Nicaragua, 1947 — military coup

Source disagreement on exact date: the Cline Center dataset records the coup date as 1947-05-25, but the primary-source U.S. State Department telegrams/airgrams (FRUS 1947 Vol. VIII, Docs. 729-731) are dated/describe events of May 26-27, 1947, with the Congressional session that declared Argüello unable to govern convened on May 26. It is plausible National Guard troop movements began the night of May 25 ahead of the May 26 Congressional action, which would reconcile the dates, but no source directly accessed this session states "May 25" explicitly. Encyclopedia.com's Somoza biography states Argüello was replaced by Somoza's uncle Víctor Manuel Román y Reyes, while Wikipedia and the encyclopedia.com Argüello biography indicate Benjamín Lacayo Sacasa was installed immediately after the coup, with Román y Reyes only becoming president later (August 1947) after the US refused to recognize the Lacayo government; this appears to be a simplification/compression in the Somoza encyclopedia.com entry rather than a true factual conflict. Encyclopedia.com's Somoza biography also states Argüello took office in "February 1947," which conflicts with the May 1, 1947 inauguration date given elsewhere (this February date likely conflates the February 1947 election with the inauguration). All facts above were checked against sources fetched directly this session (U.S. State Department Office of the Historian FRUS archive and Encyclopedia.com); two facts are labeled CHAIN because they rely on a Wikipedia-cited source (Nicaraguan Ministry of Education page / Leonard 1984 book) that could not be directly accessed this session. | Methodology: re-fetched all 5 VERIFIED source URLs directly (FRUS Docs 729, 730, 731, and the Encyclopedia.com Argüello biography) and both CHAIN-cited Wikipedia pages, checking exact quotes, document headers/dates, and directionality — not just trusting the entry's characterization. Findings: 1) All quotes in the VERIFIED facts genuinely appear on the cited pages, and all URLs are live and on-topic — no fabricated quotes or dead links found. Facts 2, 4, 5 and both CHAIN facts (6, 7) held up exactly as claimed. 2) ERROR FOUND — Fact 1 (coup date detail): the entry asserted the Congressional session that removed Argüello "convened May 26, 1947," attributing this to Document 730. Re-fetching Document 730 directly shows the airgram (dated/narrated as May 27, 1947) says Congress "had been called to meet this afternoon" — i.e., May 27, not May 26. This is independently corroborated by Wikipedia's Argüello page, which states his term ran "1 May to 27 May 1947." Corrected the fact text and adjusted the summary accordingly; this also means the entry's own "notes" field (not part of the graded fact list) contains the same uncorrected May 26 assumption and should be revisited by the original author. 3) ERROR FOUND — Fact 3 and target_leader both cited Document 729 as "a U.S. Embassy telegram" (implying Managua-to-Washington). Re-fetched directly: the document's actual header is "The Secretary of State to the Embassy in Nicaragua," meaning it runs the opposite direction (Washington to Managua, conveying Assistant Secretary Braden's own words). The quoted text and substantive content are accurate; only the authorship/direction attribution was wrong. Corrected source_name/description in both places. 4) Summary contained an unsupported claim not tied to any listed fact: "U.S. officials, who had urged Somoza not to use force against Argüello..." Re-checking both FRUS documents, no such prior U.S. warning is described; instead, Document 730 shows Somoza himself had previously given the Chargé unprompted assurances he would not use force — a different claim not captured as a sourced fact. Trimmed this unsupported clause from the summary and replaced with the "deplored" detail, which is directly sourced (fact 3). 5) The Encyclopedia.com Somoza-biography discrepancy flagged in the entry's own notes (Román y Reyes vs. Lacayo Sacasa) was not independently re-verified since it is disclosed as a caveat rather than asserted as a fact; it does not affect any VERIFIED/CHAIN fact in the list. Net assessment: the entry's sourcing is fundamentally honest (real documents, real quotes, no invention), but contained two verifiable factual/attribution errors introduced by imprecise reading of its own primary sources, plus one summary claim that outran its sourced facts. All three are corrected above. Verdict: CORRECTED.