Leon, Nicaragua – If you want to be a friend of Daniel Ortega, the once and perhaps future president of Nicaragua, it helps if you were once his enemy.
An intimidating nom de guerre doesn’t hurt either: “The Godfather,” “Commander Bull’s-Eye” and “The Alligator.” To a man, they either fought in or backed the Contra war that sought to overthrow Ortega’s revolutionary Sandinista government in the 1980s.
Now all three are working to get him elected president, 16 years after Nicaraguans voted the mustachioed hero of the Latin American left out of office.
“In the battle between realism and idealism, realism has won out,” Jaime “The Godfather” Morales Carazo said, explaining why he and so many other Nicaraguan conservatives have joined the Sandinista camp. “If you think about the future, you can’t look back at the past.”
Once the Contras’ top political negotiator, Morales lost his palatial home in Managua, the capital, when the Sandinistas expropriated it and handed it over to Ortega, who still lives there.
Now Morales is Ortega’s running mate in the Nov. 5 presidential election.
Across Nicaragua, pictures of the graying Morales occupy billboards alongside portraits of Ortega, himself an avuncular 60-year-old with thinning black hair who bears a diminishing resemblance to the youthful rebel he once was.
The Ortega-Morales ticket leads in all the polls: A Zogby survey last week had Ortega 15 percentage points ahead of his nearest rival.
The Cold War enmities that once defined politics are a fading memory. No one worries much anymore about communism or a Reaganesque counterrevolution. Instead, people wonder what Ortega really stands for and if there’s anyone he won’t make a deal with.
“Ortega has turned his movement into a buffet lunch, and everyone is invited: conservatives and radicals, Sandinistas and anti-Sandinistas, pro-Americans and anti-Americans,” said Emilio Alvarez Montalvan, a conservative former foreign minister. “The essential question people are asking themselves is if Daniel Ortega has really changed.”
Most observers here agree that an economic crisis that has forced thousands of Nicaraguans to emigrate is feeding Ortega’s lead in the polls. On the campaign trail, he’s portrayed himself as the antidote to the conservative economic ideas backed by the country’s past three presidents.
“We’ve had 16 years of these democratic governments, and what have they given us?” Ortega asked a rally in Leon, a city 50 miles northwest of Managua. “They’ve turned us into beggars! They’ve plundered the people and robbed from our youth.”
Unemployment stands at about 17 percent, and since 1990 half a million Nicaraguans have left the country in search of work in the United States and nearby countries such as El Salvador and Costa Rica.
