Nicaragua Election Ads Replay Civil War Horrors
Grim television images from Nicaragua's 1980s civil war are being used by conservatives to scare people who would vote for left-wing former rebel and president Daniel Ortega in the Nov. 5 election.

TV ads by center-right candidate Eduardo Montealegre and the Liberal Party's Jose Rizo show presidential front-runner Ortega in military garb and, in a separate shot, corpses being loaded onto a truck during the war between Ortega's Sandinista government and U.S.-backed Contra rebels.

"With this past, they won't fool you with polls," says Rizo's ad, over shots of fighting and corpses and accounts of Sandinista government troops killing indigenous people and raping women.

"He's a danger for Nicaragua," booms Montealegre's ad.

Ortega, leading opinion polls in his third comeback attempt since losing a 1990 election, calls the ads a dirty campaign.

He says he has changed since the Sandinistas rolled tanks into the capital Managua in a 1979 popular revolution that overthrew a decades old family dictatorship and then spent a decade fighting the counter-revolutionary Contras.

His own ads feature himself as a peacemaker, his supporters in raspberry pink baseball caps singing along to a Spanish version of John Lennon's anthem "Give Peace a Chance."

But Ortega's rivals are flashing the word "Danger" over grainy images of wartime misery.

"Shall we go backward?" asks Montealegre's ad, over black-and-white footage of Ortega with Sandinista troops played in reverse to show them marching backward.

In another, people line up for food rations outside grocery stores emptied by a U.S. trade embargo, and count wads of bank notes made worthless by soaring inflation, a result of the war and the Sandinistas' economic mismanagement.