On Wednesday, January 10, Managua's Plaza la Fe was the site of the kind of gathering Nicaragua has not seen since the 1980s, as more than 100,000 people converged to celebrate the inauguration of Daniel Ortega, the 61-year-old former Sandinista comandante and perennial As the ceremony began, a recording of a fiery speech Ortega delivered PA system, stirring the crowd to life. Then Ortega emerged, flanked by the lions of the Latin American left, Venezuelan President Hugo Ch a vez and Bolivian President Evo Morales. The lines in Ortega's contra insurgents, and his signature black mustache is dyed now, but the affirmed by Ch a vez.
Fresh from his own inauguration hours earlier, during which he effusively pledged "socialismo o muerte!" Ch a vez lionized Ortega by lifting a page from Bertolt Brecht. "Men who spend their whole lives fighting for justice are indispensable," Ch a vez boomed.
As he flailed his arms to emphasize his stentorian rhetorical volleys, young men in the crowd reached for their digital cameras, eager to snap a shot of this political rock star in action. Ch a vez was followed by the more subdued Morales, ex-leader of indigenous president. With his voice barely rising above the chants from the crowd of "Evo!
Evo!" Morales pledged that he, Ch a vez and As Morales left the podium, the socialist folk group Quilapayun's anthem, "El Pueblo Unido Jam a s Ser a Vencido," an ode to martyred socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende, sounded from the speakers by the stage. Fireworks exploded above the plaza while groups of the sky.
"The people united will never be defeated," the crowd chanted Finally, Ortega stepped to the microphone, launching into a call-and-response chant against savage capitalism. Then, in an plaza, he laid out his agenda, vowing to block privatization of Nicaragua's water, increase access to electricity for the country's poor American governments. He also took a dig at the right-wing Liberal in 1990.
"Our agenda is unfinished," Ortega declared. "When we left the illiteracy rate was 13 percent. Today it is 35 percent.
" contrast to the strategy that propelled his campaign. On the campaign trail, Ortega worked assiduously to reassure the Nicaraguan public that re-emerge. In stump speeches and campaign ads he repeated the word "reconciliacion" like a mantra, pledging no more land seizures, clashes with the church or blood-soaked battles with The Empire.
Ortega's theme song, played over and over on pro-Sandinista radio stations during his campaign, was a hip-hop version of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance," To ratify his image makeover, Ortega selected as his vice president Jaime Morales Carazo, a former contra leader whose home he had once seized. The Vatican's most important figure in Nicaragua, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, a fervent opponent of Ortega during the 1980s, has become one of his closest allies. With an eye on the $175 million Millennium Challenge grant for Nicaragua, approved before the election by the Bush Administration, Ortega has toned down his anti-American rhetoric.
The day before his inauguration, he held court with Bush and US Ambassador Paul Trivelli, a hated figure in Nicaragua who has openly demonized Ortega. The new Daniel Ortega is a uniter, not a back into Nicaragua's presidential palace, his will to power may have sapped Sandinismo of its revolutionary soul. It's hard to know what the Sandinistas stand for anymore, Francisco Chamorro, assistant editor of president Violetta Chamorro, told me.
"They are a giant coalition now that is full of Liberals [members of the PLC], contras, everybody. And the whole party is based around Daniel Ortega and his family." inspired by the original Sandinistas.
In 1998, after his stepdaughter Arnaldo Aleman, who was in the process of looting the treasury of $100 million. The two caudillos entered into "el Pacto," agreeing to Thanks to this measure, Ortega was able to win the presidency last year with a smaller percentage of the votes than he received during his unsuccessful campaigns in 1990 and 2001. Yet with such a small share of the vote, Ortega must rely on his right-wing allies to pass any legislation through the National have been forced out.
Herty Lewites, a member of the original Sandinista junta and the former mayor of Managua, was ejected from the Sandinista National Liberation Front by leadership. Lewites formed the Movement for Sandinista Renovation (MSR), machinations. Lewites was lagging behind Ortega in the presidential race when he suffered a heart attack and died July 2, Just days before the election, under pressure from Cardinal Obando and the Vatican's local antiabortion surrogates, who staged massive marches through Managua, Ortega endorsed a proposed ban on "therapeutic abortions," or abortions to save the life of the mother.
A week after this loophole (established by Nicaragua's government more than a century ago) was closed by the government of then-President Enrique Bolanos, a pregnant with a fever and abdominal pain. Two days later, after being refused an abortion, she and her fetus were dead. Edmundo Jarqu i n, a left-of-center economist who replaced Lewites as the MSR's candidate, was the only candidate who opposed the abortion ban.
Jarqu i n took a strong stand for women's rights, airing commercials pledging to mandate harsh penalties for domestic abusers. Yet he Montealegre, a conservative with all the charisma of a bespectacled banker, broke from the PLC and ran as an insurgent against Nicaragua's corrupt caudillo system. Despite support from the US National Administration against an Ortega victory, Montealegre could not convince PLC candidate Jos e Rizo, who pledged to keep Aleman out of jail, to drop out of the race.
At the height of the campaign, Rizo gained a boost of confidence when, in a bizarre stunt, Oliver North was Ortega, for his part, refused to debate his opponents and rejected all interview requests. Instead he stumped through the countryside with his Though they often traveled in a top-of-the-line Mercedes, Ortega and Murillo claimed to be on a "pilgrimage" for the people. With the right divided and the dissident left moribund, Ortega's path to victory seemed the local media, demanding in an almost satirically gringofied accent that Aleman be jailed.
