Nicaraguan poor hope Ortega will take up old cause
12 Jan 2007 00:22:57 GMT Source: Reuters
By Greg Brosnan MATAGALPA, Nicaragua, Jan 11 (Reuters) - Even as civil war and rationing ripped Nicaragua apart in the 1980s, Maria Morales supported Daniel Ortega, the young Marxist who seized power in a revolution, for fighting for the poor. After an election comeback two decades later, Ortega is president again and Morales hopes he will resurrect ambitious health and education programs that were a brief success before the war against U.S.-backed rebels wrecked the economy. Struggling to feed a family crammed into a shack near the northern town of Matagalpa on a wage of just over $1 a day, the 60-year-old coffee picker sees Ortega as a savior. "He gave us food, he gave us work," she said, adding the conservative governments that ran Nicaragua for the last 16 years did little for the poor. Ortega, a former Sandinista rebel, took office on Wednesday after winning November's election with a pledge to help the poor in a $5 billion economy based on coffee, tourism, foreign aid and remittances sent home by Nicaraguans working abroad. He joins a group of leftist Latin American leaders aligned with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, an outspoken foe of the United States. As Ortega promises moderate socialist policies, millions in the region's second-poorest country hope he has enough revolutionary zeal left to lift them out of misery. Thousands of zealous young teachers and nurses fanned out into rural areas spreading health care and literacy shortly after the 1979 Sandinista revolution. But economic mismanagement and a war against Contra rebels trained and funded by Washington bankrupted Nicaragua and dealt the Sandinista government an election defeat in 1990. SO MANY POOR Ortega boasted at his inauguration that his first government had cut the illiteracy rate to 12.5 percent from 65 percent, saying the current 35 percent rate and accompanying chronic poverty proved free-market policies had failed. "How they can keep insisting this model is the best when there are 4.2 million poor?" he said. Counting on financial and energy aid from Chavez, Ortega has promised cheap credit that could make a difference in a country where eight in 10 people live on less than $2 a day, according to U.N. figures. An earthquake in 1972 destroyed Managua, the lakeside capital, killing thousands of people and turning a once lively city center into a wasteland where many families still live without electricity or water. But the most ferocious poverty grips a countryside still reeling from a civil war that killed 30,000 people. In rural areas, schools are scant and hospitals scarce. Outside Morales' door, beautiful scenes of afternoon mist curling around sheer jungle cliffs contrast with the squalor. Morales sleeps on plastic sheets with two daughters, a son and two baby grandchildren in the tiny, wooden shack. They collect water from a dirty river and boil it on a wood stove. The only lights at night are candles. A few miles away, a potholed highway has become a tenuous economic lifeline. As rain soaked their tattered clothes, scores of children, some barely old enough to walk, shoveled roadside dirt into the potholes and smoothed them over with their bare feet, scurrying for the occasional tip tossed by a motorist. Maria Ortiz, 39, left a coffee-picking job to live in a plastic hut on the highway with her four children after hearing the family could bring in more cash by filling in holes. Unable to send the four young breadwinners to school, Ortiz is clinging to Ortega for hope. "We voted for him," she said. "Let's see how he helps us."
