Word: ortega
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...Congress wasn't the only place the Bush Administration suffered electoral embarrassment this week. In Nicaragua, cold-war bogeyman Daniel Ortega - whose Marxist Sandinista government had been an obsession of the Reagan Administration - was elected president again on Sunday despite frantic U.S. lobbying for his defeat. By most accounts, the yanqui politicking - which included a threat to cut off U.S. aid to impoverished Nicaragua if Ortega won - backfired miserably, actually helping boost the Sandinista leader to his first-round victory. That such U.S. pressure tends to work in favor of its opponents is a lesson Washington seems woefully unable...
...election of Ortega - who won with 38% of the vote, about 8 points ahead of his U.S.-backed opponent, conservative banker Eduardo Montealegre - is no doubt a concern. After he and Sandinista guerrillas toppled Nicaragua's brutal dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in 1979, Ortega led an authoritarian, Soviet-backed regime that wrecked the economy and fought a civil war with U.S.-backed contra rebels that killed some 50,000 people. Ortega was finally ousted in a 1990 election, and for the past 16 years, during which he twice failed to recapture the presidency, he seemed little more than a relic...
...decade after communism's collapse, Latin American voters began to express their anger at the failure of Washington-backed capitalist reforms and free trade agreements to narrow the epic gap between rich and poor in the region. That backlash has helped Ortega, 60, who insists his politics are more moderate today - he is widely viewed as more of a cynical opportunist than a radical Marxist - to take advantage of a divisive feud inside Montealegre's Liberal Constitutionalist Party that ended up splitting its vote this year. As Ortega's poll numbers climbed, the Bush Administration went into panic mode, publicly...
...then-U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha in 2002 regarding left-wing presidential candidate and Chavez acolyte Evo Morales. In Bolivia, the perception of imperious yanqui meddling helped turn Morales into a front-runner who was eventually elected President last year. Gutierrez did much the same for Ortega, says Ortega's running mate, Jaime Morales, a former Contra leader whose house had been confiscated by Ortega in the 1980s (Ortega has since paid him for the home) but who has reconciled and allied with Ortega. "I don't blame the U.S. for all of Nicaragua's problems as many...
Many perceived Montealegre to be the United States’ unofficial choice for Nicaraguan president. The U.S. had threatened to pull aid from an Ortega-led government, according to the Associated Press...