AREQUIPA, Peru – Humberto Ortega Saavedra, former head of the Nicaraguan armed forces and younger brother of Nicaragua’s ruler, Daniel Ortega, died this Monday in a military hospital in Managua, according to the Army in a replicated statement by the press.
“The patient Humberto Ortega Saavedra, 77 years old, presented with cardiorespiratory arrest, and after treating him with cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers, he did not come out of this condition, and was declared dead at 02:30 am,” the notice indicates.
The Nicaraguan Army said that Ortega had been ill for several months, with serious heart problems. In life, he was part of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a leftist movement that in 1979 overthrew the dictatorship rightist of Anastasio Somoza.
Decades later, in 2018, after the deaths of hundreds of people in a popular uprising, Humberto Ortega publicly questioned the use of paramilitary groups of armed civilians and called for early elections and urged his brother to work with the army to find a solution to the crisis in Nicaragua.
Due to his critical stance towards his brother’s government, on May 28 Daniel Ortega called him a “traitor” in an event with soldiers and police in Managua, and said that he “sold his soul to the devil.”
In a press release published by the official media El19Digitalthe children and grandchildren of Humberto Ortega expressed their “deep pain over the death” and asked for “respect for the privacy and mourning” of the family.
In reporting the death, the Government recognized his “strategic contribution” as a Sandinista, a movement he joined as a teenager.
“He was known as one of the most important military strategists during the insurrection,” he highlighted. Mateo Jarquín, historian of Nicaragua at Chapman University in California.
For her part, Vice President Rosario Murillo, wife of dictator Ortega, in her daily message to the official press in Nicaragua, limited herself to reading the government statement, without adding comments about the death of her brother-in-law.
