Ortega ahead in Nicaragua vote count

Early election results in Nicaragua suggest former Marxist revolutionary Daniel Ortega could return to power as president after 16 years.

Results from just under 15% of polling stations show Mr Ortega with about 40% of the vote - enough to avoid a second round of voting if that support holds.

The main Conservative candidate Eduardo Montealegre is trailing with 33%.

Mr Ortega says he has changed from the leader who seized property from the wealthy during a 1979 revolution.

The poll is being watched by the US, which is concerned that its former Cold War enemy could be returned to power.

Chief Nicaraguan election official Roberto Rivas struck out at a US embassy statement suggesting "anomalies in the electoral process".

"We have promised the Nicaraguan people transparent elections, and that's what we've done," he said.

Mr Ortega's opponents say he would take the nation back to the days of the civil war with the Contra rebels.

'Savage capitalism'

Turnout was reported to be high with some people having to join long queues to vote but election observers reported no major problems.

Mr Ortega, who is making his fourth attempt to become elected president, will be hoping to secure 35% of the vote and a five-point lead over his nearest challenger to avoid a run-off.

There are five candidates in all.

Mr Ortega has seen 16 years of conservative governments and says he wants an end to "savage capitalism".

But he says his revolutionary days are behind him - and his main priority is to secure foreign investment to help to ease widespread poverty.

Mr Ortega has been endorsed by left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

He was also hoping for support from the 80% of Nicaraguans who live on $2 a day or less.

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Nicaraguans waited in long lines Sunday to vote in an election that will decide whether Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega returns to power 16 years after the end of his Soviet-allied rule and a US-backed war to topple him.

The vote has become a tug-of-war between rivals Venezuela and the United States. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has said that aid and trade "will be endangered" if "anti-democratic forces prevail," while Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a US foe, has openly favored his "brother" Ortega.

While some polls opened late, few major problems were reported. Pablo Ayon, head of the independent Nicaraguan Civic Group for Ethics and Transparency, said participation was "high, orderly and peaceful."

Ortega faces four opponents: Harvard-educated Eduardo Montealegre, Sandinista dissident Edmundo Jarquin, ruling party candidate Jose Rizo and former Contra rebel Eden Pastora. Most polls show that his closest rival is Montealegre of the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance, a party that broke from the Constitutionalist Liberal Party of former President Arnoldo Aleman, who was convicted of corruption following his 1997-2002 term.

The race was Ortega's fifth consecutive presidential campaign. He won a 1984 election boycotted by Sandinista foes, then lost in 1990 to Violeta Chamorro, ending Sandinista rule and the Contra war. His next two presidential attempts, in 1996 and 2001, were also failures.

But Ortega could win in the first round with just 35 percent of the vote if he leads his closest opponent by five percentage points.

Recent polls showed Ortega with a comfortable lead over Montealegre, but just short of the votes needed to avoid a second round.

Ortega cast his vote amid a throng of cameramen, saying he was confident there wouldn't be a runoff.

"Nicaragua wins today," he said before climbing into his Mercedes Benz sport utility vehicle and driving away with his wife.

Results will begin to trickle in late Sunday, but officials likely won't declare a winner until Monday or later. Voters are also electing a new Congress.

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Staff and agencies
Monday November 6, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

The Sandinista leader, Daniel Ortega, today looked increasingly likely to be returned to power, 16 years after a US-backed rebellion helped to oust him from office.

Preliminary results after 15% of ballots had been counted following yesterday's elections in Nicaragua showed the former president had polled 40% of the vote, in what could be one of Latin America's biggest political comebacks.

Early figures indicated he had opened up a lead of 7% over his Harvard-educated rival, Eduardo Montealegre of the Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance.

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Like many others Andrew Anthony went to Nicaragua to support the Sandinistas by picking coffee, building loos - and drinking rum. Two decades later he returned as Nicaraguans, their revolution long defeated, prepared to vote in new elections. He found the country had changed as much as himself - with a reinvented Daniel Ortega still in business

Sunday November 5, 2006
The Observer

Back in the 1980s, in what used to be called Thatcher's Britain, it could sometimes seem as if history had obeyed Marx and repeated itself, this time in the farcical guise of the 1930s. There was huge unemployment, massive strikes, pitched battles between workers and police, and the most talked-about drama on television was Brideshead Revisited. In this strange retroworld of bygone class struggle there was even, for true aficionados of the earlier period, a version of the Spanish Civil War.

It was fought in far-off Nicaragua, where a group of revolutionaries had been inspired, naturally, by a figure from the 1930s. The National Sandinista Liberation Front, better known as the Sandinistas, named themselves after Augusto Sandino, a cowboy-hat-wearing nationalist who fought against US occupation. Sandino became an iconic martyr when he was double-crossed and murdered in 1934 by Anastasio Somoza, the dictator whose family ran the country for over 40 years.

