Word: ortega
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...road from Managua to the town of Tierra Azul has been an occasional target for antigovernment rebels. So when President Daniel Ortega Saavedra recently made the two-hour trip, he took along plenty of security. A fleet of more than a dozen sturdy vans accompanied the President's off-white Toyota, while an armed, Soviet-made helicopter provided surveillance from the air. When Ortega, 40, reached his destination, a makeshift plaza, he quickly took a seat behind a long table. "Face the People," a folksy forum that brings ordinary Nicaraguans into contact with officials of the Marxist-oriented Sandinista government...
...more than two hours Ortega faced questions from campesinos who had gathered for the occasion. Would the President find more land for peasants? (Yes. That very afternoon he would award 375 families some 6,000 acres of land.) Would he help arm the townspeople against the U.S.-sponsored contra rebels? (No. Nicaragua, he said, has no spare firearms.) Ortega rarely missed an opportunity to promote the goals and concerns of the Sandinista regime. "The revolution is not yet finished," he declared...
...lunch of rice, tortillas, chicken, steak and beer. Afterward he climbed behind the wheel of his Toyota, with a radiotelephone next to the gearshift and a rifle under the seat, and settled in for the drive back to the capital city. For the next 90 minutes, Ortega, occasionally taking his hands from the wheel to make a point, gave an unusually informal interview to TIME...
While he talked and laughed comfortably, Ortega found no humor in what he described as the "greater pressures" now being exerted on Nicaragua by the Reagan Administration. "I think that the U.S. is attempting to create conditions for a major offensive on a military order," he said. "You can feel it in the air." Ortega's warnings of a pending Yanqui invasion are not new. Nicaraguan leaders usually interpret any major contra move as a prelude to U.S. intervention. But the message from Washington has grown more menacing in recent weeks, and while some political analysts view the attacks...
...used such rockets in battle. Declared Secretary of State George Shultz: "Fine, I'm all for it. I hope they get more of these weapons." The incident marked a turning point of sorts for the Sandinistas. "Now that (SA-7s) are introduced, the war has a new character," warned Ortega. Never before, he insisted, have Latin American guerrilla forces used such advanced weaponry. "When Shultz says it is right that the irregulars use these rockets, then that is giving the go-ahead to the use of rockets to any irregular force in any part of the world...