PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua (AP) -- A decade after the U.S.-backed
Contra war helped force him to end his socialist rule, Daniel Ortega proclaimed
himself a changed man and on Saturday began his campaign to retake the presidency.

After meeting with leaders of Indians allied with the former Contras, Ortega held his
first campaign rally in Nicaragua's northeast Caribbean coast in an effort to assuage
fears that he wants to return the country to a socialist model that -- along with a
U.S. economic embargo -- wrought economic disaster in the 1980s.

Ortega, unsuccessful in two presidential runs representing the Sandinista National
Liberation Front since he called a democratic vote in 1990, has a strong chance in
the November election. Polls show he has a slight lead over Enrique Bolanos of the
governing Constitutionalist Liberal Party.

Nicaraguans complain of corruption, high unemployment and hunger under current
Liberal President Arnoldo Aleman, and even in this sweltering area on the Miskito
coast, where the Contras enjoyed broad support, people are beginning to support the
Sandinistas.

"When Daniel was in power, everyone had a job, food, a way to support their
family. Now you need to be a member of the (ruling) party to get work," said
Siomara Salvador, 23, who took her five little cousins to a Sandinista rally at the
Puerto Cabezas airport Friday.

After the Sandinistas' 1979 revolution, former President Ronald Reagan's
administration financed the Contras, a group of anti-Communist rebels, contending
that Ortega was trying to spread his revolution through support of leftist rebels in El
Salvador.

Strong opposition grew in the United States to the Contra war, which killed at least
40,000 people in Nicaragua, and the U.S. Congress temporarily cut off aid to the
Contras in 1985. But top Reagan aides tried to funnel money to the group illegally
through secret weapons sales to Iran.

Under pressure from the international community, Ortega allowed free elections in
1990, convinced he would win. But in a vote aimed partly at ending the war,
Nicaraguans elected Violeta Chamorro, who made the country a free-market
democracy. Aleman was elected in 1996.

The United States has warned of serious consequences if Ortega is re-elected, and in
May the State Department quietly urged other parties to rally around a single
candidate to oppose Ortega, so as not to split the anti-Ortega vote.

Ortega insists the U.S. fears are misplaced. He says he is a changed man, and
although he remains a socialist, he now realizes that the Sandinistas erred in
excessively closing the economy during their rule, instituting enormous public
subsidies and expropriating private businesses.

At a recent Sandinista rally, an American flag even appeared alongside the
red-and-black Sandinista banner.

"This is a different Ortega from that of the 1980s," Ortega's running mate, Agustin
Jarquin, said in an interview Saturday. "This Ortega admits that he made some
mistakes, and that he needs to learn from them."

Jarquin, a Christian Democrat leader who was jailed six times in the 1980s for his
opposition to Ortega, said that despite Ortega's Marxist-Leninist philosophy, he has
embraced the free market as a necessary force in the modern world.

"Maybe after a long guerilla war, when you become coordinator of the government
at the age of 33, it's easy to believe you own the truth, it's easy to become cocky,"
Jarquin said. "But I think time has taught him that nobody owns the truth."

Many Nicaraguans are willing to give Ortega a second chance.

"It won't be the same as it was before. The past is past," said Luis Denis, a
40-year-old carpenter. "This time it will be democratic."

For his official opening campaign rally, Ortega sacrificed the huge crowds of the
capital -- a Managua celebration of the Sandinista revolution last month drew more
than 100,000 people -- for the symbolism of Nicaragua's Caribbean coast, a
desperately poor area where the Contras had wide support in the 1980s.

The area, a sparsely populated cross-section of Miskito Indians, blacks whose
ancestors came from the West Indies and mestizos, has been largely forgotten by
Nicaragua's governments, and poverty amid the region's dirt roads and wooden
shacks is dire.

Ortega was meeting with Indian leaders allied with the former Contras to win what
would be a highly symbolic victory for his candidacy.

"This is the area that suffered most in the 1980s," said Humberto Campbell, a
regional Sandinista leader. "It's an important symbol of reconciliation that the
(Sandinista) Front and local leaders can come together."

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press.