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.
Mr. 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, Mr. Jarquín said.
Once the Sandinistas won, Mr. Ortega was blamed for instituting mandatory military service during the battle 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 Mr. 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, then-president Violeta Barrios de Chamorro kept him on as head of the armed forces, a controversial move that Mrs. 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.
Mr. 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,” Mr. Maisto said. “Among the Nicaraguan military, he was respected.”
For years, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 the police had surrounded Mr. Ortega’s house and seized his electronic devices. He was never heard from again. Mr. Ortega was widely reported to have been under house arrest since May.
The president later called his little brother a “traitor” for once having bestowed an important military award to an American.
“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.”
A statement from his family said he was survived by three daughters and two sons.
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