Daniel Ortega Doesn't Change Much,

and now many of his comrades-in-arms are beginning to see the light. When I returned to my graduate education in 1992 after a visit to Nicaragua during which a friend and I had interviewed Nicaragua's former president, one teacher was not impressed. "He's a tyrant!" was his response to the picture of Ortega and I shaking hands. I should still have the picture somewhere, but I'll admit it's not in a frame, and maybe in part that's due to my teacher's response to what I thought was mainly a coup (after all: at the time I didn't speak one word of Spanish--my friend, and an American free-lance journalist who was also in the interview, did all the talking; at the time I believed I understood about 25% of what was being said). The man indeed is a little dictator, and he's proving it during his new tenure as his country's president to the point where he is now losing prominent, long-standing members of what in recent years has already been a truncated Sandinista party. First he alienates large sections of his movement (which go on to found their own political movement), now he's losing people from those who decided to stick with him. Back during the 1970s and 1980s there was a clear, and not terribly uplifting, U.S. role in Nicaraguan events, one that to an extent explained some of the less than democratic policies Ortega and the Sandinistas pushed through. What's interesting about this week's article is the absence of any mention of a U.S. role. Sadly, Nicaraguans seem to be inflicting most of their ongoing, apparently never-ending misery on each other, without much help from the outside; and sadly, a deluded, washed-up Cold War revolutionary, one who should have retired a long time ago, is doing a lot of the damage.