General Humberto Ortega Saavedra (10 January 1947 – 30 September 2024) was a Nicaraguan revolutionary, military leader, writer and businessman.

Humberto Ortega Saavedra was born in La Libertad, a mining town in the Chontales Department of central Nicaragua on 10 January 1947.

[4] In 1971, Ortega was part of an FSLN delegation with Fonseca, Agüero and Rufo Marín that received General Staff military training in North Korea.

[5] Humberto Ortega was "major theorist"[1] of the urban insurrection strategy that ignited civil war in Nicaragua in October 1977, leading to the fall of the Somoza dynastic dictatorship in July 1979.

[4] In the interim, his brother Camilo was killed in battle in 1978[6] and in March 1979 Humberto was named to the nine-member National Directorate brokered by Castro to lead the FSLN.

[1] When the FSLN took power, Ortega became chief of the Sandinista Popular Army (EPS), beginning in October 1979, and defense minister (January 1980).

[1] During the decade of Sandinista rule, he oversaw the buildup of the EPS, making military service compulsory and mobilizing 320,000 people, as he prosecuted the war against the U.S-backed Contras.

[8] In 1996, he remarked he wasn't leaving government "on a bicycle", in reference to the fortune he had amassed,[3][9] a departure from earlier views like a 1981 threat to "hang the bourgeoisie from the light posts".

[10][11] In May 2024, Ortega was stripped of his communication devices, given a police summons, and placed under house arrest following the publication of an interview with Infobae during which he described his brother's regime as "authoritarian, dictatorial" and said there was no one to take power when Daniel dies, including his wife and vice president Rosario Murrillo.