Nicagaruan Anti-Semites May Return to Power

Nicaragua (Reuters) Oct 2006 - Nicaraguan left-wing Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega, making his third bid to return to power, has a 17-point lead before November's presidential election and could win without a runoff, a poll showed on Wednesday.

The survey gave 37.5 percent support to Ortega, a U.S. Cold War foe and ally of Venezuela's radical leftist leader Hugo Chavez. It was the first to indicate that the 61-year-old Ortega could take the presidency in the first round.

MANAGUA -- They say they have changed. They insist that they are not the revolutionaries they were in the 1980s. That past saw a leftist-oriented government that instituted a hated draft, imposed food rationing in the face of a U.S. embargo and forced the vast majority of the tiny local Jewish population to go into exile in the United States and neighboring Costa Rica.
"We are not going to have a return to the past," a high-ranking Sandinista official who asked not to be identified said in an interview.

Isaac Gorn, a member of the near-defunct Nicaraguan Jewish community who now lives in Costa Rica, does not trust the Sandinistas.

Recalling that the country's sole synagogue was seized by the Sandinista government and converted into a secular school, he said no one should trust the Sandinistas.

Via Sultan Knish