Mr. Ortega, the estranged brother of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, had been under house arrest for months after making statements that infuriated his sibling.
Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and younger brother of the current president, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule only to wind up under house arrest, died on Monday, the Nicaraguan government announced. He was 77.
Mr. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement. He died at a military hospital in the country’s capital, Managua.
Mr. 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 California.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
