At the time of Ortega's return to the presidency, attorney and award-winning author Steven Hendrix was on the ground in Nicaragua working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The New Nicaragua: Lessons in Development, Democracy, and Nation-Building for the United StateS≪/i> is Hendrix's eyewitness account of the changes going on there.
What Hendrix found in the new Nicaragua is a decidedly mixed bag: a presidential campaign marked by dirty tricks and backroom deals, yet an election held under the first neutral comprehensive observation ever in the developing world; an overt effort to appease the United States even while attempting to undermine U.S. policy in the region. Yet despite this, Hendrix saw U.S. pro-democracy, civil society efforts succeed, disproving the many skeptics who doubt that nation-building is even possible.