Word: sandinistas
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Sandinista headquarters, as the uneasy rumors of defeat hardened into certainty, several party officials violated the election-day ban on alcohol and generously sampled rum. On the other side of Managua, it was well past midnight before Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was finally convinced of her upset victory. As the news sank in, Chamorro's perpetually smiling face clouded with worry. Would the Sandinistas accept the people's verdict? Rising from her wheelchair and perching carefully to favor her right knee, broken in a fall in January, Chamorro gestured for silence among the 100 people gathered in her spacious living...
...first shock of the Sandinista defeat wore off, Nicaragua's fault lines reemerged. Within a day of the elections, scattered incidents of violence erupted in Managua and rural towns as Chamorro and Ortega supporters clashed. By Tuesday Ortega was sounding like his usual defiant self. At a public rally, he roared, "They want the government. We give it to them. We will rule from below." A peaceful transition, he cautioned, required the immediate demobilization of the contras. Warning that "the change of government by no means signifies the end of the revolution," Ortega was deliberately vague about the future role...
...even last-ditch efforts such as these were not sufficient to suppress the true feelings of the Nicaraguan voters. Chamorro's campaign focused on assuring Nicaraguans that the vote would be secret and fair. Ironically, the lavishness of the Sandinista campaign may have also hurt its chances...
Those Americans who backed the Sandinista regime found it difficult to fathom Ortega's loss. Up to the time of the vote these supporters ignored the facts and glorified the party's egalitarian theories. If they had seen how the Nicaraguan government gradually lost touch with those it originally represented, perhaps they would have foreseen Chamorro's victory...
This oppression could have stemmed from the presence of Ortega's military of 150,000 soldiers, supposedly formed to combat the 15,000-strong Contra resistance. Ortega also used the war against the Contras to excuse censoring La Prensa, harassing non-Sandinista priests and bishops and dislocating an indigent tribe from its ancestral homeland...