http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101229/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_nicaragua_venezuela_perez MANAGUA, Nicaragua – A former vice president in Nicaragua's Sandinista government said Wednesday the movement received crucial financial aid to oust a dictator from Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, who died Saturday.
Novelist Sergio Ramirez told the Managua newspaper La Prensa that Perez gave the movement more than $1 million to help the guerrillas topple Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Ramirez said that fellow novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the one who first put the Sandinistas in touch with Perez in 1997. Calls to Garcia Marquez' number in Mexico City, where he lives, went unanswered Wednesday.
Perez gave "more than $100,000 per month for the revolutionary cause" and also aided by immediately recognizing the new rebel government as soon as it seized its first city in Nicaragua, Ramirez said.