The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, in the middle, embraces the Venezuelan leader Diosdado Cabello under the watchful eye of the First Lady Rosario Murillo during a celebration of the Sandinista Revolution in Managua, July 2013
This article forms part of the series "Persistent inequality: the controversial legacy of the pink tide in Latin America" produced in partnership with the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Institute of Sociology of the Freie Universität Berlin
In 1979 a popular uprising led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the US-backed Somoza-family dictatorship which had ruled Nicaragua since the 1930s, and in 1984 the Sandinistas and their presidential candidate, Daniel Ortega, decisively won the country’s first free elections in decades.
