Daniel Ortega

President of Nicaragua (1985–90, 2007–)

• Born: November 11, 1945
• Place of Birth: La Libertad, Chontales, Nicaragua

Ortega led the Sandinista revolutionary movement in Nicaragua, which finally ousted the Somoza dictatorship. The new government, with Ortega as president, introduced social reforms such as health care and education but also instituted repressive policies. Ortega encountered resistance from the Contras, sponsored by the United States. In 1990, Ortega lost the election but stayed involved in politics. He regained the presidency in 2007. In 2021, he was elected to his fourth consecutive term as president, becoming the longest-serving leader in the Americas, though the election was widely ruled as "fake" internationally.

Early Life

Daniel Ortega was born José Daniel Ortega Saavedra in a time of unrest in his country of Nicaragua. The Somoza family had ruled the country as dictators since 1933. In an interview in 1997, Ortega said that during his childhood and adolescence he lived through the economic and social repression of the Somoza dictatorship. Ortega’s father had fought alongside Augusto César Sandino and had been imprisoned by Somoza. His mother also was anti-Somoza and had been sent to jail. It became clear to Ortega, when he was an adolescent, that the only way to overthrow the dictatorship was through armed struggle.

In 1963, Ortega attended the University of Central America in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. He joined the underground movement known as the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), which was an underground movement at the time. He became a leader in this movement in 1967 and was in charge of the urban guerrilla campaign. However, he soon was arrested for bank robbery and spent the next seven years in jail. He was released in 1974 along with a number of other Sandinista prisoners in exchange for some Somozista hostages. He was then exiled to Cuba, where he received several months of guerrilla training. Ortega was inspired by Cuba’s challenge to imperialism and capitalism. Cuba would become a major source of aid for the Sandinistas.

Life’s Work

In 1979, virtually all sectors of Nicaraguan society had joined in the effort to oust dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. When Somoza fled Nicaragua on July 17, Ortega became a member of the five-person Junta of National Reconstruction, along with Sandinista militant Moisés Hassan, novelist Sergio Ramírez Mercado, businessman Alfonso Robelo, and future Nicaraguan president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Ortega became de facto president.

Somoza left the nation with a debt of more than $1.5 million. The uprising to remove him from office led to the deaths of between 30,000 and 50,000 Nicaraguans (about 1 percent of the population). In addition, 100,000 people were injured, 150,000 were left homeless, and 150,000 fled to Honduras or Costa Rica. Ortega’s government improved health care in rural areas, built many new schools, and increased literacy. However, his government also took control of many businesses, increased press censorship, and restricted the civil rights of its political opponents.

Assuming the presidency in 1985 after being elected, Ortega faced opposition from various constituencies. The former privileged minority in the conservative hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and the probusiness daily newspaper, La Prensa, feared that the Sandinistas would attempt to establish a communist state in which religion, private enterprise, and most civil and political liberties would be abolished. The United States believed Ortega had developed the first communist country in Latin America and feared that other countries would follow his lead. In 1981, US president Ronald Reagan condemned the FSLN for joining with Soviet-backed Cuba and for supporting revolutionary movements in other Latin American countries, such as El Salvador.

In a move against what the United States considered encroaching communism, the Reagan administration authorized the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to begin financing, arming, and training rebels as anti-Sandinista guerrillas. These rebels, who came to be known collectively as Contras, were regarded by Reagan as freedom fighters. The formation of the Contras would lead to one of the largest political scandals in US history: the Iran-Contra affair (1986–89), in which US government officials, namely the staff of the National Security Council, violated national policy by conducting the secret sale of arms to Iran and then diverted the profits from those sales to the Contra guerrillas.

By November 1984, Ortega had called for national elections, which he won with 67 percent of the vote. He took office on January 10, 1985. Reagan declared the election unfair, thereby justifying continued US support of the Contras. The Sandinista government’s attempt to improve the unsteady political situation in Nicaragua during the 1980s led to a long and bloody civil war against not only the Contras but also a coalition of dissatisfied peasants, former Sandinista allies, and supporters of Somoza. From 1980 to 1989, more than thirty thousand Nicaraguans died in this conflict.

In 1990, Ortega was defeated in the presidential election by Chamorro. She had been supported in her campaign by a fourteen-party anti-Sandinista alliance known as the National Opposition Union (Unión Nacional Opositora, or UNO). In 1996 and 2001, Ortega would again run for president, losing to Arnoldo Alemán in 1996 and to Enrique Bolaños in 2001. In Ortega’s last days as president, he enacted a series of legislative acts known as the Piñata. Estates that had been seized by the Sandinista government became the private property of various FSLN officials, including Ortega. Over time, however, Ortega’s policies favored a more moderate democratic-socialist agenda, and his Catholic faith became more intense.

