Daniel Ortega
Daniel Ortega led the Sandinista revolution, lost power at the ballot box, returned to it, and has governed Nicaragua since 2007 in a manner his own former comrades call a dictatorship. Born in 1945 in La Libertad to a family opposed to the Somoza dynasty, he joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front at nineteen and was imprisoned for seven years from 1967 after a bank robbery, released in a 1974 hostage exchange. The FSLN took Managua in July 1979, ending forty-three years of Somoza family rule. Ortega emerged as the dominant figure of the governing junta and was elected president in 1984. His government redistributed land, ran a literacy campaign that cut illiteracy sharply, and fought the Contras — a counter-revolutionary force armed and financed by the Reagan administration, including through the illegal arms sales that became the Iran-Contra affair. The International Court of Justice ruled against the United States in 1986. Some thirty thousand people died in the war. He lost the 1990 election to Violeta Chamorro and, unexpectedly, handed over power. He lost again in 1996 and 2001. He returned in 2006 with 38 per cent, after a pact with the right that lowered the threshold, an alliance with the Church, and a reversal of his position on abortion. Term limits were removed in 2014. Protests in 2018 were crushed with over three hundred dead. Opposition candidates were arrested before the 2021 election, and critics have been stripped of citizenship. His wife is co-president. Almost every surviving Sandinista commander of the 1979 revolution now opposes him or lives in exile.
- Lived: 1945 CE – ?
- Nationality: Nicaraguan
- Roles: revolutionary, head_of_state, politician
