The U.S. Embassy has been accused of counterrevolutionary subversion. A nervous Catholic Church is appealing for calm. The opposition party is crying electoral fraud, while roaming gangs armed with clubs are attacking marchers. The mayor here has called it anarchy. And everyone is asking: What is President Daniel Ortega after?This sounds more like the Central America of the 1980s. But Ortega, the former Marxist revolutionary comandante who returned to the president's office in 2006, is at the center of a chaotic new struggle. Critics charge that he and Nicaragua, the poorest country in Central America, are marching backward, away from relatively peaceful, transparent, democratic elections to ones that are violent, shady and stolen.
The Nov. 9 elections and their disputed results -- for 146 mayoralties, including that of Managua, the capital -- have become a crucial test for the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Ortega, its leader, who seeks to consolidate his power in Nicaragua and enhance his standing as a founder of the "pink tide" of left-leaning governments flowing across Latin America. In the months leading to the vote, Ortega and the Sandinistas cracked down on their critics and revived old antagonisms between the United States and the former revolutionaries.