Free Republic

Ortega's Return? By Frank J Gaffney Jr. FrontPageMagazine.com | November 1, 2006 This Sunday, the people of Nicaragua will cast votes that may elect their next president in the first round of balloting. Depending on their choice, that exercise in democracy may be the last for some time to come – if the winning candidate reverts to form and ushers in a new era of authoritarianism in a country too long afflicted by his misrule. According to the polls, all other things being equal, Daniel Ortega – the communist revolutionary whose repressive regime ruled in Managua in the 1980s –...

OLIVER NORTH AND HIS associates were leaving Managua last Tuesday on a private plane after a dramatic surprise visit when they heard news they could scarcely comprehend. The U.S. State Department had just issued a "Public Announcement" that, in effect, warned Americans not to travel to Nicaragua because of the prospect for "violent demonstrations" and "sporadic acts of violence" leading up to the Nov. 5 presidential election there. The North group had seen nothing in Nicaragua to justify a travel advisory, normally issued when life and limb of visiting Americans are at risk. U.S. and Nicaraguan security officials alike are...

Daniel Ortega, the former leader of the Left-wing Sandinistas in Nicaragua and one of the United States' most reviled Cold War enemies, appears to be on the brink of making a spectacular comeback.Twenty years after his Sandinista government fought a bitter civil war against American-funded ''Contra" rebels, he is leading in the polls for the presidential elections on Sunday. But now he has ''found God" and talks of ''peace and love" not Marxist-Leninist ideals. In a final frenzy of campaigning, the podgy, balding 60-year-old, is spreading what he calls a "spiritual revolution", "full of love and hope" around this country,...

Alliances and enmities have been reshaped in a magically realist way for the presidential electionLIKE most places in the ramshackle Nicaraguan capital, the street corner has no name. You are merely told to go to the baseball field in the “America Uno” slum and find your way from there. It is not hard to locate because hundreds of people from the surrounding shanties, many wearing football shirts emblazoned with the name Daniel, have been waiting into the night to cheer the man they hope will deliver them from poverty. Fireworks crackle overhead and speakers blare out his campaign song —...

The sight of a moustachioed former Marxist revolutionary and American Cold War foe hugging babies and autographing baseball caps as he embraces democracy should bring a frisson of pleasure to the US.But instead, the fact that the election campaign of the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is going so well that he may return to power in Nicaragua next month is causing alarm in Washington. For although Mr Ortega's old Soviet mentors have gone, his country is once again the focus of a crucial regional power play in Washington's Latin American back yard. Some 27 years after his Sandinista movement overthrew...

Breaking with a long tradition, Jimmy Carter runs around the world bad-mouthing President Bush and the USA. He seems to think that those of us who were alive and conscious during his failed presidency have forgotten. I haven’t. I remember 15 to 20% interest rates at the same time that unemployment stood at 7%. I remember inflation at 12%.

Just three weeks after Hezbollah invaded Israel, kidnapping two Israeli soldiers and causing the deaths of eight others, Human Rights Watch issued a 49-page report about the war that had been ignited by this attack. The title of the report was Fatal Strikes: Israel's Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon. "Our research shows that Israel's claim that Hezbollah fighters are hiding among civilians does not explain, let alone justify, Israel's indiscriminate warfare," declared Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based nongovernmental organization. "In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes," the group concluded. Then it added the most damning...

WASHINGTON - Elliott Abrams, a special assistant to the president and an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, has been appointed deputy national security adviser with a focus on promoting global democracy and human rights. President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, also announced Wednesday that Faryar Shirzad will continue to serve in an expanded role as deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. Abrams, who becomes national security adviser for global democracy strategy, will continue work on Israeli-Palestinian affairs in concert with Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Abrams has served as special assistant...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (Reuters) - Despite U.S. efforts to stop left-wing Nicaraguan politician Daniel Ortega from returning to power, a poll released on Tuesday showed he maintained a six-point lead over rival presidential candidates. Ortega, who headed the socialist Sandinista government in the 1980s, had the support of 29 percent of those surveyed, according to a poll by Cid-Gallup. Twenty-three percent said they backed conservative banker and former Foreign Minister Eduardo Montealegre. A June Cid-Gallip poll also gave Ortega a six-point lead. Washington, which backed Contra rebels who battled the Soviet-supported Sandinista government, has criticized Ortega as "undemocratic" and tried to...

Nicaragua candidate dies suddenly A candidate in Nicaragua's forthcoming presidential elections, Herty Lewites, has died suddenly of a heart attack. Mr Lewites, 65, a centre-left ex-mayor of Managua, had broken with ex-president Daniel Ortega's Sandinista Party and was third in a recent poll. His candidacy had been expected to split the Sandinista vote and harm Mr Ortega's chances of regaining power. A recent poll gave Mr Ortega a narrow lead over his main conservative rival ahead of the November vote. Breakaway movement Mr Lewite's party president Dora Maria Telle told the Associated Press news agency he had suffered from long-standing...

