Word: sandinista
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With his owlish gaze, lithe step and limber tongue, Antonio Lacayo Oyanguren looks and acts like the Jesuit-trained postgraduate of M.I.T. that he is. For most of his 45 years, he has labored in profitable obscurity. During nearly 11 years of rule by the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Lacayo, the son of one wealthy family who married into another, tended to business, leaving Nicaragua's treacherous politics to others...
...could no longer maintain that low profile after his mother-in-law, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, defeated the Sandinistas and became President of Nicaragua in April 1990. Lacayo, who served as Chamorro's campaign director, immediately began shaping the new administration; according to insiders, he picked the President's Cabinet and made the controversial decision to retain Sandinista General Humberto Ortega Saavedra as head of the armed forces. Lacayo's official title is Minister of the Presidency, but some feel he might as well be called Mr. Presidency. "Dona Violeta conferred absolute power on Antonio from the beginning," says...
Lacayo attributes his success in business to financial acumen and patriotism during the Sandinista regime. Says he: "Everyone said that to invest in & Nicaragua meant supporting the Sandinistas. I believed that it would lead to victory against the Sandinistas. So I opted to invest...
Nicaraguans agree that Chamorro -- guided by Lacayo -- has kept her two central campaign pledges: to end the nine-year conflict between the Sandinista army and the U.S.-backed contras, and to eliminate the military draft. Her administration is also slowly repairing the economic meltdown produced by Sandinista mismanagement, the war and a U.S. embargo on trade that was lifted only last year...
While estimates of the booty go as high as $700 million, the full extent of Sandinista looting will never be known. By order of the outgoing government, Central Bank, Treasury and comptroller records from February to April 1990 were destroyed. But TIME has obtained partial documentation of their greedy goodbye to power...