Nicaragua's former Sandanista leaders and Catholic clergy have prayed together for reconciliation on the 25th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution.
A young man raises a flag of the Sandinista National Liberation Front at a rally in Managua yesterday to mark the overthrow of US-backed dictator Anastacio Somoza Debayle
An estimated 250,000 Sandanista supporters gathered in Managua to mark the defeat in 1979 by the Sandanistas (FSLN) of the US-trained army of dictator Anastasio Somoza.
The United States covertly supported the right-wing Contras in their armed rebellion against the democratically elected socialist government of the Sandanistas in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s.
US support for the Contras led to the Iran-gate affair when it sold weapons to Iran and diverted the proceeds to the Contras.
The Sandinistas' eventual loss of power in the 1990 national election was seen by many as stemming from US support for the Contras as well as the effects of a US trade embargo blamed for helping ruin the economy of Nicaragua, now one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere.
Former Sandinista president Daniel Ortega, who lost power in a 1990 election to US-backed candidate Violeta Chamorro, attended yesterday's mass with his family and hundreds of party faithful and read a passage from the Bible.
Cardinal Miguel Obando, once a fierce critic of the Sandinista government, celebrated a mass for "reconciliation, peace and eternal rest" for those who died in the revolution and the ensuing counter revolution by US-backed Contra forces during the 1980s that cost at least 30,000 lives.
Mr Ortega led a Sandinista rally later at the central plaza, where he told at least 250,000 party faithful that the Sandinistas also brought mass literacy, access to health care, land for peasants and housing for the urban poor.
"It never occurred to us to do to them what they did to us after we kicked them out of government," Mr Ortega said, likening the Contra rebels and their right-wing backers who challenged his government to the dictatorship deposed by the revolution.
President Enrique Bolanos, a conservative businessman whose properties were confiscated by the Sandinista government, told local television the anniversary should go down as a "day of weeping".