“Yes, that is how long Daniel Ortega has been around.”
This simple acknowledgment came when I read the piece captured in the screenshot below. In August/September 1989, I was a young military adviser at UNHQ in New York, and was part of a UN assessment mission traversing Central America—Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica—nations scarred by ideology and violence. We moved carefully, deliberately, ensuring the anti-Sandinista Contras forces knew our schedule in Nicaragua, before we climbed into Sandinista MI-17 helicopters for low-altitude flights over territory where we could easily have been mistaken for targets.
The irony was not lost on me. Only a few years earlier, Oliver North had become the face of the Iran-Contra Affair—secretly selling arms to Iran to fund Contra rebels, shredding documents, and lying to Congress. Now here I was, protected by the very Sandinista pilots, those weapons were meant to defeat, flying nap-of-the-earth through rugged Nicaraguan terrain, watching Sandinista commandantes demonstrate professionalism that commanded respect despite political differences.
Those pilots were extraordinary. Their flying maneuvers through Contra-occupied territory were precise, confident, masterful. They kept us alive through sheer skill, navigating the same skies where American-funded rebels hunted below with stinger missiles. In those moments, suspended between US geopolitics and Nicaraguan reality, I understood something about how the world actually works—how ideology dissolves in the presence of competence, how enemies become temporary constructs when survival demands cooperation.
And there was Daniel Ortega, head of the Sandinista government, a revolutionary leader who had once seemed destined to reshape Central America. To his credit—and I do not offer this lightly—he conceded power to Violeta Chamorro, the widow of the man his revolution had violently overthrown. I was privileged to meet her in Managua alongside UN Envoy Iqbal Riza, the evening she won the presidential elections in late February, 1990. She carried herself with a dignity born of profound loss, a woman who had endured assassination of her husband and years of political warfare, now ascending through the very mechanisms of democracy, that revolutionaries had once dismissed as bourgeois illusion.
It seemed then that Nicaragua had achieved something remarkable: a peaceful transfer of power, a revolution’s quiet end, a nation choosing reconciliation over revenge. The Cold War was ending. The Contras were demobilizing. Democracy, fragile but present, appeared to have won.
That was then.
Now, more than 40 years after his first rise to power, Daniel Ortega remains. Not as the revolutionary who graciously stepped aside, but as something far more familiar: a leader whose time has passed but who refuses to relinquish control. He has transformed from the young Comandante who once promised liberation into a figure of intransigence, presiding over a Nicaragua that has become increasingly authoritarian, his wife serving as vice president in a dynastic arrangement that mocks the revolution’s early egalitarian rhetoric.
We have seen this before. We understand the weight of leaders who mistake longevity for legitimacy. The pattern is painfully familiar across the Global South—the revolutionary who becomes the dictator, the liberator who becomes the oppressor, the young idealist who ages into cynical self-preservation.
What strikes me most, looking back from the distance of the Pasifika, is not Ortega’s transformation—that seems almost inevitable now. What strikes me is my own youthful faith that 1989 represented a genuine turning point, that the world was finally learning to settle disputes through ballots rather than bullets, that even revolutionaries could become democrats.
I was wrong. The MI-17 helicopters still fly over Nicaragua, but now they serve a different kind of war—one fought against the Nicaraguan people themselves, against journalists and protesters and anyone who dares to question the Comandante who forgot to leave.
Daniel Ortega has been around for so long that it is difficult to remember a Nicaragua without him. But perhaps that is precisely the problem. A nation cannot move forward when its leader remains trapped in the revolution he once led, frozen in time while his people yearn for a future he will not permit them to build.
“Yes, that is how long Daniel Ortega has been around.”
It is both a statement of fact and a lament—for Nicaragua, for revolution, for the bitter lesson that power, once acquired, is rarely surrendered willingly, even by those who once promised to share it.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 