Former President Ortega bids for power in election

Former Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega is seeking to regain power in elections tomorrow, having recast himself as liberty-loving moderate who seeks normal ties with the United States.

It is two decades since US President Ronald Reagan set in motion a plan to create a Nicaraguan rebel group to take up arms against Ortega and his pro-Cuba Sandinista front. Nearly 10 years of strife ended with his ousting in free elections in 1990.

President George W Bush’s administration is not convinced that a ‘‘new Ortega’’ has replaced the old one, citing his continuing ties to Iraq and Libya, with Marxist rebels in Colombia and his undiminished admiration for Cuban President Fidel Castro.

Normally, the US Government professes neutrality in foreign elections but there is no official fence-straddling this time.

The State Department has said implicitly that Ortega, 55, cannot be trusted to support the global anti-terrorist coalition that Bush has been trying to forge since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

After highlighting Ortega’s ties to countries on the US list of terrorist sponsors, the State Department said last month ‘‘there is no middle ground between those who oppose terrorism and those who support it’’.

The history of Ortega’s relations with the United States is long and bitter.

Alarmed that all of Central America might fall into the Soviet-Cuban camp, the Reagan administration financed anti-communist Nicaraguan rebels who battled the Sandinista army for nearly a decade.

The policy outraged many Democrats and was perhaps the most controversial American foreign policy venture during the 1980s. The uproar over Nicaragua ended with Ortega’s defeat in 1990 presidential elections by a US-backed moderate, Violetta Chamorro.

Ortega has been running neck-and-neck in the election with a conservative businessman Enrique Bolanos, most of whose property was confiscated by the Sandinistas in the early 1980s.

Bolanos, 73, served as President Arnoldo Aleman’s vice president until resigning to kick off his presidential campaign this summer.