[Wash Times] Buenos Aires ‐ When Nicaraguan guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega first took power in mid-1979, his admirers included a 17-year-old Caracas high school dropout who celebrated a "newly lit light" in Latin America as he maneuvered his bus around Venezuela’s hilly capital.Nearly four decades down the road, the driver, Nicolas Maduro, clings to power as his country’s embattled president, and it seems to be the increasingly unpopular Mr. Ortega who is taking cues from his Venezuelan counterpart as he tries to hold on to power.
It has been a stunning comedown for Mr. Ortega, who led the anti-U.S. Sandinista movement in the Reagan era and seemed so secure in power two years ago that he engineered the election of his wife as vice president in a landslide electoral win.
All that has changed since an outbreak of popular discontent in April. It is so severe that some warn of a coup and others fear the country could face another civil war.
Faced with nationwide protests ‐ initially over a pension reform but rapidly expanding against his autocratic rule overall ‐ Mr. Ortega has led a violent clampdown, with security forces and paramilitary forces killing an estimated 297 demonstrators in less than three months. That number exceeds the deaths from political protests in Mr. Maduro’s Venezuela in the same period.