Sandinista leader Ortega wins election, asks IMF for aid.

Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, who presided over Nicaragua's bloody communist dictatorship in the 1980s, is back as president-elect, scheduled to take over the reins of government in January. Ortega won the country's November 5 presidential election with a 38-percent plurality of the vote.

On November 16, Ortega and his economic team met with officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank to request more aid to fight hunger in Nicaragua. Ortega reportedly assured the officials that he had learned his lesson from earlier errors and would not try to take his country down the Marxist road again.

Ortega ran his campaign on the theme of "peace, love and reconciliation," and dramatically toned down his fiery Marxist rhetoric. He reportedly has gone through a religious conversion and has befriended his old nemesis, Cardinal Obando y Bravo, the Catholic Church's top-ranking official in Nicaragua. The International Herald Tribune ran a story on November 10 with a headline that read: "Cold War icon Daniel Ortega trades in Marx for God, warms to U.S." But has the leopard really changed his spots? In his May Day speech in Havana, Cuba, in 2005, he referred to Americans as "the enemies of humanity." He has remained closely allied with Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Marxist ruler, Hugo Chavez.