MEXICO CITY (AP) — Former Sandinista guerrilla and retired Nicaraguan general Humberto Ortega Saavedra, a fierce critic of his brother and current president of Nicaragua in recent years, died on Monday. He was 77 years old.
The Nicaraguan Army issued a statement on the X social network on Monday in which it reported Ortega’s death, without going into details about the cause of death. In the publication he was recognized as the founder of the Army and for his “exemplary and patriotic performance” as commander in chief of the Sandinista Popular Army.
Who was considered the “strong man” of Nicaragua, distanced himself with strong criticism from the management of his brother Daniel Ortega in recent years, despite the fact that they shared power during the revolution in the 1980s. The president called him “ traitor” during a public event at the end of last May.
Days earlier, the police had deployed a fence around Humberto Ortega’s home and stripped him of his phones and computers. Later, without confirming the house arrest, the government reported that it had sent a medical team to provide “permanent care” to Ortega in his private residence for health reasons.
Dissident and former presidential candidate Juan Sebastián Chamorro told The Associated Press from exile that “Humberto Ortega’s legacy is intrinsically linked to the war.”
Chamorro attributed the deterioration in Ortega’s health to the house arrest imposed on him by his brother’s government.
“I blame Humberto’s death in large part on the stress he suffered in recent months, five months after he was kept home in prison and unable to do his logical work and write and communicate and be able to go out,” he declared. “That obviously further weakened his mood and eventually caused his death.”
This protection began after Humberto Ortega stated in an interview that the president did not have suitable successors and that a “power vacuum” would occur at the time of his physical disappearance.
The public statements of the former general, who had intensified his criticism of his brother since the 2018 rebellion, would have irritated Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, the powerful vice president who according to opponents would aspire to take over the government immediately upon the death of his brother. husband.
Humberto Ortega suffered from heart problems and in October 2022 he was fitted with a pacemaker, as reported at the time. In the controversial interview with the Infobae media, he said that he had had “serious cardiovascular events” since 2018, which were repeated in recent months. He received regular care at the Vivian Pellas hospital (private) in the Nicaraguan capital.
However, after the official team of doctors was sent, that private care ended.
President Daniel Ortega confirmed the discomfort that his statements caused in the government, when on May 28, in front of a square full of soldiers and police, he called him a “traitor” for having decorated 32 years ago, as head of the Army, the then US military attaché in Managua, Dennis F. Quinn.
Born in Managua on January 10, 1947, Humberto Ortega was one of four children of the marriage between Daniel Ortega Cerda and Lidia Saavedra, opponents of the regime of General Anastasio Somoza that was overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. The younger brother of both, Camilo , was also a guerrilla and died in combat in 1978.
Humberto Ortega joined the guerrillas of the Sandinista National Liberation Front at a very young age and in 1969 he was wounded in the arm in a failed military operation in which he tried to remove Carlos Fonseca, the top Sandinista commander, who died in 1976, from a Costa Rican prison. .
After the fall of Somoza and the triumph of the revolution on July 19, 1979, he was appointed head of the Sandinista army and Minister of Defense. His great power was completed by being a member of the highest board of commanders of the FSLN, to which his brother Daniel and his comrades Tomás Borge, Víctor Tirado, Henry Ruiz, Bayardo Arce, Jaime Wheelock, Carlos Núñez and Luis Carrión also belonged.
With more than 100,000 men under arms, the army led by Humberto Ortega faced some 40,000 rebels supported by the United States. The civil war lasted almost 10 years and left at least 35,000 dead on both sides.
Considered by his friends a shrewd, calculating and cold-minded man, Humberto Ortega had controversial phrases: if in 1981 he threatened to “hang the bourgeois from the light poles,” in 1996 he defended his new role as a private businessman and justified his fortune. saying that he was not going to leave the government “on a bicycle.”
Under his mandate as top commander in chief of the EPS and during the presidency of his brother Daniel (1985-1990), compulsory military service was implemented, which mobilized more than 320,000 young recruits to the war fronts, as stated in interviews after his retirement.
Although the Sandinistas left power in 1990 after being defeated at the polls by Violeta Chamorro, Ortega continued for five more years at the head of the EPS, which changed its name to the Nicaraguan Army. He also promoted a process of reduction and “professionalization” of the military corps, forcing the replacement of its top commanders every four years and subordination to civil power.
After his retirement in 1995, he alternated his family residence between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, fully dedicated to business and writing essays in which he proposed a “nation agreement,” embracing the theory of “centrism” as a formula for a government of national conciliation in Nicaragua.
From that position, and during surprise public appearances in the Nicaraguan press, he did not hesitate to make uncomfortable criticisms of his brother Daniel, who after 16 years in the opposition had returned to the government in 2007 as an FSLN candidate promising “work, peace and love.” .
As a result of the social rebellion of April 2018, the former general called to “end” the paramilitary forces that acted as support for the police in an “indiscriminate repression” that left at least 355 dead in the country.
“The people no longer want to see these parapolice forces in accompaniment functions with the police or alone… We cannot accept that there are parapolice or paramilitary forces,” he said in an interview. “The Army must talk to Daniel Ortega” to control this situation, he added.
And he appeared again in 2019 to question the arrest of some 168 opponents who were detained at the time. Daniel Ortega responded publicly: “Some traitors and country-sellers who went so far as to say that they were going to lack light poles to hang the rich, now come out saying that these gentlemen are not terrorists.”
In February 2022, he publicly reproached his brother for the death of former guerrilla and retired general Hugo Torres, arrested a year earlier in a police raid of opposition leaders and who died after being imprisoned for eight months in El Chipote prison. Torres died in a “cruel confinement,” wrote Humberto Ortega in an article published in the newspaper La Prensa.
Humberto Ortega was the author of several books on military history and strategy, including “50 years of Sandinista struggle” (1978), “On the insurrection” (1981), “The epic of the insurrection” (2004) and “The odyssey through Nicaragua” (2013).
