At a dinner in Managua in the mid-1980s, I sat next to a British businesswoman who had lived comfortably in Nicaragua for decades. Heading for retirement in England, she took a last potshot at what she considered the immature idealism of the Sandinistas, who were then in power. "Haven't they read the Bible?" she asked archly. "Don't they know the poor will always be with us?"

I lived in Nicaragua for six years of the Sandinistas' embattled rule (1979-90) and recently returned for the first time. Of hundreds of comments I'd heard in Nicaragua, that was the one that echoed in my mind as I headed back. I had met many people during my years there--teachers, doctors, agronomists and others--who believed quite the opposite: that widespread poverty was not a foregone conclusion, and they had fought to reduce it.

The individuals who are now in power were not among them. What I found, after Nicaragua's eleven years as a free-market economy and on the eve of national elections, was a depth of poverty that had never existed during the Sandinista years. Shortages and rationing, which were endemic in the 1980s, have been replaced by relative wealth for some households and out-and-out hunger in many others. The failed populism of the Sandinistas, which was an economic disaster but did include a safety net, has given way to more commerce and some construction of infrastructure, but also flagrant corruption, massive unemployment and indifference toward the indigent.

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