Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth

Nicaragua elections

FSLN leader Daniel Ortega, president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, won the Nov. 5 presidential election with slightly more than 38% of the vote. He assumes power Jan. 10. The rightist Eduardo Montealegre of the Alianza Liberal Nicaraguense, favored by the U.S., came in second with 29%. Montealegre promised continuity with the Enrique Bolanos administration, also supported by the U.S., which has done nothing but worsen Nicaragua's poverty in the past five years, due in no small part to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).

The country's elite was unable to unite behind a single candidate which, along with the recent change to the electoral law designed by Ortega that allows victory with only 35% of the vote, enabled Ortega to win.

Oliver North was in Nicaragua in October to try to bolster Montealegre's case, and the U.S. ambassador Paul Trivelli warned of sanctions if Ortega won. The Bush administration was furious that Hugo Chavez was "meddling" in another country's elections when he came out in favor of Ortega and sold fuel and fertilizer earlier this year to Nicaragua at reduced rates. Montealegre's campaign made every effort to scare people into believing that Ortega would take the country back to the days of the civil war. That war, created by Reagan and North, "meddlers" who created the Contra army, cost the tiny country some 30,000 lives.

Ortega insists he is no Marxist and poses no threat to CAFTA, free trade, and private property. He means it. He speaks now only in general terms about aiding the poor, much as any politician in an impoverished nation does. His latest unconscionable about-face came in the weeks before the election when he bowed down to the Catholic Church and supported the legislature's total ban on abortions. For the past century legal abortion was possible only if three doctors certified that the mother's life was at risk. That meager protection has now been jettisoned by the Church in alliance with Ortega, who in the 1980s supported abortion rights.