Daniel Ortega Saavedra, born in 1945, president of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990, and reelected in November 2006 to a second five-year term beginning in January 2007. Born in La Libertad and educated at the Central American University in Managua, Ortega quit his law studies to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1963. Within four years Ortega had become head of its urban resistance campaign as the Marxist-oriented rebel group sought to overthrow the dictatorship of the Somoza family. He was jailed from 1967 to 1974 and then was exiled to Cuba, but returned secretly to Nicaragua to rejoin the FSLN.

In July 1979 the Sandinistas led a national uprising that ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The task of leading the country was assumed by a pluralistic Government of National Reconstruction, coordinated by Ortega, who had led the most moderate of the three FSLN factions in the guerrilla war against Somoza. But the Sandinistas soon dominated the government, and non-Sandinistas left the ruling council. The government faced the enormous task of rebuilding a country devastated by the Somoza dynasty, the longest dictatorship in Latin American history. Ortega sought foreign help in relief and reconstruction, but he was wary of compromising his country’s international neutrality and its mixed private and state-owned domestic economy. As a result he secured aid primarily from Latin American and Western European countries, rather than the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). In keeping with the goals of their revolution, the Sandinistas also expanded government control of the economy and instituted numerous social programs.

When Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as U.S. president in 1981, U.S. policy shifted dramatically from one of economic assistance to one of economic sanctions coupled with military and diplomatic pressures. Viewing the Sandinistas as pro-Communist, the United States supported Nicaraguan rebel groups known as contras (for counterrevolutionaries), which waged a guerrilla war to overthrow the Sandinista government. In response, Ortega’s government instituted a military draft and began receiving arms from the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other Communist nations. In 1984 popular elections were held for the presidency and National Assembly, and Ortega was elected president with more than 60 percent of the vote. That same year Ortega entered into regional peace negotiations and agreed to sign a treaty drafted by the Contadora group (Colombia, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela).

Under the peace agreement, internationally monitored elections were held in 1990, and Ortega was defeated by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. He became secretary general of the FSLN in July 1991. In 1996 Ortega again ran for president, advocating moderate rather than revolutionary positions, but was defeated by Arnold Alemán, a conservative lawyer and businessman. Ortega ran for president for a third time in 2001 but was defeated by Liberal Party candidate Enrique Bolaños Geyer.

On a fourth attempt in 2006, however, Ortega defeated conservative Eduardo Montealegre by a margin sufficient to avoid a runoff. Despite adopting relatively moderate positions and calling for foreign investment, Ortega’s candidacy was openly opposed by the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush. The Bush administration included a number of figures who had played key roles in the Reagan administration’s efforts to oust the Sandinistas, including John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, and Elliot Abrams, who was convicted of lying to the U.S. Congress in the Iran-contra scandal. The Bush administration warned that Ortega would lead Nicaragua into an alliance with the anti-U.S. president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, and threatened economic sanctions and a cutoff of U.S. aid if he was elected. But the move appeared to backfire as many Nicaraguans voted for Ortega out of resentment against U.S. intervention. Ortega also enjoyed a wide following among young Nicaraguans in the capital’s barrios, many of whom are unemployed and not old enough to remember the last time the Sandinistas ruled.