Ortega headed back to power in Nicaragua

Daniel Ortega, the rebel leader driven from power 16 years ago by a U.S.-backed war and the missteps of his own Sandinista movement, was cruising Monday toward victory and an unlikely political resurrection in Nicaragua’s presidential vote.

The result was a blow to the Bush administration, which worked actively to discourage Nicaraguans from voting for Ortega, a 60-year-old former Marxist now allied with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the bete noire of Latin American and U.S. conservatives.

With 62% of the ballots counted, Ortega was outpolling conservative challenger Eduardo Montealegre, 39% to 31%. Two separate “quick counts” that took samples of the vote found Ortega would win a clear and “irrefutable” first-round triumph.

Ortega’s apparent victory was celebrated Monday evening in the impoverished neighborhoods of this and other Nicaraguan cities, where the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s core supporters have remained loyal through years of revolution, counterrevolution and electoral defeats.

Cars cruised down Managua’s main streets with horns honking and passengers waving the black and red flag of the Sandinista Front.

“I feel like I did in 1979, because this is a new revolution,” said Violeta Mena, 44, remembering the day when the Sandinistas marched into Managua after defeating the army of dictator Anastasio Somoza. “This is not an armed revolution, it’s a revolution for social justice.”

Though his followers still call him el comandante, Ortega won by reinventing himself as a moderate and a dealmaker in the long tradition of Latin American populist politics.

Over the last two years, Ortega has forged a series of cunning alliances that have left his opponents on both ends of the political spectrum weak and divided.

Ortega reconciled with former enemies, including the hierarchy of the local Roman Catholic Church and former commanders of the right-wing Contra army who fought to overthrow him in the 1980s. And Sandinista legislators used their influence to change the rules of the electoral contest to make a first-round victory easier.

“He’s a smart man and a shrewd politician, obviously,” former President Carter said. Carter, who as president met Ortega when the Sandinistas came to power in the 1979 revolution, was leading a 62-observer delegation here.

Having pulled off an unlikely political second act, Ortega “has an opportunity to heal his country and to heal the disparity between his country and the United States,” Carter said.

Ortega was winning a first-round victory in Sunday’s vote thanks in large measure to a constitutional amendment the Sandinistas negotiated with one of Nicaragua’s most powerful politicians -- former President Arnoldo Aleman, now serving a 20-year sentence for fraud and money laundering.

The amendment lowered the threshold for a first-round victory from 45% to 35%. Aleman, in exchange, received a loosening of the conditions of his house arrest.

In 1990, 1996 and 2001 Ortega lost presidential elections to conservative candidates even though he won a greater percentage of the votes in each of those races than he did Sunday.

Carter and other international and Nicaraguan observers said the voting had proceeded normally, despite claims by conservative candidates and the dissident Sandinista Renovation Movement of widespread irregularities.

“The election has taken place in a climate of tranquillity,” said Claudio Fava, head of the European Union’s team of election monitors. “Above all, it is a victory for the Nicaraguan people.... There was no fraud.”

U.S. officials, who had strongly urged Nicaraguans not to vote for Ortega and threatened economic consequences, responded cautiously Monday, saying they would withhold comment pending final results.

“The Nicaraguan electorate has responsibility for choosing its leaders,” a State Department statement said. “We will work with those leaders based on their commitment to actions in support of Nicaragua’s democratic future.”

After meeting with Carter at a Managua hotel Monday night, Ortega told reporters that Nicaragua would continue to “give security to the private sector, protect foreign and national investors ... and work to eradicate poverty in the country.”

Ortega’s opponents were not prepared to concede defeat.

“This is a battle to transform Nicaragua,” Montealegre, a Harvard-educated banker, said Monday morning. “It won’t be over until the last vote is counted.”

Another conservative candidate, Jose Rizo of the Liberal Constitutional Party, was running third in the official count, with 23% of the vote.

Oscar Rene Vargas, a sociologist and political analyst here, said the split in the conservative vote, along with a lingering crisis of poverty, immigration and unemployment, helped deliver a Sandinista victory.

Between 1990 and 2005, he said, the number of Nicaraguans living in poverty increased from 2 million to 4 million.

“People had a lot of expectations that life would get better” with conservative governments, Vargas said. “Instead, life got worse.” Hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans emigrated to neighboring Costa Rica, El Salvador and other countries in search of work.

With Ortega looking strong in polls before the election, Paul Trivelli, the U.S. ambassador in Managua, worked behind the scenes to unite Nicaragua’s conservative politicians behind a single, anti-Ortega candidate.

Trivelli warned that $220 million in U.S. aid to Nicaragua could be imperiled in the event of an Ortega victory, and U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez said U.S. aid to the country would be endangered if “anti-democratic forces” prevailed in Nicaragua. Three Republican congressmen called on the Bush administration to stop people in the U.S. from sending money to Nicaragua should Ortega win.

The American lobbying has been enough to alarm the Organization of American States, which in October said it “regretted” the U.S. intervention. “The future of Nicaragua’s political institutions should depend only on the decisions of the people of this nation,” an OAS observer mission said in a statement.

The European Union and watchdog groups have been critical of Venezuelan attempts to influence the Nicaraguan vote. Chavez is widely believed to have helped fund the Ortega campaign, which dominated the airwaves here.

Michael Shifter, vice president of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, said U.S. officials have been disturbed at the prospect of Ortega’s return. But he said the U.S. effort to prevent Nicaragua from turning to Ortega was out of proportion to any threat the politician could pose to the country and region.

“It’s a setback to U.S. policy, but sort of a self-inflicted one, since he’s not crucial to U.S. security interests, as they set him up to be,” Shifter said.

He said Ortega was not likely to try to push Nicaragua far to the left, and would have to remain closer to the center to accomplish his goals in the country and the region. Ortega will be an ally of the left-leaning regimes in Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia, but “his capacity to extend his influence is limited,” he said.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington and special correspondent Alex Renderos in Managua contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Who is Ortega?

1945: Born in La Libertad, Nicaragua, to middle-class parents.

1963: Joins Marxist Sandinista National Liberation Front.

1967: Arrested and imprisoned on bank robbery charges.

1974: Released in exchange for hostages, becomes a Sandinista commander.

1979: Sandinistas overthrow dictator Anastasio Somoza and form five-person Junta of National Reconstruction. Under the junta, Nicaragua makes advances in literacy, healthcare, women’s rights and working conditions, but sparks opposition with land seizures, economic controls and forced relocation of Miskito Indians.

1984: Elected president, amid boycott by opposition groups.

1986: President Reagan warns that defeat of the U.S.-funded Contra rebels would create “a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two days’ driving time from Harlingen, Texas.”

1990: Loses presidential election to former junta member Violeta Barrios de Chamorro amid spiraling inflation, a U.S. trade embargo and widespread discontent over conscription to fight the U.S.-supported Contra war.

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Sources: Associated Press, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Los Angeles Times reports