Revered by some and reviled by others, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is poised to be returned to power in Nicaragua. The early results from yesterday's elections in the impoverished country, if reflective of widespread voting patterns, would be sufficient to add his name to the increasingly lengthy list of socialist leaders - including Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Brazil's Lula, Argentina's Néstor Kirchner, and Bolivia's Evo Morales - ruling large swaths of Latin America.
In past interviews, such as this one on CNN, Mr Ortega has talked about how his ideology was nurtured by the police beatings he received in his youth. He governed during the violent US-backed insurgency waged by the Contras. The American intellectual Noam Chomsky has written that the root of US concern over the less than mighty nation of 5.5 million people lay in how successful the Sandinista reform programme proved to be.
Whatever the motives, over 60,000 people are thought to have died during the civil war, including the grandparents of FonC-K, who has been blogging from California.
