BY TIM ROGERS

With Nicaragua's traditional right-wing forces divided, President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo are focusing their efforts on squelching opposition from their former comrades on the left, who they now label as "right.''

For months, the Ortega administration has used state institutions and Sandinista media outlets to besmirch and badger left-wing organizations and individuals who criticize the government. But more recently the campaign has turned violent as the Sandinistas resort to the old tactic of street thuggery -- something Ortega warned would happen months ago.

Last Thursday, a Sandinista mob attacked a group of university students who were protesting the Ortega government peacefully outside of official Sandinista TV station Multinoticias in Managua. While the students chanted ''We don't want violence,'' the mob hit and shoved the students, including the women, and then chased them down the street, kicking them and whipping them with belts as they ran away.

The new policy of street violence started on Sept. 20, when mobs of Ortega supporters took to the streets armed with machetes and sticks to prevent an anti-government protest that was scheduled to take place in the northern city of León. Wearing masks and pro-government T-shirts, Ortega supporters blocked all the entrances to the colonial city to stop traffic and search buses and private vehicles for people the president has labeled ''traitors'' and "puppets of the yanqui empire.''

The situation grew violent when the Sandinista mob clashed with anti-riot police, who used tear gas to disperse the crowd and restore order. A separate group of rioters threw Molotov cocktails and burned the vehicle of Enrique Saénz, president of the left-wing Sandinista Renovation Movement, which the Ortega-controled Supreme Electoral Council banned from participating in the November municipal elections.

Former guerrilla hero and Ortega critic Dora María Téllez, who led the original Sandinista uprising in León in 1979, called the violence a ''very dangerous'' precedent.

''This was pure fascism because Ortega used everything he had,'' Téllez said. "This is his strategy to crush the opposition, civil society and the other political parties and to instill fear in the people -- all so he can stay in power.''

The Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights, the Nicaraguan-American Chamber of Commerce and opposition political parties have all strongly denounced the violence as a violation of Nicaraguans' rights to civic protest and free expression.

Sandinista union leader Gustavo Porras, meanwhile, warned that the Ortega loyalists will continue to take to the streets every time a protest is scheduled against the government, ``To defend ourselves from the neoliberal oppressors.''

The government's official media outlet Multinoticias TV hailed the violence as a victory for ''the people of León'' for defending their city against the ''right-wing oligarchs'' who were trying to ''provoke'' and ''confuse'' the population.

RETURN TO POWER

After leading Nicaragua through a tumultuous decade of battling U.S.-propped counterrevolutionary forces in the 1980s, Ortega reinvented himself and his party and returned to power in 2007 with the help of a controversial alliance with former political adversaries and leaders of the Catholic Church.

Though the Ortega of today still employs the same leftist discourse of the past -- identifying himself as a socialist revolutionary and blasting his opponents as ''oligarchs'' and ''sellers of the nation'' -- many of his traditional friends and enemies have swapped places since the 1980s.

The Sandinista leader has formed a power-sharing pact with opposition political leader Arnoldo Alemen, appeased the business sector by complying with structural adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund, and endorsed the church's conservative social positions on issues such as abortion.

As a result, Ortega's main resistance today comes from Sandinista dissidents who claim their former compañero has abandoned the ideals of the revolution.

''The main political opposition to Ortega is the same left that fought against the dictatorship of Somoza,'' said opposition lawmaker Victor Hugo Tinoco, a longtime Sandinista political leader who was eventually thrown out of the party in 2006 after challenging Ortega's authority.

''At the same time, Ortega sits very well with the oligarchy, because he's part of the new oligarchy,'' Tinoco told The Miami Herald. "He tries to hide this reality by using an old discourse to sell his image abroad and among certain sectors of loyal Sandinistas.''

Sociology Professor Cirilo Otero says Ortega has benefited from a confusing discourse and inconsistent actions that disorient people's political bearings and kept the country off-balance.

''There's a saying in Nicaragua that when the river is turbulent, the fisherman wins,'' Otero said of the president's muddling of left and right. "If the people are confused, Ortega wins.''

Much of the confusion is generated by the Sandinista media outlets that reshape public opinion through incessant repetition of attack campaigns and slanderous reporting against individuals, which has recently earned them the scorn of international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders.

BAN ON ABORTION

Some of the most venomous attacks have come against the feminist movement, which has criticized the government's ban on abortion and played a key role in supporting the sexual abuse charges filed against Ortega by his stepdaughter Zoilamérica Narváez in 1998. The Sandinista media in turn have accused the women's movement of money laundering, illegally promoting abortion, and acting as ''modern-day Trojan horses'' for an international campaign to destabilize the Ortega government.

The Sandinistas have also targeted international leftist icons such as Ernesto Cardenal, who calls Ortega a ''false revolutionary.'' In reaction to Cardenal's outspoken criticism of Ortega, Sandinista media has slandered him as a right-wing sellout.

Sergio Ramírez, Ortega's former vice president in the 1980s, says the fact that Ortega has fallen from grace among so many international leftists who once defended the Sandinista revolution speaks volumes about the current state of affairs here.

''His lack of credibility creates an emptiness without echo,'' Ramírez told The Miami Herald. "In the international arena, only Venezuela and Russia [support Ortega], because even Cuba remains silent.''