Advocates of an open border between the U.S. and Mexico do their best to present a mellow American flag-waving image to the public. But when they gather in semiprivate, they communicate much differently to each other. Perhaps they need to be even more careful. In the big pro-immigration marches this spring, Hispanic activists sought to present themselves as "civil rights" advocates in the gentle and inclusive tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Oh sure, some of the recent marchers went "off message," carrying Mexican flags and calling for "reconquista," but for the most part, the demonstrators were well-behaved. But...

Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon.  In 1982, following Operation Peace for Galilee, JINSA reported on the international terrorist haven that had arisen in Fatahland – the southern part of Lebanon controlled by Yasser Arafat.  Aside from the expected mélange of Middle Easterners, there were Japanese Red Army, German and Italian Red Brigades, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadorans, Colombians and Peruvians.  There were Iranian Shi’ites, East Germans and Bulgarians.  Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon, again.  Religious Iran and secular, Ba’athist Syria made a deal to use Syrian-controlled Lebanon as a base for Hizballah to attack Israel.  Today, Israel...

LEON, Nicaragua (Reuters) - After years of setbacks, many Nicaraguans from Leon, the cradle of the 1979 Sandinista revolution, believe their aging former guerrilla leaders could soon return to power in elections that could also prove a diplomatic nightmare for Washington. "We need a change. It's been bad, bad, bad," said 60-year-old war Sandinista war veteran Daniel Sauro, referring to 16 years of pro-Washington governments that took power after Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega's electoral defeat in 1990. Sauro lives in a city where colonial churches and dilapidated houses are still splattered with aging bullet holes from 1970s street battles between...

CARACAS, Venezuela - U.S. missionaries accused by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of espionage have been forced from their remote outposts among jungle tribes by a government order, the final pair leaving Thursday after years of evangelical work. The New Tribes Mission flew those two out of the rain forest to regroup with other missionaries in the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz. There they will decide what to do next: leave the country or continue with a legal battle seeking to overturn the government's order to expel them from indigenous areas by Sunday. Most of the group's missionaries are Americans. Since...

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Thousands of supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez marched in Caracas on Saturday to support the leftist leader in his dispute with Mexico's president over U.S. free trade proposals. State workers, unionists and students, many wearing red T-shirts, waved flags and anti-U.S. placards as they marched through the capital accompanied by trucks blaring revolutionary songs, Venezuelan folk ballads and Mexican mariachi music. Venezuela and Mexico withdrew their ambassadors on Monday after Chavez called his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, a "lap dog" of U.S. imperialism for his close ties to Washington and told him, "Don't mess with...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua, March 20 - Raising tensions that have revived the politics and personalities of the cold war, the United States has suspended military assistance to Nicaragua because it has failed to move forward with the destruction of an arsenal of shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles that the Bush administration considers a possible terrorist threat. American diplomats here said Friday that about $2.3 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Army had been suspended pending the destruction of the Soviet-made SA-7 missile systems. In Washington, a senior State Department official confirmed that "part of our security assistance is on hold" while an agreement...

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP)-Miskito Indians leaders on Thursday asked government and human rights investigators to probe allegations that at least 150 of their people were killed under Nicaragua's Sandinista regime.The leaders said that the country's independent Permanent Human Rights Commission should investigate and the government prosecute those who carried out the killings and burned houses, destroyed crops and slaughtered livestock.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece appears in the July 18th, 2005, issue of National Review. Twenty years ago this summer, Washington’s hottest debate centered on the Contras’ war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua — and how to keep the nations of Central America from falling into the hands of Marxist terrorists or right-wing death squads. It was the equivalent of today’s Iraq debate. The eventual victory of freedom in Nicaragua came at a cost of tens of thousands of lives — and it is now in jeopardy. The hard Left in Latin America has learned its lessons: It is no longer...

Facing down the Sandinistas By Enrique Bolanos On Tuesday, April 26, in Managua, Nicaragua, I approached, face-to-face, a crowd violently protesting a 3-cent increase in the public bus fare -- a rise triggered by the recent world oil price surge. There had already been four days of violent street demonstrations centered around three national universities and orchestrated by the Sandinistas. Private buses and government vehicles had been burned and several policemen injured, two of them seriously. Public transportation had been paralyzed for several days and smoke from protesters burning tires in the streets wafted above the city, and the long-gone...

FORT STEWART, Ga. - A soldier who said he refused to return to duty because he opposes the war in Iraq left his unit as its job became more dangerous, his commanding officer testified Thursday. Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, an infantryman with the Florida National Guard, is charged with desertion after failing to return to his unit in Iraq after a two-week furlough in October. He said his experiences in Iraq turned him against the war, and he claims he deserted his unit partly to avoid orders to abuse Iraqi prisoners. Capt. A.J. Balbo, the lead prosecutor, said in his...