By Catherine Bremer ESTELI, Nicaragua, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Mina Mesa proudly holds up a faded sepia-colored photo of her son taken a year before he was killed at age 15 fighting in Nicaragua's 1979 Marxist revolution. Her thumb is stained brown after voting for left-wing Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, honoring her dead son by backing the former guerrilla's bid to return to power 16 years after a devastating civil war against U.S.-trained Contra rebels brought him down. "My son's dream was to free the poor from oppression, so I must fight for that," said Mesa, 60, who runs a gallery of old photos of some 1,200 Sandinistas who died in the conflict. "The Sandinistas brought medicines and literacy to every corner of the country. Even during the war they made sure we all had food. For the poor, Ortega is the only one," she said. But for Rolando Lopez, 44, who hid petrified in the roof of his house as Sandinistas carried off his friends to fight the Contras and killed others that resisted, Ortega revives painful memories he would rather forget. "Twenty six years later, I can still remember the sound of the women crying," said Lopez, whose brothers fled the country during the revolution and the decade-long war that followed before Ortega was toppled in a 1990 election. Making his third bid to return to power, Ortega's legacy had Nicaraguans bitterly divided as they voted in a presidential election on Sunday. Those whose sons and husbands gave their lives in 1979 to oust a feared dictatorship want Ortega to win and bring back the social programs their men believed in. POLLS GAVE ORTEGA STRONG LEAD But those who saw coffee growers and landowners die defending their families and property in the Cuban-inspired revolution, and many who lost their relatives in the ensuing civil war, hope he loses to either of two conservative rivals. The split is especially deep in Esteli, a town in Nicaragua's mountainous north, which was a Sandinista stronghold in the revolution and saw bitter fighting in the civil war. Polls give Ortega a strong lead, based on a softer version of his old socialist dream and helped by the failure of 16 years of right-wing governments to reduce poverty. Even those too young to remember the fighting, which was so brutal that soldiers often sealed coffins to spare families the sight of the corpses, say the revolution affected their vote. "My mother and my grandparents told me about what my uncle did for Nicaragua. For me, he is a hero and a martyr," said 25-year-old fireman and Sandinista voter Gustavo Romero. "Their dream was to throw out the imperialists. Today it's a different ideology, but it's still about helping the poor." Nearby, supporters of the ruling Liberal Party remember only killings, hyperinflation, property seizures, dire food shortages and military conscription. "All I learned from that time is to be frightened of the Sandinistas and to hate them," said Lopez, a lawyer. Today Esteli is calm. Tourists come for its other quirks -- like it being home to the only traffic light on the Pan-American highway between Managua and the Honduran border. Voters want it to stay like that. "Both sides were as bad as each other. The fighting scared me because I had two small sons," said Alma Gutierrez, 58. "Now all I want is a government that will fulfill its promises."
