From the " target="_new">Jewish Telegraphic Agency [2], July 3:
Nicaraguan presidential candidate Herty Lewites died late Sunday of an apparent heart attack. The son of a Jewish migrant, Lewites, 66, was the country's best-known citizen of Jewish descent.
A dissident from the leftist Sandinista movement that ruled the country from 1979 to 1990, Lewites headed the Sandinista Renewal Movement's ticket for the November elections. He was running a distant third in the four-way race in early public opinion polls.
Though his mother was not Jewish and he never sought links with the country's tiny Jewish population, Sandinista supporters backhandedly referred to Lewites as "the Jew" and spread false rumors he was a practicing Jew with "Zionist tendencies" after he launched an unsuccessful bid to unseat Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista party chair and presidential candidate.
See our last post [3] on Nicaragua's political crisis (and the resource issues behind it), and our last report [4] on Central America.
