Word: ortega
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some things never change. Every year Ronald Reagan petitions a resistant Congress for renewed aid to the contra rebels. And every year, as the vote nears, Nicaragua's Sandinista leaders make a blunder that puts Reagan's request over the top. In 1985 Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega Saavedra jetted off to Moscow four days after a $14 million contra-aid measure had been rejected; chastened by what looked like a deliberate slap in the face, Congress reversed itself and okayed a $27 million package. The next year a Sandinista attack on contra bases inside Honduras persuaded Congress to approve...
...Sandinista stumble began last weekend, after Managua learned that the U.S. press would carry the damning charges of a recent Nicaraguan defector, Major Roger Miranda Bengoechea, who had occupied a top post in the Defense Ministry. Hoping to pre-empt Miranda's charges of a planned military buildup, Humberto Ortega delivered a powerful speech reaffirming Sandinista plans to arm up to 600,000 Nicaraguans and obtain Soviet MiG-21 jet fighters by 1995. Unflinchingly defiant toward the U.S., Humberto thundered, "We do not need to hide our relations with the socialist camp in defense matters...
Daniel apparently had second thoughts. The next day he told U.S. reporters that the military plans were only a "proposal" and painted instead a picture of a Swiss-style large reserve army. But Ortega was trying to have it both ways. While aiming to soothe Washington, he was playing to audiences at home, where both Miranda's charges and peace talks with the contras threaten to weaken Sandinista support. In a speech the same day, Ortega warned that if the Sandinistas lost an election they would step down but would lead an insurrection if they disagreed with the new government...
Some of Miranda's information was painstakingly detailed. Charging corruption within the Sandinista directorate, he claimed that Humberto Ortega, under other names, maintains a bank account, No. 58946, in a Swiss branch of the National Bank of Paris. As of last October, Miranda claimed, the account totaled $1,495,596, all of it diverted between 1981 and 1986 from Defense Ministry coffers...
Last week Humberto Ortega had other matters to deal with. He announced that Sandinista infantrymen had shot down a single-engine Cessna plane and captured $ an American "mercenary," James Denby, 57, a pilot who divides his time between a corn and soybean farm in Carlinville, Ill., and a ranch in Costa Rica. Two days before the incident, Denby had requested permission to fly over Nicaragua to reach Costa Rica. The Sandinistas charged that Denby was on an espionage mission for the contras. But it appeared that if it came down to comparing the propaganda value of a Denby with that...