In Nicaragua, a leaf does not fly without the prior scrutiny of the tyrant. His face is omnipresent, like a Big Brother who sees and controls everything. Nothing is done without the prior knowledge of Daniel Ortega Saavedra and the vengeful and fanatical first lady, Rosario Murillo . Their marriage, which has more to do with power than love, suffocates the ‘nicas’ on a daily basis with propaganda, misery and oppression. Communism in vein.
“We hear from him every day. Every day we name it for some reason or another. It largely determines our lives. His name and his face are on the billboards of streets and highways in Nicaragua, in the news and newspapers ”, writes Fabián Medina in his book El Prison 198: A Profile of Daniel Ortega.
Daniel Ortega has more lives than a cat. He survived the electoral defeat that Violeta Chamorro gave him in 1990, the heart attack that almost took him to the other side in 1994, the chilling report of the rape of his stepdaughter Zoilamérica at just 11 years old in 1998 and the massive street protests in April of 2018 that calmed down by gunfire killing more than 400 people.
Few remember his past as a gunman in the Sandinista Front. On October 23, 1967, he was part of a commando that shot and killed Sergeant Gonzalo Lacayo , one of the harshest and most cruel types of the Anastasio Somoza Debayle dictatorship. Eighteen shots to the body. The last of them on the forehead shouting “Long live the Sandinista Front!” Daniel Ortega Saavedra was 22 years old at the time, extremely thin, sporting a thick mustache and wearing bottle-ass glasses for his myopia.
Ortega never regretted the execution of the Somoza National Guard sergeant. “I saw it as something natural, something that had to happen. It is true that we were taking the life of a person, but that was a person who was stealing the life of the people. Ortega would spend seven years in the Somoza dungeons, not for killing Sergeant Lacayo but for the assault on the Kennedy branch of the Bank of London on July 21, 1967.
His years in prison will leave him with ‘prisoner syndrome’ as a sequel. “He is always isolated, he eats standing up and in his offices he always builds a kind of cell, a very small room with a bed and some books where he takes refuge when he is troubled,” someone close to him confesses to the journalist Fabián Medina.
Another colleague of his confirms it: «On a trip to Caracas, Daniel stayed the four or five days locked up in the hotel. The meals were brought to him there. We were occupying the same room. I was going to do the laps and he was locked up. That’s when I understood that it was easy for Daniel to stay locked up. What I saw there was a prisoner, a man who had the culture of the prisoner ”.
To Ortega’s criminal record we must add the death of three soldiers (two of them brothers) from the Somocista Guard in the assault on the Ocotal barracks on October 12, 1977 at the hands of a column from the Sandinista Front. The date is mythical in the Sandinista calendar and is celebrated as the “feat of San Fabian.”
Upon leaving prison, Ortega went to Cuba where he received military training for a year and a half. He was released thanks to an exchange of Sandinista prisoners in exchange for members of the Somoza elite kidnapped by the terrorist gang.
“When I secretly returned to Nicaragua in 1976, all the defense mechanisms that I had developed in clandestine life began to be activated again,” Ortega told Playboy . And that’s when I felt good. I felt great! I felt so much better than when I had been completely free. “
Those who know him describe him as withdrawn, without the slightest sense of humor or charisma to speak, to enchant people.
“Laughing man, you fucking have a stick face!” People like to be laughed at – they asked Daniel Ortega for theirs once he was inaugurated president of the Government Junta of National Reconstruction that ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1984 after the fall of Somoza on July 17, 1979.
“They did not glimpse that at that moment the seed of the dictator was sown, which would later be equal to or worse than the one that had just been shot out of Nicaragua,” says Medina. He was not a leader but rather a rough and gruff guy, withdrawn and of few words. «Those who know Ortega know the terror he has of the public claim. Avoid exposing yourself to a debate. He can’t control feeling humiliated.
As a good communist, Ortega and his wife like the good life, waste and luxury. Ronald Reagan called him a “dictator with designer glasses”, alluding to some three thousand dollar glasses he bought in Manhattan during his visit to New York. The Sandinista justified himself by saying that he feared a US invasion and needed replacement frames. His wife bought him clothes in the most expensive stores in New York, but Ortega preferred his olive green jacket. “It’s not that he was austere and had only one jacket, it’s that he bought 40 identical jackets in one go.”
Rather than compete with Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez, Ortega preferred to be their pawn, receive instructions, and carry out their orders like a servile lackey. Like his communist mentors, Ortega loses women. An escort describes this as an “incredible relaxation.” “There is even a lover who was married, very beautiful, and Daniel was going to leave her at his house in Belo Horizonte and the husband would leave grateful to Daniel for leaving her.” To sleep with them, Ortega enjoyed the comforts of the same mansion and even the same queen bed in which the dictator Somoza had relationships with his lover Dinorah Sampson .
“It’s funny, but three of Daniel’s bodyguards were Somoza’s guards, jailers with whom he made friends when he was imprisoned. His best friends were fellow prisoners, and he surrounded himself with his former jailers, as if the man did not want to leave the jail in which he was, ”says Fabián Medina Sánchez.
Ortega’s most frequent trips are to Cuba, for health reasons, and to Venezuela, for political and money reasons, especially when Hugo Chávez Frías ruled, who acted as his patron and tutor. Chávez’s protection was translated into a check for 500 million euros a year with which Ortega greased his power machine.
While sinking his people into misery, inflation and unemployment, the satrap allows himself to travel the world at 120,000 euros each way since Ortega is accompanied by an entourage that included his wife, eight children, grandchildren and even daughters-in-law and sons-in-law.
Ortega has concentrated in his hands more power than the Somoza regime he overthrew itself. The Army and the Police act as their own Praetorian Guard. The judiciary hardly resists him. Power is everything in this suspicious-looking satrap. As the Sandinista commander Tomás Borge told him: “We can pay any price, the only thing we cannot do is lose power. Whatever they say, let’s do what we have to do. The highest price would be to lose power ”.
Power blinds and destroys. Ortega is only Somocismo with another name . Three months after the April 2018 demonstrations there were more than 400 dead, jails full of political prisoners, thousands of Nicaraguans fleeing, hiding or migrating to other countries, and a Daniel Ortega in check, internationally isolated, and supported by an army of paramilitaries, a Police that has become denatured, and an Army that pretends to be on the fringes of everything.
Ortega’s chances were greatly reduced, and at this point, the dynastic succession seems like an opium dream. “We are before a sadistic subject, Daniel Ortega, with a magical schizoid thinking, who is capable of torturing and killing to continue taking his delusion of power to the unspeakable.
Daniel Ortega made power his life purpose. And for those who dared to challenge him, he responded with a phrase from Somoza himself that he would make his own: “Silver for friends, stick for the indifferent, and lead for enemies.”
How do you explain Ortega’s survival? For Fabián Medina Sánchez, it is necessary to look for it in the minority of Nicaraguan society that puts its destiny in the hands of the “strong man”, the gamonal de hacienda, the caudillo. That society that believes itself to be a minor, dependent, that seeks the strong man to guide it and, in turn, that strong man takes care that society continues in that condition of dependency to prevent the growth of the little republic that would deny him as a figure of power.
