the two prisoners. Critics call him a dictator, and that label sits on the record even though we only had thin sources. We could not open the main academic biographies, so treat this as a sketch.

The good stuff is that Nicaragua has since honoured him. A National Assembly decree dated March 2011 declared him a national hero, which is a posthumous honour from his own country, not a neutral verdict. We found no account of private cruelty or personal charity either way. That's honestly the whole list we could verify.