Remember Daniel Ortega?  The communist thug dictator of Nicaragua who disgusted the great Ronald Reagan with his mirrored sunglasses and his Fifth Avenue shopping sprees, and then later got into the news with child molestation charges brought on by his stepdaughter?  He's also famous for his many fraudulent "re-elections" and dismantling his country's democracy.

Now that Hugo Chávez is gone, he's back on the radar again, arm in arm with a new sugar daddy he's sold his hapless country out to: Russia's Vladimir Putin.

In an alarming story, the Washington Post reports that the Russians have set up a base camp full of Russian-speaking Russians of indeterminate purpose, in some compound at the base of a volcano, which is supposedly a GPS satellite-tracking station.  U.S. officials think it might be more of an electronic surveillance station aimed at the U.S. and note that it's aimed right at the U.S. Embassy in Managua.  They say they aren't alarmed for now, but it could have a dual-purpose spying function.  Besides that, a gleaming new Russian edifice devoted to "counter-narcotics" operations has gone up, baffling many as to what interest Russia could have in the issue.  Does Putin really want to keep meth out of the hands of the U.S. Rust Belt's unemployed?

In exchange for these rather impressive concessions, the Nicaraguans get shipments of blocky, Soviet-style buses to ride around in on public transport – hot, sweaty, and always breaking down.

That sounds like the sort of deal Ortega would do.

It goes to show that Latin America's leftist dictators' club really is still entrenched and ruthless, and now that the oil money from Caracas has dried up, its members now put their countries up for sale to America's opponents.  Nicaragua has gotten such a good deal that El Salvador, now led by a group of aging communist guerrillas from Ortega's 1980s heyday, want a Russian deal of their own.  It's not enough for them to ship one tenth of their population to Los Angeles and elsewhere in the U.S. as illegal immigrants in order to feed off their remittances while Americans pay for their housing, health care, jail costs, education, and welfare.  No, a sellout to the Russians needs to be added to the mix to get gringo good.  Because let's face it: communist systems are unsustainable, and they can exist nowadays only if there's a sugar daddy willing to pay.  Putin knows this well and has kept his country rather uncommunist back home, the better to sell the romance to these boobs.

The U.S. left, of course, is silent.  Leftists north of the Mexican border are still saying President Trump is in bed with the Russians.  They've forgotten about their little buddy Ortega.

The U.S. has maintained a hands-off policy for decades on these places.  But as these countries now sell themselves out to the Russians, it's becoming an increasingly costly withdrawal.  More attention needs to be paid to this region, because apparently, with the cat away, the rats have gotten playing.