LONDON -- "Ortega is a tiger who has not changed his stripes," warned U.S. ambassador Paul Trivelli before the former revolutionary leader won back the presidency of Nicaragua in Monday's election. Retired U.S. Marine Col. Oliver North, who took the fall for President Ronald Reagan's administration in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, showed up to warn that Daniel Ortega was as bad as Adolf Hitler. And Ortega just smiled and said: "Jesus Christ is my hero now."
It's deja vu all over again as American leaders denounce the Communist threat in Nicaragua and leftist Latin American leaders like Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez celebrate the rise of the "pink tide" in their region. Old images of the Sandinista revolutionaries and their "sandalista" foreign admirers (leftwing youths who came to help the revolution by picking coffee beans and drinking lots of cheap rum) fill the media. Seventeen thousand foreign observers and a thousand journalists came to Nicaragua for the elections. But the whole drama is Hamlet without the Prince.
Ortega was once a revolutionary leader, but that was a quarter-century ago. Now he is a populist politician as cynical as any of his opponents, and the likelihood that his election will make any difference to Nicaragua's poor is slim.