Daniel Ortega

Daniel Ortega Saavedra (born 11 November 1945) is the leader of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) and has dominated Nicaraguan politics for more than four decades. He joined the Sandinistas as a teenager and was imprisoned from 1967 to 1974 for activities against the Somoza dictatorship. After the Sandinista revolution overthrew Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979, Ortega became coordinator of the ruling Junta of National Reconstruction and then, following the 1984 elections, President of Nicaragua from 1985 to 1990.

His first government was defined by the Contra War, in which U.S.-backed insurgents fought the Sandinista state — a conflict at the center of the Iran-Contra affair and the International Court of Justice case Nicaragua v. United States (1986), which found the U.S. had violated international law by mining Nicaraguan harbors and supporting the Contras. Ortega lost the 1990 election to Violeta Chamorro and spent 16 years in opposition.

He returned to the presidency after winning the 2006 election and has since been reelected in 2011, 2016, and 2021, each time amid international concerns about electoral fairness. Constitutional changes in 2014 removed presidential term limits. His wife, Rosario Murillo, has served as Vice President since 2017 and was elevated to "co-president" under a 2025 constitutional reform.

Ortega's later rule has drawn sustained criticism from the Organization of American States, the EU, and UN human rights bodies, particularly after the violent suppression of the April 2018 protests, in which the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights documented over 300 deaths. Since 2018 his government has jailed opposition candidates, stripped citizenship from dissidents and clergy, expelled the Jesuits, withdrew Nicaragua from the OAS (announced 2021, completed 2023), and aligned closely with Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.