Humberto Ortega Saavedra, the former chief of the armed forces of Nicaragua and the current president’s younger brother, who publicly questioned his sibling’s “dictatorial” rule, only to wind up under house arrestgoplay, died on Monday in Managua, the capital. He was 77.
The Nicaraguan government announced the death, in a military hospital. Mr. Ortega had been in ill health for several months with severe heart problems, the Nicaraguan military said in a statement.
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 the country during a civil war against U.S.-backed rebels, known as the contras, that lasted through 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 Orange, Calif.
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