Iran, Nicaragua increase diplomatic ties

MANAGUA, Nicaragua – Iran’s hard-line president expanded his search for allies in his standoff with Washington on Sunday, pledging deeper ties with Nicaragua’s leftist leader through the opening of new embassies in each other’s capitals.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Managua as part of a whirlwind series of meetings with Latin America’s newly inaugurated leftist leaders. He visited fellow OPEC member Venezuela on Saturday, pledging with President Hugo Chavez to spend billions of dollars financing projects in other countries to combat the global influence of their common enemy, the United States.

Ahmadinejad, president of a fundamentalist Shiite theocracy deeply hostile to Washington, met with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, whose first government faced a U.S.-backed guerrilla insurgency during the 1980s.

The leaders announced they would open embassies in each other’s capitals, strengthening ties between two countries that have had little interaction yet share long and troubled histories with the United States.

Their paths crossed in the 1980s during the Iran-Contra affair, in which the U.S. secretly sold arms to Iran to free American hostages, then used some of the proceeds to back Contra rebels who fought Ortega’s first, Soviet-backed government.

Ortega, while pledging close ties with Ahmadinejad, has tried to start his new government on a cordial note with the U.S.