Among her acts of philanthropy was an event held on Christmas 1938, where she distributed 25,000 gifts to children of limited resources in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and attended matters related to the Women's Wing of the Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN).

She was present at the dance at the Casa del Obrero in León when the young poet Rigoberto López Pérez, a militant of the opposition Independent Liberal Party (PLI), shot her husband on the night of September 21, 1956, and accompanied him in his last moments at the Gorgas Hospital, located in the Panama Canal zone in Panama, where he died in the early morning of September 29 of the same year.

New York Cardinal Francis Spellman sent a statement to Luis Somoza Debayle, the president's eldest son, who succeeded him, writing that, "I am sure your father would have been very pleased to know that you will be his successor."

Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, was one of those who most presented solidarity for Somoza, alongside Paul Magloire of Haiti, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo of Chile, and Alfredo Stroessner of Paraguay.

Her life as a widow was spent in the social circles of her native Nicaragua and in the United States, where she lived next to her firstborn Lillian Somoza of Seville-Sacasa.

Her will began by saying: "Being in full use of my mental faculties, being free from harshness, threats or undue influence of any person, I make public and declare this my last will and testament [...]".

She named universal heir of all her fortune and transferred all her real, personal or mixed properties to her daughter Lillian Somoza Debayle of Seville Sacasa, because she had given her "roof and has taken care of me for more than fifteen years".

During her husband's rule, several of her relatives held strategic positions in politics: Debayle died in February 1987, in Washington, D.C., with her daughter Lillian and her family by her side.