In Latin America the capitalism the US endorsed tended to go hand in hand with dictatorships and death squads. But even by regional standards, Somoza's son, also called Anastasio, was an exceptional piece of work. And not only as a tyrant and torturer. After an earthquake devastated the capital Managua in 1972, he diverted tens of millions of dollars of international aid into his personal bank account.

Then in 1979 a revolution led by the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza and suddenly a country that was known previously only as the birthplace of Bianca Jagger was the height of radical chic. As if to confirm this new status, the following year the Clash, those poets of vicarious rebellion, named their fourth album Sandinista!. And when Ronald Reagan's administration enforced a trade embargo, mined the Nicaraguan ports and funded the remnants of Somoza's hated National Guard that made up the Contras, artists and writers like Julie Christie and Salman Rushdie came out in support of the Sandinista cause.

At home the left had suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of Margaret Thatcher's government but Nicaragua represented hope, or revenge, or a chance to teach Thatcher's bellicose friend Reagan a lesson. It was the Third World David standing up to the superpower Goliath. Concerts and benefits were held to raise funds. Hundreds of British volunteers made their way to Central America to offer their support. And I was one of them.

In one respect, at least, the often cited analogy of the Spanish Civil War was all too pertinent. More than 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the Contra war, a figure that, relative to population size, approximates to the death toll in Spain. But of course the international brigades that went out to Nicaragua were nothing like their counterparts 50 years earlier. We didn't take up arms, we picked coffee. As befitted the generation that would give the world the triple grand skinny latte, it was less Homage to Catalonia, more Homage to Cappuccino.

Thus 19 years ago I became a coffee brigadista for six weeks in the Matagalpan mountains. Afterwards I stayed on in Nicaragua for six months, working on a project for refugees from El Salvador, building latrines and generally drinking in the heady, rum-filled atmosphere of revolution. I'd gone for genuine reasons of solidarity but also because, as a 25-year-old graduate working as a despatch rider, I felt alienated by the yuppie world that was taking shape in London. Added to which there was the dim flicker of doomed romance. I was having an off-again off-again affair with a woman who'd gone off to Nicaragua. All in all it seemed like a good idea, a sort of gap year for lefties, a veritable holiday in a war zone.

Not long after I returned to England, the war ended, in 1990 the Sandinistas lost an election, and Nicaragua disappeared from the headlines. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, left-wing revolutions went quickly out of fashion. Overnight the Sandinistas seemed like a fleeting anachronism, a minor historical footnote destined to be forgotten.

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We, Nicaraguans, have just lived through a truly remarkable and long electoral campaign. Although it officially began in August, the candidates had been campaigning since 2005, and the journey has been one of extraordinary and surreal events. What we have witnessed could very well fit in the most imaginative magical realism novel.

The highlights include Daniel Ortega arriving to the Sandinista rally of July 19 (the anniversary of the revolution) on horseback, wrapped in a Nicaraguan flag as if for a boxing match, riding through Managua with the flag of the United States as part of his cavalry; the John Lennon song Give Peace a Chance, with new lyrics, playing endlessly at Sandinista rallies; Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, turned into ridiculous preachers of love, salvation and religion appearing together at every campaign stop: she dressed in pink and blue, rings on each of her ten fingers, turquoise jewellery up to her elbows, he in a white shirt, smiling beatifically and asking people to elect him "for the love of God".

Ortega and Murillo's sudden conversion and intimacy with the Catholic church and their former nemesis, Cardinal Obando y Bravo, has been perhaps the most outrageous demonstration of political "repackaging" we have seen in Nicaragua so far. But there's also the candidate for the Liberal party, José Rizo, who recently appeared on television, in this most tropical and hot country, sitting on a rattan chair by a lit fireplace dressed in a short-sleeved guayabera shirt. Perhaps, as often happens in Nicaragua, the air conditioning was turned up so high he needed a fireplace to warm up. But to see him next to a fireplace, in Nicaragua, was certainly a bizarre scene.

Although popular banter calls Murillo a "witch" and cartoonists always portray her next to a cauldron cooking potions and spells, it was the Liberal party's spokesman and legislative candidate, Enrique Quiñonez, who in a TV show he hosts, alerted people to the presence of the number of the beast, 666, in Ortega's campaign. On charts especially drawn for the occasion, he asked people to count the letters in Ortega's campaign slogan and in his vice-presidential candidate's name: Jaime Morales Carazo. Both have 18 letters: 666, he intoned ominously. Daniel Ortega's signature, he went on, if one looks carefully at the way he writes the letter D, the pen stroke he draws beneath his name, the date ... it's 666 again ... and so forth.

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