Word: ortega
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...Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, defeated the Sandinistas and became President of Nicaragua in April 1990. Lacayo, who served as Chamorro's campaign director, immediately began shaping the new administration; according to insiders, he picked the President's Cabinet and made the controversial decision to retain Sandinista General Humberto Ortega Saavedra as head of the armed forces. Lacayo's official title is Minister of the Presidency, but some feel he might as well be called Mr. Presidency. "Dona Violeta conferred absolute power on Antonio from the beginning," says a longtime family friend. "He's running the country...
...brashest critic of the administration's soft policy on the Sandinistas is its own Vice President. Godoy remains outraged that General Ortega held on to his army post and has repeatedly called Chamorro and Lacayo "prisoners of the military." Lacayo pounces on such overheated rhetoric. "How much accommodation with the Sandinistas is too much?" he asks. "If we're too generous, that's better than not being generous enough. The gains we've made by negotiating with the Sandinistas are enormous. For a start, we're not killing each other anymore...
Former President Daniel Ortega Saavedra, who the morning after his defeat proclaimed, "We were born poor, and we'll be satisfied to die poor," had a last-minute change of heart. In April the President's office ordered the withdrawal of $3.6 million in U.S. currency from the Central Bank, plus the equivalent of $5 million more in Nicaraguan cordobas. Francisco Mayorga, who, as Chamorro's first Central Bank president, inherited the mess that the Sandinistas left behind, estimates that a total of $24 million was looted from the bank...
...Ortega is still living in a house seized from Jaime Morales Carazo and valued at $950,000, including antiques and an art collection. Last April Ortega paid a token $2,500 to the former Sandinista government for the deed to the house, which is protected from prying eyes by a high wall decorated with festive murals. Other top Sandinistas also retired in style. Miguel D'Escoto, the rotund priest and ex-Foreign Minister, paid only $13,000 for one of the capital's plushest mansions...
State-owned enterprises became private overnight, with former Sandinista Cabinet ministers and army officers listed as executives. Chamorro's government is attempting to evict Ortega and a handful of other Sandinista squatters from their mansions. But for the most part, it has decided to ignore "la pinata." Says Antonio Lacayo, Chamorro's right-hand man: "In this country, political reality has more weight than...