Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...time for the official campaign for Nicaragua's national elections approached, the ruling Sandinistas faced a unique prospect for a Marxist regime: the chance of winning a new term in office through open and honest balloting. President Daniel Ortega Saavedra had been nominated for re-election in a splashy party convention, and he launched a surprisingly effective grass- roots campaign, while opposition candidate Violeta Barrios de Chamorro got off to a pathetic start. Best of all, the 10,000-man army of insurgent contras, deprived of U.S. military support, was skulking in Honduras under a regional peace accord ordering them...
...contras in 1985? Last week he did it again. Ortega announced the cancellation of a 19-month-old cease-fire with the rebels and thereby raised the possibility that the elections, scheduled for February, might be scuttled. With that one action he managed to put Nicaragua back on the U.S. agenda, outrage his Central American neighbors and renew the prospect of war in his worn-out nation...
...terms, the impact of lifting the cease-fire remains unclear. Throughout the cease-fire, government troops continued to break up the contras' support network in the provinces, and rebels staged sporadic attacks against the army. Now those occasional engagements could escalate. At least 2,000 contra guerrillas are inside Nicaragua, and there is little doubt that more have been infiltrating the country during recent weeks. On Friday the Sandinista army said it had begun offensive operations against the rebels in nine of the country's 16 provinces...
...then, did Ortega venture so much opprobrium abroad to score points at home in a race that, by most accounts, he was already winning? The answer may lie in a poll published two weeks ago by the Nicaraguan Institute of Public Opinion. With nearly 90% of Nicaragua's 1.97 million voters registered, large numbers of them as the result of a Sandinista campaign, Ortega led the opposition by 26% to 21%. Yet the Institute's sample showed that 46% remained undecided -- more than enough to make any candidate for office extremely uneasy...
Uruguay's President Julio Maria Sanguinetti, chatting with George Bush, spotted him first. Sanguinetti muttered a low warning to the U.S. President that Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, who had just entered the room at Costa Rica's Hotel Cariari, was headed toward them. Bush squared himself, picking up the Sandinista comandante in his peripheral vision. He was poised for this power game that is played with body language and photo opportunities. Adversarial heads of state strive to gain a psychological edge over one another and to make points with the vast electronic audiences that watch these dramas. In this...