Ortega turning his wrath on former friends and allies as authoritarian slide continues

“Ortega y Somoza, son la misma cosa.” 

When Daniel Ortega led the Sandinista Revolution that overthrew Nicaragua’s far-right dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979, no one could envisage that the pair of bitter foes would decades later be equated to one another in a popular protest ditty. Mr. Ortega rose to power under a banner of social justice and political fairness but later threw his own rulebook out the window, being elected to a controversial fourth presidential term in 2022. 

He has become a textbook example of autocracy and is now persecuting his adversaries — including many of his former comrades-in-arms.

In 2021, when running to extend his current 15-year stint as Nicaragua’s president, Mr. Ortega used his political police to arrest at least seven opposition candidates. In most cases, the leader accused his opponents of being backed by a “U.S interventionist plot” to oust the Sandinistas from power. Such suspicion would have been warranted in the 1980s, during Mr. Ortega’s first spell as head of state, but the Washington Card has become a crutch for...