Arturo Cruz

After repeatedly resigning from positions in protest, opinion divided between those who lauded him as a statesman and man of principle, and those who derided him as an ineffectual hand-wringer.

However, his wife persuaded him not to join Edmundo and Fernando "El Negro" Chamorro in their November 1960 rising, which included an attack on the Jinotepe barracks.

He became a member of Los Doce, the Group of Twelve establishment figures who voiced support for the Sandinista struggle against dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Their backing of the Sandinistas' popular front convinced many Nicaraguans that the FSLN's appeal had broadened beyond its communist roots, and moved the country towards the full-scale insurrection that toppled the régime in July 1979.

When the Sandinistas announced in January 1984 that they would hold elections in November, the right-wing opposition umbrella group, the Coordinadora Democrática Nicaragüense, settled on Cruz as the only candidate acceptable to all factions.

In 1999, he issued a statement asking the United States and Honduran governments to release all information about the death of his nephew, David Arturo Báez Cruz, a naturalized American citizen and former Green Beret who returned to Nicaragua to serve in Sandinista military intelligence, and died while acting as a military advisor with Honduran guerrillas.