Word: ortega
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Most preliminary counts show 60-year-old Daniel Ortega, who served as the Nicaraguan president from 1985 to 1990, as having already won 40 percent—the minimum a candidate needs to win an election in one round. If those counts are verified by electoral officials, Montealegre will not have the chance to challenge Ortega in a second round...
...Monday night’s counts, Liberal Alliance candidate Montealegre lagged behind Ortega by 7 percent. That wide of a gap rules out Montealegre’s only other conventional shot at a second round. For that to happen, Ortega would have to lead Montealegre by less than 5 percent and have won less than 35 percent...
...Improbable as it may seem, Ortega, now 60, has reemerged as the frontrunner in Nicaragua's presidential race through his alliance with an unlikely chum, former President Arnoldo Aleman. The corpulent Aleman would seem to be the skinny Ortega's antithesis - an arch-conservative Somoza acolyte elected President in 1996 in a wave of nostalgia for the pre-Sandinista days. But as President from 1997 to 2002, Aleman stole tens of millions of dollars from public coffers, including $1.8 million he charged on a government credit card for his wedding in Miami to a woman 22 years his junior. Aleman...
...Aleman's record didn't deter Ortega from cozying up to his erstwhile nemesis, and in 2000 the Sandinistas struck a cynical deal with the Liberal Constitutionalists to control Nicaragua's Congress (which this month passed a controversial total ban on abortion) and its courts, and to freeze out the country's more moderate parties. One key dividend for Ortega: In 2001 a Sandinista judge dismissed Narvaez's sexual abuse charges against Ortega, despite the fact that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, has ruled that her case has merit...
...prospect of an Ortega victory has Washington alarmed - especially after the Reagan Administration had worked so obsessively in the 1980s to topple the Sandinistas, and because the Bush Administration had urged Aleman's prosecution as part of a wider crackdown on corruption in Latin America. Ortega is also a friend of Bush's hemispheric archfoes, Cuba's communist leader Fidel Castro and Venezuela's radical leftist President Hugo Chavez. The Bush Administration, in fact, has warned that if Ortega wins it may cut U.S. aid to Nicaragua...