NICARAGUA:One of a few men in history to take power first by force and later by ballot, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega has matured since he rolled into Managua in a jeep with a rifle in hand leading a 1979 revolution.
Gone are the austere olive-green military fatigues on a skinny frame, the unfashionable thick-rimmed glasses and the fiery rhetoric against "Yankee imperialism". Instead, the balding Sandinista Party leader drives a Mercedes Benz sport utility vehicle, uses contact lenses and dresses well. Only his thick moustache remains.
Nicaraguans voted the Sandinistas out of office in 1990, tired of the civil war that killed some 30,000 people. Ortega and two brothers were senior commanders in the long guerrilla war that finally ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.
Ortega survived a scandal out of office that would have destroyed most politicians when a stepdaughter alleged in 1998 that he had sexually abused her for years.
His wife, Rosario Murillo, stood by him and he weathered the storm.
Today, the former urban guerrilla who was jailed and tortured for fighting the US-backed dictatorship he later toppled prefers to talk about God, peace, love and reconciliation.