A humiliating hostage crisis ensued in August 1978 when Sandinista rebels led by "Comandante Cero (Commander Zero)" future Contra leader Eden Pastora took over the National Assembly.

In the eighties, they plugged away in near-total obscurity on behalf of Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels and El Salvador's FMLN opposition party.

From 1977 through 1978, Williams was out of baseball, serving as a freedom fighter in Nicaragua during Nicaraguan Revolution, fighting with the Sandinista rebels.

During November 1927, marine reconnaissance aircraft detected the fortress of El Chipote, which was the main base of the Sandinista rebels, located near the border with Honduras.

The Defense Department said today that the Soviet bloc nations had supplied $2.8 billion in aid from July 1979, when the Sandinista rebels overthrew the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, to March 1989.

In Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown by Sandinista rebels in 1979, its guardsmen fleeing across the border into Honduras.

It served as a staging area for the Sandinista rebels in the 1970's, and in the 1980's it became the site of secret airstrips and supply centers for the contras who sought to oust the victorious Sandinistas from Managua.

Mr Ortega led Sandinista rebels in ousting the Somoza family dictatorship in the 1979 revolution and was the top figure in a government that withstood a U.S.-backed "Contra" rebellion throughout the 1980s.

He also helped to finance and arm the Sandinista rebels in their fight to topple the Somoza regime in Nicaragua in the late 1970's.

The Sandinista rebels announced the Junta as its provisional government on June 16, 1979, as the civil war against the Anastasio Somoza Debayle regime entered its final phase.