In 1998, Ortega’s stepdaughter Zoilamérica Narvaez released a forty-eight-page report accusing her stepfather of having sexually abused her for nineteen years, beginning when she was eleven years old. However, because he was a member of the National Assembly, Ortega had immunity against prosecution. Narvaez’s accusation was heard by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on March 4, 2002, but despite this, Ortega was reelected president on November 5, 2006. He achieved his comeback by touting his deep Christian faith and making claims to improve the widespread poverty that plagued Nicaragua during his campaign.

During Ortega's second official term as president, the Nicaraguan Supreme Court abolished the term limit that had previously restricted presidents to two terms. This enabled Ortega to run for reelection again on November 6, 2011, and he was once again victorious. He won a third term in 2016, during an election in which he chose his wife as his running mate. Murillo has proven to be an outspoken and steadfast vice president.

In 2018, violent protests broke out in Nicaragua. Originally stemming from a smaller student demonstration against Ortega's recently implemented pension system reforms, the unrest grew into a larger protest calling for Ortega's resignation. By July of that year, more than three hundred people had been killed in the protests and many more imprisoned, according to human rights groups, but Ortega remained firm in his refusal to step down as president.

Despite the widespread unrest, Ortega was sworn in to a fourth term as president in early 2022, though the election was widely seen as rigged internationally. Observers noted that he appeared frailer in recent years, and criticism that Nicaragua had become a dictatorship continued to grow, including from within the Nicaraguan government itself. Among other crimes, Ortega has been accused of detaining dozens of opponents of his government, including journalists and opposition leaders, and subjecting them to severe mistreatment in prison.

In 2024, Murillo announced that Ortega's administration had established diplomatic ties with the People of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, better known as the Taliban. The group took control of Afghanistan in 2021 after international troops led by the United States left the country.

Significance

Ortega has become almost legendary in Nicaragua because of his determination to improve the conditions in his country in the face of countless obstacles and confrontations. His name symbolizes the idea of a small, poor country outmaneuvering a superpower, the United States. He has by no means been a perfect leader, but to follow the life of Ortega is to follow the history of Nicaragua during most of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Ortega grew up a poor peasant under the rule of a dictator, worked to organize a successful revolt to oust that dictator, and then became president of Nicaragua, only to face more social and political unrest as well as foreign intervention. His government embodied a contradiction, however, as it not only instituted reforms in health care and education but also clamped down on political opposition, censored the media, and took control of many businesses; it was dictatorial in its own way. The civil war that erupted during and continued for most of the 1980s led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and upended the lives of hundreds of thousands more. Ortega’s legacy, as a result of this history, is both a good one for many Nicaraguans and one of violence, cruelty, and repression. His name is forever associated, as well, with US involvement in Latin American affairs and with US policy against communism in the region.

Bibliography

Aburto, Wilfredo Miranda. "Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega Establishes Diplomatic Ties with the Taliban." El Pais, 27 June 2024, english.elpais.com/international/2024-06-27/nicaraguas-daniel-ortega-establishes-diplomatic-ties-with-the-taliban.html. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Close, David H., Salvador Martí i Puig, and Shelley A. McConnell, eds. The Sandinistas and Nicaragua since 1979. Boulder: Rienner, 2012. Print.

Cortázar, Julio. Nicaraguan Sketches. Trans. Kathleen Weaver. New York: Norton, 1989. Print.

"Daniel Ortega: From Revolutionary Leader to Opposition Hate Figure." BBC, 10 Jan. 2022, www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-15544315. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War. Cambridge: South End, 2005. Print.

Guillermoprieto, Alma. "The Revolution Eats Itself in Nicaragua." The New Yorker, 10 Mar. 2022, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-revolution-eats-itself-in-nicaragua. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

McCuen, Gary E., ed. The Nicaraguan Revolution. Hudson: Gem, 1986. Print.

Miranda, Roger, and William Ratliff. The Civil War in Nicaragua: Inside the Sandinistas. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1993. Print.

Morris, Kenneth E. Unfinished Revolution: Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation. Chicago: Hill, 2010. Print.

Peace, Roger C. A Call to Conscience: The Anti–Contra War Campaign. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2012. Print.

Rushdie, Salman. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. 1987. New York: Holt, 1997. Print.

Walker, Thomas W., and Christine J. Wade. Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. 5th ed. Boulder: Westview, 2011. Print.