NICARAGUA: As Daniel Ortega was making his fourth attempt to win back Nicaragua's presidency in elections yesterday, its citizens are grappling with the very real possibility that the former Marxist revolutionary could finally succeed.
That prospect has sent shudders through Washington, where Mr Ortega is remembered, and reviled, as the bane of the Reagan administration. In Nicaragua, however, the vote is being viewed less as a referendum on Mr Ortega's 11-year rule after his guerrilla forces seized power in 1979 than as a chance to end a more recent era of collusion between his Sandinista National Liberation Front and the Constitutionalist Liberal Party, which holds the most seats in the National Assembly.
Maverick candidates from both camps have pronounced themselves disgusted by the unbridled corruption that has flourished under "el pacto", or the pact, as the powersharing arrangement is known, and they have formed popular breakaway parties that vow to return the focus to Nicaragua's impoverished multitudes.
Yet this very splintering of his opposition, combined with a rules change devised under the pact that allows a candidate to win a first-round vote with as little as 35 per cent of the ballots and a five-point lead, offers Mr Ortega (60) his best chance at a comeback since voters swept him from the presidency in 1990.
The immense affection Mr Ortega earned by toppling brutal dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979 was severely eroded by his government's human rights abuses, confiscation of property and bloody war against US- backed Contra insurgents.
However, he now leads public opinion polls in the five-way race with as much as 33 per cent - putting him within striking distance of a first-round victory.
"Everyone is asking themselves: 'Should I vote for the candidate I really want, or should I vote for the guy who I think can beat Ortega'?" observed Carlos Chamorro, a political analyst and son of the woman who replaced Mr Ortega in 1990, Violeta Chamorro.
Mr Ortega's opponents have weighed in over the past week with a frenzy of ads promoting themselves as the most viable alternative. Josi Rizo (62), candidate of the Constitutionalist Liberal Party, blanketed the airwaves with commercials claiming the massive turnout at his closing campaign rally proved he was the safest bet.
Eduardo Montealegre (51), a former foreign and finance minister now representing the breakaway Nicaraguan Liberal Alliance, countered with spots touting opinion polls that put him in second place. "Think of your family and of Nicaragua. Don't waste your vote on candidates who can't defeat Ortega," Mr Montealegre, who is favoured by the Bush administration, urged in a final televised message on Wednesday. By contrast, Edmundo Jarquin (60), an economist who represents the breakaway Sandinista Renovation Movement and who trails Mr Montealegre and Mr Rizo in opinion polls, argued that the old strategy of lining up behind one candidate to defeat Mr Ortega would only ensure the continued dominance of corrupt party bosses on the right. "The only way to waste your vote is to vote for more of the same," he said.
Mr Ortega, meanwhile, sought to cast himself as the candidate of reconciliation. In place of military fatigues, he has campaigned in jeans and white shirts to the blaring accompaniment of the John Lennon song, Give Peace a Chance. He has reached out to old enemies, signing a public "peace agreement" with a former Contra group and picking as his running mate a former Contra spokesman whose house he once confiscated.
Mr Ortega, a once avowed secularist, even courted the Catholic Church by supporting legislation last month to extend Nicaragua's already restrictive abortion ban to cases where a mother's life is in danger.
His transformation, however, has hardly been complete. In a nation reeling from widespread unemployment, hunger, and frequent electrical blackouts, he has spoken repeatedly of taming "wild capitalism" by forgiving the debt of poor farmers and requiring banks to lower the fees they charge Nicaraguans abroad to wire money to their families back home. Still, he has insisted he supports free markets, and what few references he made to the US were muted compared to his firebreathing past.