While the State Department warned that Ortega's Rizo as the tool of Aleman. "We have a saying in English," Trivelli said of Rizo. "If it walks like a duck, and it talks like a duck, then it's Trivelli apparently was unaware that in Nicaragua, the word for "duck" is also derogatory slang for "homosexual.
" Despite his pact with the right and all his personal flaws, Ortega is still revered by many regular Nicaraguans. I challenged several Ortega against the charge that he molested his stepdaughter. The response of Marvin Aguilar, a 42-year-old Managuan taxi driver and self-described "Sandinista for life," was typical.
"If he did it, where is the video?" Aguilar said of the allegations. "Where is the evidence?
Anyway, these charges were all invented by the Liberals, and what the hell have they done for the people? Nothing." Aguilar has a point.
In sixteen years, Nicaragua's US-friendly Liberal expense of the basic needs of Nicaragua's desperately poor. It is easy to see why. Many of the most prominent Liberal party bosses live in a separate universe from the rest of their countrymen, in a series of tiny pleasure islands off the coast of Laguna Managua, a freshwater lake Out on the lake, the dusty barrios that pulse all day to blaring night, drift away in the distance.
A group of white-skinned teenagers zoomed by on water skis, waving as they passed the million-dollar McMansion of the owner of Flor de Ca a, a Nicaraguan rum company. Violetta Chamorro's house, which forms a bridge over two isletas, is particularly tasteful. A family of monkeys swung from trees nearby.
If you were a member of the Nicaraguan elite, you'd be home now. achievements of Nicaragua's Liberals, the Zona Franca, a gigantic strictly outlawed. Last year, according to the Nicaraguan daily La I passed through the Zona last May in a rented car, driving as I rights off Nicaragua's pristine coastline.
Dozens of women stood along the highway, seeking to hitch a ride home. I pulled over and two young women gingerly clambered into my back seat. They were so small their I asked them about their jobs.
They told me they stitch jeans for twelve hours a day. A Chinese woman perpetually watches over them to make sure they do not talk to one another. They get a ten-minute break each day to eat.
I turned around to ask them about their political views and found them both asleep, exhausted from another day at the Zona. Forty-five Liberals point to as an economic boon, the beach town of San Juan del Sur. During the past decade, foreign investors have flocked to San Juan, mansions.
High above the town is Pelican Eyes, a resort hotel that rents At a bar looking out over San Juan's marina, I talked to Kenerlyn Marin, Like many young Nicaraguans I met in town, she is caught between two worlds, hungry to enjoy the good life of the cheles, or white people, but loyal to her barrio, where electricity and water are only occasionally available. With glee, she described to me the reaction of the TV watching the election returns like it was the end of the world," Marin said. "Every night these cheles get drunk, but when Daniel [Ortega] won, they just sat there, sober, saying, 'Oh shit, he's going to take everything we have.
' Me, I was drinking my beer and saying in my Like Aguilar, Marin would have none of the charges against Ortega. "No offense," she began, "but you cheles see how poor we are. I don't Yet the kinder, gentler Ortega is unlikely to fulfill the nightmare scenario of San Juan's foreign business community.
Ortega's government is currently working hand-in-hand with Chris Berry, the American owner of Pelican Eyes, as he seeks to resolve a land dispute with a relative of revolutionary godfather Augusto Sandino. "Our investors met with Daniel Ortega after the election, and he wasn't the Danny Ortega of the 1980s, that's for sure," Timothy Thomas, a Nicaragua-based broker for On the other hand, Ortega's partnership with left-leaning Latin American The day after his inauguration, inside Managua's Ruben Dario Theatre, Ortega joined Ch a vez, Morales and Cuban Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura to sign Alternativa Bolivariana para la Am e rica, or ALBA, Ch a vez's project for Latin American economic integration (a As part of the deal, Ch a vez has pledged to grant Nicaragua $30 million in gifts and low-interest loans, 100,000 barrels of oil on "preferential terms" to ease the country's transportation crisis and dozens of electricity plants and health cooperatives. Hundreds of Cuban doctors are likely to find their way into Nicaragua's impoverished countryside by the summer.
government could benefit Nicaragua. Among them is Sergio Ram i rez, an party by Ortega for his dissident views. Writing in the webmag Open Democracy, Ramirez commented, "If there is one thing that Ortega cannot be accused of lacking, it is pragmatism.
...
It could even be called a On the afternoon of Ortega's inauguration, I visited Managua's La conflict and christened the era of Liberal government. The plaza was empty except for four barefoot young boys squatting behind a bush. I walked toward them and found them sniffing a Gerber jar full of glue.
A police car buzzed by and the boys burst from the bushes, glassy-eyed but strangely joyous. One of them waved a vintage tennis racket as he scampered by. According to my tattered guidebook, Managua has only two Unlike their grandparents and perhaps their parents, these four boys have been raised in an era of peace.
But Liberal government has also denied them the hope Nicaragua's revolution once inspired. In a country content with the stability of the past sixteen years but still hungry for social change, Daniel Ortega, a deeply flawed, complicated figure, has been granted a rare second chance.
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