Nicaragua time, again: will a Reaganite be elected? Or will the chief Sandinista return?

IT's not unusual for politicians to invoke the memory of Ronald Reagan. Of course, most of those who do so are American--but not Eduardo Montealegre. He's trying to become the next president of Nicaragua, and he's calling for Americans to revive their Reagan-era interest in his country. "In the 1980s, the United States fought hard against Marxist expansion in the Western Hemisphere, and it drew a line in Nicaragua," Montealegre said in a June 14 speech at the Heritage Foundation. He believes the time has come to draw that line again.

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His main opponent in the upcoming election is Daniel Ortega. Yes, that Daniel Ortega--the iron-fisted Sandinista leader who nationalized Nicaragua's economy, lifted its rate of inflation to roughly 30,000 percent, cracked down on dissent, inspired the Contra resistance movement, and otherwise ran his country into the ground while praising the Soviet Union's five-year plans and snarling at capitalism. You might have thought he was rotting in a prison somewhere on the Mosquito Coast by now, or at least living a life of exile in a French chateau. But instead, the man whom Reagan once called "a dictator in designer glasses" is back. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has replaced the Kremlin as his patron, and the polls suggest that the resurgent Ortega has a real chance at victory on November 5. "The future of Nicaragua is at stake," warns Roger Noriega, a former Bush-administration diplomat who is now a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

In truth, Ortega never really went away. Since losing a presidential election in 1990 to Violeta Chamorro--an election that he scheduled only because he was sure he would win--this Cold War leftover has remained a fixture in Nicaraguan politics. Propped up by yellow-dog Sandinistas, he ran for president in 1996 and 2001, finishing second both times. During this period, Ortega forged a cynical pact with Arnoldo Aleman, the man who beat him in 1996. They amended Nicaragua's constitution to give themselves lifetime seats in the legislature and immunity from prosecution: Aleman knew he was vulnerable to charges of corruption, and Ortega needed to fend off credible accusations from his stepdaughter that he had sexually abused her throughout the 1980s. The two men also used their party machinery to weaken the office of the presidency--a de-energizing of the executive that has crippled the government of current president Enrique Bolanos, an authentic reformer. Last October, deputy secretary of state Robert Zoellick traveled to Nicaragua and condemned the threat of "a creeping coup" led by "a clique of caudillos."

One of the most important elements of this creeping coup involves election rules: It is now possible for a presidential candidate who receives as little as 35 percent of the vote to win the race. This is widely seen as increasing Ortega's odds in a field that includes four major candidates. "He can't get 50 percent," says Montealegre. "The majority of the people are against the Sandinistas, but a minority of voters will support him, and these rules make it possible for someone to win with minority support." If Ortega draws about the same percentage of support as John Kerry did in Kansas in 2004, he could triumph.

Nicaragua is a small and poor country: Its president has fewer constituents than the mayor of New York City, and Haiti is the only country in the Western Hemisphere with a lower per capita GDP. Yet the nation has loomed large in the American mind for quite some time, at least since President William Howard Taft dispatched the Marines there in 1909. (They stayed almost constantly until 1933.) FDR's famous quip--"He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch"--was a reference to Anastasio Somoza, the father of the Nicaraguan dictator whose abuses of power allowed the revolutionary Sandinistas to gain popularity. A chief problem with the Sandinistas, who came to power in 1979, was that they were Moscow's sons of bitches, and they immediately tried to destabilize the region by exporting terrorism and revolution to Colombia and El Salvador. The Reagan administration responded by supporting the Contra rebels, at least when the Democratic Congress would allow it. Although Chamorro's election booted Ortega from the presidency, the Sandinistas have remained a significant force in Nicaraguan politics, currently controlling more than 40 percent of the national legislature as well as several municipal governments, including that of the capital city, Managua.

Today, despite these challenges, Nicaragua is a U.S. ally. It's a participant in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, making it part of a bloc of nations that together trade more with the United States than do the billion-plus citizens of India. Nicaragua even sent soldiers to Iraq--a force of 115 that probably didn't shock or awe anybody, but was enough to earn membership in the coalition of the willing.

