Storm Warnings Over Nicaragua

Nicaragua (Reuters) Oct 2006 - Nicaraguan left-wing Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, making his third bid to return to power, has a 17-point lead before November's presidential election and could win without a runoff, a poll showed on Wednesday.

The survey gave 37.5 percent support to Ortega, a U.S. Cold War foe and ally of Venezuela's radical leftist leader Hugo Chavez. It was the first to indicate that the 61-year-old Ortega could take the presidency in the first round.

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Sandinistas say they've changed but don't convince Jews - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

MANAGUA -- They say they have changed. They insist that they are not the revolutionaries they were in the 1980s. That past saw a leftist-oriented government that instituted a hated draft, imposed food rationing in the face of a U.S. embargo and forced the vast majority of the tiny local Jewish population to go into exile in the United States and neighboring Costa Rica.

"We are not going to have a return to the past," a high-ranking Sandinista official who asked not to be identified said in an interview.

Isaac Gorn, a member of the near-defunct Nicaraguan Jewish community who now lives in Costa Rica, does not trust the Sandinistas.

Recalling that the country's sole synagogue was seized by the Sandinista government and converted into a secular school, he said no one should trust the Sandinistas.

"Before we lived tranquilly and no one bothered us, but then the Sandinistas came, took the synagogue, burned [his family's textile] factory and everyone had to leave," he said.

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President Ronald Reagan - Remarks to Jewish Leaders During a White House Briefing on United States Assistance for the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance - March 5, 1986

"There's been a lot of misinformation floating around about the true character of the Sandinista regime. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it disinformation. For instance, take their ties to terrorist groups in the Middle East. Those ties go back more than a decade and a half. Tomas Borge, Nicaragua's Minister of Interior, was one of many Sandinista Communists to train in PLO camps in Lebanon and Syria and Libya. To quote Borge's own words: ``We say to our brother Arafat that Nicaragua is his land and the PLO cause is the cause of the Sandinistas.'' Yasser Arafat returned the compliment saying, ``The triumph of the Nicaraguans is the PLO's triumph.''

Or listen to what the Sandinista Communists say about Qadhafi, whom they call ``our great friend'' -- Borge again: ``Our friendship with Libya is eternal. Libya is a people which, in accordance with our experience, has developed solidarity without frontiers.'' Remember that one: ``Solidarity without frontiers.'' Qadhafi, meanwhile, has been openly sending them millions of dollars of arms, because, he says: ``The Nicaraguan Communists fight with Libya. They fight America,'' he put it, ``on its own ground.'' The Sandinistas have also drawn close to the Iranians. Just last year the Iranian Prime Minister [Mir Hosein Musavi-Khamenei], who's thought to control Iran's terrorist apparatus, said to Daniel Ortega -- and I quote again: ``We consider your revolutionary country as our own home.''

The Sandinista Communists have matched their words with actions, joining the PLO in terrorist assaults in the Middle East, including the attempted overthrow of the Hussein government and the hijacking of an El Al airliner. The Sandinista terrorist killed in that El Al hijacking, Patrick Arguayo Ryan, is revered as a hero by the Nicaraguan Government. They even named a large power dam after him. The Nicaraguan Communists claim that they're not anti-Semitic, they're just anti-Zionist. Well, as anti-Zionists, they desecrated Managua's synagogue and drove the small Jewish community into exile. Isaac Stavisky, who was there, tells of the anti-Jewish Sandinista graffiti: ``Death to the Jewish Pigs,'' with red and black FSLN [Sandinista National Liberation Front] initials next to it, and ``Beware Sandinista Justice.'' Well, what is the official Sandinista position on this persecution of the Jewish community? The Jews, they say, have a ``bourgeois mentality'' that prevented them to adjusting to communism.

Managua has also rolled out the welcome mat for terrorists from around the world, not just Cubans, Bulgarians, Libyans, PLO, and Iranians, but members of the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Basque ETA [Basque Fatherland and Freedom], and the Italian Red Brigade. These criminals and lunatics now camp out on the doorstep of the United States. If the Sandinistas are allowed to consolidate their hold on Nicaragua, we'll have a permanent staging ground for terrorism. A home away from home for Qadhafi, Arafat, and the Ayatollah -- just 3 hours by air from the U.S. border. The recent terrorist attack in the Palace of Justice in Colombia in which the Sandinista Communists were implicated is just the beginning, the first rumblings of a Communist earthquake that could overrun Latin America."