Word: ortega
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...After diplomats began arriving for work, he entered the building and requested asylum. Espinoza, a critic of the Sandinista regime, apparently feared arrest. Such concerns are widespread in Nicaragua these days. Since the House passed legislation to give $100 million in aide to forces fighting the Sandinistas, President Daniel Ortega Saavedra has been cracking down on a wide range of opponents...
...antichurch actions followed closely on the heels of the June 26 shutdown of La Prensa, the only remaining opposition daily in Managua. The 60- year-old newspaper's campaign against Dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle once helped to put the revolutionary regime in power. Even so, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega Saavedra insists that La Prensa has become a vehicle for CIA propaganda and will remain closed until the "war" is over...
Even with U.S. assistance, however, the rebels are facing a 60,000-strong Nicaraguan army, equipped with as many as 38 Soviet helicopters. Few observers think the rebels can overthrow the Sandinistas, and it remains uncertain whether they can even slow Ortega's drive to consolidate one-party rule. In the short run, at least, U.S. support for the contras has had the opposite effect: the day after the House vote, the Sandinistas shut down La Prensa, Nicaragua's leading independent newspaper and hinted at new restrictions on opposition political parties...
Reagan knows that sending his own troops to Nicaragua would be politically impossible so instead he buys rebels, mainly people who were deposed by the Sandinista revolution or in disfavor with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Like the condottieri of renaissance Italy, these Contras live very well off of American money. (The House voted to give the contras $30 million in economic aid when these rebels don't even have a bureacracy to distribute it. It's likely that a lot of this money will end up in hands of Miami merchants.) The United States, by hiring these mercenaries, fits very...
...wills between Nicaragua's left-wing government, which besides d'Escoto includes two other Catholic priests of Cabinet rank,* and the country's mainline church, in which 85% of Nicaraguan citizens profess membership. In proclaiming a state of emergency that suspended most civil rights last October, President Daniel Ortega Saavedra cited as its principal cause the security threat posed by the U.S.-supported contra forces poised on Nicaragua's borders. But many Nicaraguans believe that the directive was largely aimed at curbing the power of the church. Obando labeled the decree a "step toward totalitarianism...