UNFINISHED REVOLUTION

Critical biography of Nicaragua's president.

Morris (Jimmy Carter: American Moralist, 1996, etc.) examines the life of Daniel Ortega Saavedra, who blended Catholicism with Marxism in combating the repressive regime of dictator Anastasio Somoza. Ortega joined the Sandinista group FSLN in 1963, and “from then on he was a committed revolutionary.” In 1967, he “killed for the first time,” assassinating a National Guard sergeant in an act that he likened to a member of the French Resistance killing a Gestapo agent. Morris doesn't quite buy the argument, but he appreciates the fact that Ortega was skilled at what he did, having learned in prison the best practices of guerrilla warfare and putting them to good use. Ortega rose in the ranks of the guerrilla army, writes the author, not just because of those skills but also because the movement's leader was killed in 1976, at a time when the Sandinista cause was becoming well known outside Nicaragua. The civil war that raged throughout the late 1970s killed thousands, while the hated National Guard inflicted hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of damage to the country's infrastructure when it became apparent that the FSLN would prevail. Ortega, a Marxist in power, instantly became a bête noire of the Reagan administration and a target of U.S.-funded counterrevolutionaries. He remains an outsider, held by American functionaries with much the same regard that Fidel Castro once was—and he's not universally popular in Nicaragua either. For his many faults, though, Ortega, by Morris's account, has improved the lives of ordinary Nicaraguans—“it is difficult to conclude that Nicaragua would be better off replacing him with a liberal opponent.”

A solid biography of a compelling but little-known leader from a country that, though small, has loomed large in recent history.