Surely he chose Pastora for the job precisely because Pastora is the kind of loose cannon who could plausibly be blamed for acting without authorization, and in retrospect Costa Rica fell for it and paved the way for this defense by focusing so much on Pastora. Pastora is also now behaving very much like a lying guilty culprit. I say that Ortega was thinking many moves ahead a long time ago by using Pastora as the lightning rod, and was planning all along to make him the fall guy when things came to a head.

The question is whether Costa Rica can prove that Ortega was really calling the shots. It says it can, but I have my doubts. I doubt that Ortega was dumb enough to leave a paper trail.

Also, there is renewed fighting now in Nicaragua between the army and some rearmed contras, so it’s not a farfetched legal argument to make which maintains that Ortega doesn’t have complete control over the loose cannons in Nicaragua.

Combined with the essentially irrelevant but nevertheless showy spectacle of the Route 1856 boondoggle, it looks to me like the court is going to have no alternative but to rule, “Now y’all both be good!” That is, I suspect that Ortega managed to dodge another bullet, although we won’t know until the court rules.