But Will It Work?

Long before the polls closed, the people knew what they had done. Before the radio began reporting returns, before the platoons of international observers were totting up their "quick counts" and the battalions of reporters were frantically calling in the news, the word had spread across Managua. "We're going to win!" shouted a woman tending a bubbling cauldron in front of her house in one of the city's poorest barrios, thought to be a stronghold of the ruling Sandinistas. The Sandinistas? she was asked. "No, not those sons of bitches," she spat back. "The Dona. Dona Violeta."

In another startling turnaround...