The 51-year-old Eduardo Montealegre wants to maintain strong ties between Nicaragua and the U.S. Born in Managua, he went to boarding school in California and obtained degrees from both Brown and Harvard. But just as he was re-establishing himself in Nicaragua in the late 1970s, the Sandinistas seized his family's assets. "They took everything," he says. Montealegre returned to the United States, spent the 1980s working at financial firms in New York and Miami, and went back to his native land after the Chamorro victory. Since then, he has worked in the private sector and occupied a series of high-level government posts, including foreign minister and finance minister. Whereas Ortega appears to share a wardrobe with Fidel Castro, Montealegre looks and dresses like a banker. He is by nature a technocrat, but he also possesses a nerdy charisma, in the mold of the late Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, or perhaps current District of Columbia mayor Anthony Williams. "He's certainly not your stereotype of a Latin American populist," says Bernard Aronson, a State Department official in the first Bush administration.

Aronson is one of several former government officials who are backing Montealegre. Another is Jeane Kirkpatrick, who was Reagan's ambassador to the U.N. On June 14, both attended a fundraiser for Montealegre's political party at the Washington offices of Greenberg Traurig, a law firm with a nice view of Lafayette Square. (Although it's illegal for Nicaraguan candidates to raise money outside of the country, political parties are permitted to do so.) Those in attendance were perhaps as much anti-Ortega as they were pro-Montealegre. "It's ridiculous for Ortega to be on the ballot," says Kirkpatrick. "He hasn't changed. The Nicaraguan people shouldn't even permit him to hope that he'll be president."

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Montealegre believes that one of his most important jobs between now and the election is to remind Nicaraguans about how awful the Sandinista years were. The country's legal voting age is 16, and many of those who will cast ballots this fall won't have any memory of what happened in the 1980s. Older Nicaraguans certainly do, and many of those who were most severely affected by the Sandinistas are rallying behind Montealegre. At a candidate forum in Miami on June 11, he and two other candidates--Herty Lewites, a former mayor of Managua who broke away from the Sandinistas, and Jose Rizo, who represents Aleman's party--lit into Ortega before an audience of expatriates. "By far the strongest--and loudest--support went to Montealegre," reported the Miami Herald. These U.S. residents aren't allowed to vote unless they physically return to Nicaragua, but they are part of an influential diaspora that boosts the economy with their remittances. There are said to be more Nicaraguans in Miami than any other city in the world except Managua.

Apart from Ortega, Montealegre's main nemesis is Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who is trying to use his nation's oil wealth to build what he calls a Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America--a regional counterweight to the United States and what Montealegre labels "an axis of the authoritarian Left in Latin America." Chavez has allied himself with Castro, and last year he helped usher Evo Morales into power in Bolivia. This year, his meddling has sparked major controversies in the presidential elections of Mexico and Peru. Nicaragua is now coming into his crosshairs. In a blatant attempt to generate support for Ortega, Chavez is sending subsidized fertilizer and oil to cities and towns controlled by the Sandinistas. "What we're witnessing is nothing less than an attempt by Hugo Chavez to buy the elections in Nicaragua," says Montealegre. He's hoping that this claim will resonate among voters the way a similar allegation did in Peru, where Alan Garcia defeated the Chavezbacked Ollanta Humala for the presidency on June 4.

In one recent poll, Montealegre and Ortega were virtually tied in first-round balloting: 28 percent for Montealegre and 27 percent for Ortega, followed by 18 percent for Lewites and 13 percent for Rizo. In a second-round runoff, Montealegre would trounce Ortega, 49 percent to 32 percent. Yet there is some question about the accuracy of such surveys in Nicaragua, especially in rural areas. Moreover, the country's election board is currently run by Ortega's cronies. "You can count on the Sandinistas to steal 5 percent of the vote," says Noriega. "They always have and they always will." Montealegre will need to make sure that his party, which lacks the Tammany Hall muscle of the Sandinistas, produces enough election observers to keep fraud to a minimum.

If Montealegre succeeds in beating Ortega, he may be able to make good on a campaign promise that's displayed prominently in a four-page handout his entourage distributed in Washington: "Saving the Reagan Legacy."