Available Formats
Unfinished Revolution: Daniel Ortega and Nicaragua's Struggle for Liberation
By (Author) Kenneth E. Morris
Chicago Review Press
Chicago Review Press
30th September 2010
United States
General
Non Fiction
Social and cultural history
History of the Americas
Political leaders and leadership
972.85053092
Hardback
304
Width 152mm, Height 228mm, Spine 25mm
576g
Together with his brother Humberto, Daniel Ortega Saavedra masterminded the only victorious Latin American revolution since Fidel Castro's in Cuba. Following the triumphant 1979 Nicaraguan revolution, Ortega was named coordinator of the governing junta, and then in 1984 was elected president by a landslide in the country's first free presidential election. The future was full of promise. Yet the United States was soon training, equipping, and financing a counterrevolutionary force inside Nicaragua while sabotaging its crippled economy. The result was a decade-long civil war. By 1990, Nicaraguans dutifully voted Ortega out and the preferred candidate of the United States in. And Nicaraguans grew poorer and sicker. Then, in 2006, Daniel Ortega was reelected president. He was still defiantly left-wing and deeply committed to reclaiming the lost promise of the Revolution. Only time will tell if he succeeds, but he has positioned himself as an ally of Castro and Hugo Chavez, while life for many Nicaraguans is finally improving. Unfinished Revolution is the first full-length biography of Daniel Ortega in any language. Drawing from a wealth of untapped sources, it tells the story of Nicaragua's continuing struggle for liberation through the prism of the Revolution's most emblematic yet enigmatic hero.
Kenneth E Morris is the author of two previous political biographies. He is a former professor at the University of Georgia and has held research fellowships at Columbia University, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Notre Dame.