Few political leaders have benefited more from Hugo Chavez’s largesse than Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. Consequently, few foreign leaders will be watching the Venezuelan polls on Sunday closer than the Sandinista strongman.

Ortega and his party’s politburo, recipients of more than $2.2 billion in Venezuelan petrodollars since 2007, insist they are confident their Venezuelan benefactor will win re-election. Still, the former revolutionaries learned an important lesson when they got unexpectedly voted out of power in Nicaragua in 1990: nothing lasts forever in politics.

“We have lots of confidence that Chavez will be re-elected; we don’t have the least amount of doubt he’ll win … but we can’t put all our eggs in one basket,” says Bayardo Arce, President Ortega’s top economic adviser and one of the original comandantes who led the revolutionary government of the 1980s.

Arce said the Sandinista government will continue to be grateful for Venezuelan largesse, which enters Nicaragua through the private channels of Chavez’s Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas (ALBA), “as long as it lasts.” Still, the Sandinista economic planner says his government is working to diversify its economic relations with China, Europe and the United States because “We have to anticipate that ALBA is not going to be permanent.”

Since Ortega returned to power democratically in 2007, the wellspring of aid from ALBA — a bloc of eight left-leaning Latin American countries underwritten by Chavez — has provided the Sandinista government with an average of $500 million a year in loans, donations and oil credit. In 2011, Ortega’s ALBA allowance jumped to $609 million during his own re-election campaign.

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