Ortega's Encore

By Tim Padgett/Managua

Jaime Morales was a wealthy Nicaraguan banker in the 1980s when Daniel Ortega stole his six-bedroom house. Ortega, who was then Nicaragua's President, called it a justified "confiscation" on behalf of the Marxist revolution that he and his Sandinista Front were leading. Morales became a leader of the U.S.-backed contra army that waged a civil war with the Sandinistas. That conflict killed 30,000 people and led to Ortega's ouster in a 1990 election--after which he paid Morales for the house.

It's a sign of either Ortega's maturation or his opportunism--or both--that when he recaptured Nicaragua's presidency in the Nov. 5 election, his running mate was none other than Morales. Ortega still wears that drowsy look of arrogant defiance, speaks in the same mumbling cadence and insists on driving his SUV himself to cultivate a populist image. But with Morales beside him in a Managua hotel ballroom, schmoozing local and foreign investors, Ortega sounds like a changed man. "We won't eradicate poverty by eradicating capital or alienating investors but by joining forces with them," he says. Ortega is playing to the audience, but even former rivals believe that his evolution from communist strongman to nascent capitalist may be genuine. Says Morales: "Daniel Ortega deserves a chance to vindicate himself."

That, of course, is exactly what some in Washington are afraid of. Ortega's turn-back-the-clock triumph has rekindled memories of Washington's cold war obsession with Nicaragua, which embroiled the U.S. in a bloody guerrilla campaign and nearly doomed the Reagan presidency. Although Nicaragua, a nation of 5.5 million, is one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, the prospect of an Ortega restoration prompted the Bush Administration to threaten to cut off more than $200 million in total aid to the country and moved cold warriors like former U.S. Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North to fly to Managua to campaign against him. The U.S. is concerned that Ortega will become another boisterously anti-American voice of Latin America's new left, which is led by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with her advisory committee on democracy promotion last week, Richard Soudriette, president of the Washington-based International Foundation for Election Systems, volunteered that he had just returned from Nicaragua. "Coming from Oklahoma," he told her, "where we're familiar with people who are born again, it appears that the future President, Daniel Ortega, is at least claiming that he has had a change of heart." Rice answered tersely, "We'll see."

Ortega still likes to take shots at Washington--in one of his victory speeches, he said Bush "is seeking to start wars with the whole world"--but he has strived to adopt a more moderate look. His campaign anthem this year was sung to the tune of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance. To underscore his warmer, fuzzier incarnation, supporters often wore pink to rallies instead of the party's more militant red and black. But whether Ortega has shed his penchant for cynicism is another question. He and his Sandinista comrades were global guerrilla heroes when they overthrew the brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. As Nicaragua's Marxist comandante, Ortega was widely criticized for being as incompetent and corrupt as he was authoritarian. Those who know him say his quest to regain the presidency--he lost elections in 1996 and 2001--stemmed less from leftist ideals than from a raw need to accumulate power and avenge his 1990 humiliation. In 2000 he formed an alliance with President Arnoldo Aleman--a right-wing Somoza acolyte who was later jailed for embezzlement--that helped the Sandinistas dominate Congress and the courts. In 2001 a Sandinista judge who had been a high-ranking official in Ortega's first government dismissed charges by Ortega's stepdaughter Zoilamerica Narvaez that Ortega had sexually abused her when she was a girl in the 1980s. Ortega denied the charges, but the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said the case had merit. (Ortega's wife and Narvaez's mother, poet Rosario Murillo, stands by Ortega.)

Ortega may have trouble solidifying his hold on power, as he won with only 38% of the vote. That was still 9 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival, U.S.-backed banker Eduardo Montealegre, leading some to conclude that Ortega profited from voter backlash against perceived U.S. meddling in the election. However, a bigger problem than Yanqui interference may have been Yanqui neglect. After Ortega was ousted from power in 1990, the U.S. did little to help war-ravaged Nicaragua get back on its feet. "We got rid of the Sandinistas and said everything else would take care of itself," says Michael Shifter, vice president for policy at the Washington-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue. "That created a lot of discontent" that aided Ortega's eventual comeback. The new Ortega may still prove to be the old caudillo, but his victory is a reminder of the price the U.S. so often pays for prematurely declaring its missions accomplished.

With reporting by Tim Rogers/Managua, Elaine Shannon/ Washington