Ortega adresses the UN General Assembly
Daniel Ortega Saavedra (born 11 November 1945) was President of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, during the Sandinista government, and is currently the leader of the Sandinista party.
He came to power in July 1979 at the head of a revolutionary junta after the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. The junta was originally intended to be an interim government, was composed of many prominent Nicaraguan political leaders, and was backed by the United States. By 1981 however, all the members of the junta had been expelled, leaving Ortega as the sole leader. Ortega, and his radical Marxist supporters, the Sandinistas, then announced their plans to bring extensive socialist reforms to the country, strongly inspired by Fidel Castro's socialist system in Cuba. Cuba in turn began to provide economic aid to Nicaragua, along with the Soviet Union.
In November 1984 Ortega called national elections and won the presidency with 63% of the vote. The results were rejected as fraudulent by the United States but upheld as free and fair by many other observers. Frightened by the notion of a Soviet proxy state in Latin America, the U.S. under the Reagan administration supported anti-Sandinista Contra rebels operating out of Honduras and Costa Rica and, in early 1984, illegally mined Nicaragua's harbours. These actions caused much controversy in the United States, and out of these events developed the Iran-Contra Affair and the Nicaragua v. United States judgement of the International Court of Justice.
Ortega's forces were ultimately unable to resist the Contras, and in 1990 he agreed to hold elections. He was subsequently voted of office in favor of former junta member, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who led a 14-party anti-Sandinista alliance.
He stood for election again in October 1996 and November 2001, and lost on both occasions. His loss in the 2001 election can be attributed to a number of factors: allegations of corruption made against him in relation to the last days of his government in the 1980s, allegations made by his stepdaughter that he sexually abused her when she was 11, and U.S. interference in the election campaign.
