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From Anastasio Somoza senior, of whom Franklin Roosevelt reputedly said that “he may be a son of bitch, but he's our son of a bitch”, to his eponymous son, who pocketed most of the foreign aid that arrived after an earthquake flattened the capital in 1972 - the city centre is still largely grassland - to Arnoldo Alemán, who was sentenced last year to 20 years in jail for corruption and money-laundering, the country's caudillos, or strongmen, have contributed to making Nicaragua the poorest country in the isthmus. Its GDP per head, according to the IMF, is barely a quarter that of El Salvador, which suffered an even bloodier civil war between leftist revolutionaries and American-backed right-wing insurgents than Nicaragua did, but has done well since. So it was to many people's surprise when the affable, comparatively old and quite un-caudillo-like Enrique Bolaños, Mr Alemán's vice-president, who was elected to the top job in 2001, began to tackle the country's problems head-on. With an almost cavalier disregard for the norms of Nicaraguan political life, he launched a crusade against corruption, and especially against political corruption - crowned by the jailing of his erstwhile boss. That has won the American-educated president rave reviews abroad and substantial support from international bodies such as the IMF, as well as a handy amount of leeway for complying with their various targets for political and fiscal reform. But his support abroad is in almost inverse proportion to that at home. With about two years of his term still to run, his political base has virtually collapsed. Local elections on November 7th gave sweeping gains to his main opponents, the National Sandinist Liberation Front, who tried to move Nicaragua to a form of socialism during the 1980s while fighting the ruinous war against the American-backed contras. Since voters rejected the Sandinists in 1990, they have gradually regained ground through clever tactics even as the Liberals, the supposed bastion against leftism, have weakened and split. Many fear that the main legacy of Mr Bolaños's rule could be the return of the Sandinist leader, Daniel Ortega (on the right of the picture), to the presidency in the 2006 election. That, especially for the current American administration, staffed with many veterans of the 1980s, would be, as one of their diplomats describes it, “dangerous”. After Cuba's Fidel Castro, Mr Ortega has long been Latin America's most potent symbol of resistance to American hegemony -  so much so that when he stood in 2001, the American ambassador went on the campaign trail with Mr Bolaños. And besides many questions about his policies, the Sandinists themselves have been dogged by corruption scandals since they left office. Mr Bolaños's difficulties began with his pursuit of Mr Alemán. Almost all the legislators from the Constitutional Liberal Party that both men belong to have stayed loyal to the outsize personality of the ex-president, leaving Mr Bolaños with just six loyal members in a congress of 92. That has stymied his reform agenda and reduced the executive to virtual impotence. Mr Alemán's supporters in the party, such as Carlos Wilfredo Navarro, a member of the congress, argue that the jailed caudillo is still the “guide” and “moral leader” of the party. They resent the fact that Mr Bolaños just “used it to gain power, nothing more” and then turned on Mr Alemán. They wonder why Mr Bolaños stayed so quiet during his four years as vice-president, if corruption really was so deep and obvious. Mr Bolaños's supporters, for their part, argue that the only reason that most of the Liberals have stayed loyal to Mr Alemán is that they all profited equally from his corruption. The president argues that “you cannot create jobs and wealth without fighting and tackling corruption”, and that his opponents on both left and right are pursuing “selfish political interests”. What makes his situation truly desperate, however, is that the Sandinists, though notionally the opposition, are - and not for the first time—colluding with the Liberals. During Mr Alemán's presidency he and Mr Ortega made a power-sharing pact that rewrote the electoral laws to strengthen their two parties by making it harder for other, smaller ones to get into the congress; gave each of them a quota of appointments to the electoral council, the Supreme Court and the audit agency; and gave the two caudillos themselves, as ex-presidents, life seats in the congress, with immunity from prosecution. Mr Alemán lost his only by a whisker when the Sandinist deputies, along with nine pro-Bolaños Liberals, voted to strip him of it. Now, in an echo of their earlier pact, legislators from both the main parties have brought their own charges of corruption against Mr Bolaños, alleging that he used several million dollars to fund his presidential campaign illegally. Though outside bodies such as the Organisation of American States have cast doubt on the way it is being done the congress may well attempt to strip Mr Bolaños of his immunity, leaving him to face trial. Since the two parties dominate the judiciary as well as the legislature, there is no doubt that they could at the very least mire Mr Bolaños's remaining two years in legal squabbles. As the recent elections showed, the Sandinists' years of collaborationist tactics are paying off. They made gains even in Liberal strongholds such as the town of Granada in the south. They won Managua with 45% of the vote, with 13% going to APRE, an alliance party recently formed to support Mr Bolaños, and 36% to the Liberals. But APRE polled an average of just 9% nationwide. At a fight between supporters of Mr Bolaños and of Mr Alemán at a polling station, a journalist was shot dead. Unless the Liberals, divided and tainted by Mr Alemán's shenanigans, can find a credible alternative candidate, nobody stands in the way of Mr Ortega's ambitions of a return to power.