How I woke up and smelt the coffee (a former supporter on Ortega)

[muriel_volestrangler]

This is written by a British former supporter of Ortega and the Sandinistas - he went to Nicaragua in the 80s to (not very productively) work 'in solidarity' with the Sandinistas. Ortega has gone through a lot since then, and doesn't come out of this sounding very good.

...

Narvaez alleged that Ortega began abusing her when she 11, telling her it was 'good for the revolution'. Ortega denied the accusations but refused to give up his political immunity to clear his name in court. Crucially, Murillo sided with her husband against her daughter, and ever since her role has grown so that her political position is now inseparable from her husband's and, it seems, vice versa.

I met a few people who knew Narvaez and they all told me the same thing: 'She's not a liar.' Ortega, on the other hand, has proved himself to be an extremely slippery character. Towards the end of their reign, a number of the top Sandinistas took expropriated property for themselves. Ortega, for example, grabbed a palatial compound in Managua that belonged to the Contra-supporter Jaime 'The Godfather' Morales Carazo. Ortega still lives in the home, but in a move that would embarrass less a flexible politician, Morales is now running as Ortega's vice-president. That's reconciliacion

It pales next to Ortega's most notorious manoeuvre. In the past few years he has instituted what's known as 'el Pacto' with Arnoldo Aleman's right-wing Constitutional Liberal Party. Under the deal Aleman and Ortega, both former presidents, were granted lifetime appointments to the National Assembly, which meant they had immunity from prosecution.

However, so egregious was Aleman's corruption - he stole millions from the state - that he was stripped of his immunity and imprisoned for fraud and money-laundering. When Ortega left office in 1990 he vowed to 'rule from below' and, owing to the appointments he had made as president, the Nicaraguan judiciary remains staffed by his placemen. Thus he saw to it that Aleman was released from prison under loose conditions of house arrest. Perhaps the quid pro quo is that the pact lowered the threshold for first-round victory in the presidential election to 35 per cent. Thirty five per cent is the figure that Ortega was registering in opinion polls. In spite of everything - the child rape accusations, the personal enrichment, the alliance with the kleptomaniac right - he was the favourite to become the new president. Yet even the Sandinistas had had enough of Ortega. Of the original nine members of the Sandinista National Directorate, seven of them had left, including Ortega's brother Humberto. Only Ortega and Tomas Borge, the Stalinist former head of the secret police, remained.

...

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1939494,00.html

[papau]

1. long, good article- anti the "strongman" we got via Somaza/trade embargo/mined ports & terrorists

called Contras.

I don't believe US policy has changed from the above under W.