By Frances Robles
Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and the current president’s younger brother, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule, only to wind up under house arrest, died Monday in Managua, the capital. He was 77.
The Nicaraguan government announced the death, in a military hospital. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement.
Ortega was a key member of the leftist Sandinista Front that in 1979 toppled the right-wing dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza.
Along with his brother, Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua’s current president, he was a member of the nine-man directorate that ruled Nicaragua during a civil war against the U.S.-backed rebels known as the Contras that lasted throughout the 1980s.
In announcing his death, the government acknowledged his “strategic contribution” as a Sandinista, a movement he joined as an adolescent.
“He was known as one of the most important military strategists during the insurrection,” said Mateo Jarquín, a Nicaragua historian at Chapman University in Orange, California.
Ortega published several books reminiscing about his role in the fall of the Somoza regime — a corrupt family dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for decades — and took pride in helping bring change to the Central American nation, Jarquín said.
Once the Sandinistas won, Ortega was criticized for instituting mandatory military service during the fight with the Contras and was blamed by some for a massacre of Indigenous people that the Sandinistas were accused of committing in December 1981.
But Ortega’s greatest legacy arguably came after the revolution and the war that followed it. He was best known for professionalizing the armed forces, transforming them from a partisan force tied to a single political party into a legitimate military.
After the Sandinistas lost power in a 1990 election, Jarquín’s grandmother, President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, kept him on as head of the armed forces, a controversial move that Chamorro considered key to a successful transition.
“She saw him as being an instrument to help bring pacification to the country,” said John F. Maisto, who was the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua during her administration. “It was a very wise decision.”
Still, she faced pressure from conservatives in both Nicaragua and the United States to fire him.
Ortega, while serving in the Chamorro government, reduced the military’s size and oversaw a transition that included dropping the word “Sandinista” from its name.
“That was all part of the democratic transition,” Maisto said. “Among the Nicaraguan military, he was respected.”
For years, Ortega was dogged by accusations that he helped cover up the 1990 killing of a 16-year-old boy who was shot by members of his motorcade’s security team. The case was transferred to a military tribunal, which acquitted him, but an international human rights court later ordered the government to pay $20,000 in damages.
He remained in office until 1995 and later moved to Costa Rica, where he became successful in various business ventures, aided by the many contacts he had made during his years in office.
His brother Daniel was elected president in 2007 and has been accused of installing an authoritarian dynastic dictatorship much like the one the Ortega brothers helped topple.
Humberto Ortega used his perch as the president’s brother to speak out against abuses. When hundreds of people were killed in a popular uprising in 2018, Ortega publicly questioned the use of paramilitary groups of armed civilians, called for early elections and urged his brother to work with the army to find a solution to the crisis.
In an interview this year with an Argentine news site, Infobae, after moving back to Nicaragua, he questioned whether anyone could replace an authoritarian dictator.
“The same authoritarian, personalist, verticalist tendency to command has weakened the transmission belts of the party,” he said.
The statement infuriated the president and his wife and expected successor, Vice President Rosario Murillo.
Within hours, news media reported that police had surrounded Ortega’s house and seized his electronic devices. He was never heard from again. Ortega was widely reported to have been under house arrest since May.
The president later called his younger brother a “traitor” for once having bestowed an important military award on an American.
In an audio message he recorded in June, three weeks after the police raided his home, Ortega told Nicaragua’s Confidencial news outlet that he was a “political prisoner.” He worried that the stress of his “unjust imprisonment” would “produce a fatal outcome at any moment.”
“All my freedoms have been suspended,” he said, according to a recording posted online.
Ortega said he was denied visits from his family, was isolated and had resorted to using a hidden telephone.
“He was seen as kind of a rival by Rosario: She didn’t want anybody that would have Daniel’s ear other than her,” said Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at Brown University who covered the Contra war for The New York Times. “He would be the only one who could compete.”
Humberto Ortega Saavedra was born Jan. 10, 1947, in La Libertad, a mining town in Chontales, in central Nicaragua.
His parents, Daniel Ortega Cerda and Lidia Saavedra, were avid nationalists who moved the family to Managua in the 1950s. They had six children, including two who died as infants. Humberto Ortega was preceded in death by a sister, Germania, and a brother, Camilo, who died in battle during the revolution.
Ortega joined the Sandinistas during his adolescence and was credited with rescuing a commander, an operation in which he was wounded and left with permanent damage to his upper body, the government’s death announcement said.
The statement added that he was a prolific writer, particularly on the history of the Sandinista movement.
A separate statement, from his family, said he was survived by three daughters and two sons.
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