Daniel Ortega is a Nicaraguan politician and President of Nicaragua since 2007. He was also president of that country between 1985 and 1990, and is currently recognized as a dictator.He centralized power in himself and dismantled the democratic structure of his country.
Ortega was also recognized as a guerrilla of the Sandinista Revolution, being one of the members of the junta that provisionally governed the country until the presidential election that led him to his first term. This first government, unlike the others, was marked by numerous actions to combat inequality in Nicaragua.
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Summary about Daniel Ortega
Daniel Ortega is a Nicaraguan politician known for his authoritarian rule.
In his youth, he was a communist who was part of the Sandinista Front.
He participated in the Sandinista Revolution, an event that overthrew the Somoza dictatorship.
He was president of Nicaragua in the 1980s, during which time he carried out a democratic and popular government.
In 2006, he was elected again to the presidency, establishing an authoritarian government.
Origins of Daniel Ortega
Jose Daniel Ortega Saavedra was born on November 11, 1945, in the city of La Libertad, in Nicaragua. He belonged to a family of workers and of simple financial condition. His father was called Daniel Ortega Cerda and his mother, Lidia Saavedra. Ortega's family was openly against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza García.
Somoza had seized power in Nicaragua in a coup in 1936. Ortega's father was then part of the guerrilla movement led by César Augusto Sandino and persecuted by the dictatorship, and Ortega's mother was imprisoned by the same regime. This environment made Ortega position himself contrary à dictatorship dyou Somoza since his youth.
In the mid-1950s, his family moved to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and there he completed part of his educational training. In your youth, it arrived The attend the Universidad Centroamericana, where attended Right, and joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in 1963.
Revolutionary performance by Daniel Ortega
The Sandinista National Liberation Front was a guerrilla group that emerged in Nicaragua in the early 1960s. This group was formed as a resistance movement against the Somoza dictatorship, who had governed Nicaragua in an authoritarian manner since the 1930s. The movement was named after César Augusto Sandino's guerrilla warfare, and was ideologically inspired by the Marxism.
For the FSLN, Daniel Ortega was arrested in 1967 for robbing a bank in order to raise funds for the group. He spent seven years in prison, during which time he was heavily tortured, and in 1974 he was released in a negotiation by the Nicaraguan government with the Sandinistas for the execution of an exchange of prisoners.
In the same year Ortega exiled himself in Cuba, and there he was able to improve his capacity as a soldier in a guerrilla. A few years later, he returned to Nicaragua, but his return was secret and played a part in forming a large front of opposition to the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (son of Anastasio Somoza García), at the end of the 1970.
In 1979, civil war broke out in Nicaragua, and Anastasio Somoza fled and was given refuge in the Paraguay. The success of the Sandinista struggle led to the event being named the Sandinista Revolution. After that, a junta was organized to provisionally govern Nicaragua, and Daniel Ortega was one of its members. From 1981 onwards, this board began to be led by him.
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Daniel Ortega in the presidency of Nicaragua
With the success of the Sandinista Revolution, a presidential election was organized in Nicaragua, and Daniel Ortega ran à presidency byThe FSLN.He ran in that election with Clemente Chávez, representative of conservatism in Nicaragua. Daniel Ortega won the election, becoming president of the country.
In the period that he was at the head of Nicaragua, in that first government, a series of changes were initiated in the country of Central America. A series of land expropriations was carried out, which started a process of land reform, allowing thousands of families to earn their living from agriculture.
Literacy and vaccination campaigns were launched for the Nicaraguan population, with the aim of reducing illiteracy and disease rates, such as polio. In addition, part of the country's economy was nationalized, with emphasis on the financial sector. Despite these measures, there has been criticism of the Ortega government's policy, such as the government's treatment of indigenous peoples in Nicaragua.
O Ortega's first government had significant results in the social aspect, but in the economic field it suffered considerably. This is because Nicaragua became the victim of economic sanctions by the government of Ronald Reagan, president of U.S. Reagan feared that Nicaragua's example would result in new socialist-inspired revolutions in Central America.
In addition, the Reagan administration financed counterrevolutionary guerrillas that aimed to overthrow the Sandinistas from power. The combination of the civil war in Nicaragua and US sanctions caused Ortega's government to accumulate bad results in the economy. In the 1990 presidential election, Ortega was defeated by Violeta Chamorro.
Ortega dictatorship in Nicaragua
After the defeat in 1990, Ortega ran for the presidency of Nicaragua in the elections of 1996 and 2001, being defeated in both. In the 2006 election, he ran again,and stripped itself of its former communist influences, abandoning the Sandinista colors, for example.
He adopted a religious discourse and demonstrated to have some more conservative positions. The result gave him victory after obtaining more than 38% of the votes. Upon assuming his second term, Ortega initiated a centralized government that, little by little, he wasdestroying the institutions that sustained the democracy in Nicaragua.
Ortega carried out repeated constitutional reforms to ensure that he could govern Nicaragua for multiple terms. In Nicaragua there was no possibility of re-election, and all impediments were removed, allowing Ortega to reach his fourth consecutive term in the 2021 presidential election.
Your government too was marked by violently persecuting the opposition, even revoking the license of opposition parties and persecuting politicians who ran against him in the presidential elections. There was even persecution by his government against the Catholic Church.
The presidential elections held during Ortega's government were criticized by the international community, as your lawsuits aream accusedin manipulations and fraud. Finally, Nicaragua is recognized as the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere (behind the Haiti), and the Ortega government did little to reverse this situation.
The violent dictatorship led by Daniel Ortega, added to the country's poverty and the lack of government actions to reduce it, made him a hateful figure in Nicaragua.He is compared today with the dictators he once fought. This population dissatisfaction was manifested in 2018 through protests that were violently repressed by the Nicaraguan police forces.
Image credits:
[1] Rob Crandall It is Shutterstock
By Daniel Neves
History teacher
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historia-da-america/daniel-ortega.htm
