Tomás Borge - Telegraph Miskito Indians living along Nicaragua's Caribbean coast accused Borge of orchestrating the displacement and killing of Miskitos suspected of anti-Sandinista activities; he was also accused (he denied the charge) of ordering the killing of 37 opposition members in a jail in the city of Granada. He censored the press - explaining: "Freedom of speech is the freedom to tell the truth; freedom to lie cannot be freedom of speech" - and was charged with harassing the Church. In August 1982 the Reverend Bismark Carballo, director of Catholic Radio, was arrested, stripped naked and taken to a police station. Government sources claimed he had been attacked by a jealous husband who had found the priest with his wife, but some Sandinistas later conceded that the episode had been a government "sting" designed to humiliate the Church. By some estimates Borge connived in the "disappearance" of some 100 political opponents, and before the election that was to turn the Sandinistas out of power it was he who bussed machete-wielding mobs - the so-called "turbas divinas" - to disrupt opposition election rallies. Meanwhile, human rights groups were not allowed to check on political prisoners because, Borge explained, doing so might interfere with the "psychological link" between prisoners and interrogators. "He's full of talk about children and flowers and birds," said one former ally. But he has an unbounded desire for power that has become a psychosis. Tomás Borge Martinez was born on August 12 1930 in the central Nicaraguan town of Matagalpa, the illegitimate son of a market trader and a man who sold books. Born undersized with a spleen condition, he confessed later to feeling envious of friends who had girlfriends, though he would acquire a reputation as a womaniser. Resisting his mother's advice to study for the priesthood, he turned to politics and at the age of 13 began organising his school friends against General Anastasio Somoza, the father of the dictator overthrown by the Sandinistas. Borge went on to law school, but dropped out to pursue his political activities. He received military training in Cuba, and in 1956 was arrested, tortured and jailed for three years on charges of involvement in a plot that ended with Anastasio Somoza's assassination by the poet Rigoberto Lopez Perez. Borge escaped from jail and took refuge in Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica. After returning to Nicaragua, in 1961 Borge joined with Carlos Fonseca Amador and others to found the FSLN. Daniel Ortega joined later and became its leader. Imprisoned for subversive activities in 1976, Borge was severely tortured before being sentenced to 180 years" imprisonment. In later years he would seek to dispel rumours that he had been castrated by unzipping his trousers and offering to produce evidence to the contrary. Borge was liberated in August 1978 by a Sandinista commando force that attacked the National Palace, took the entire National Congress hostage and traded them for 50 Sandinista prisoners who then escaped to Cuba. Somoza was ousted the following year. Borge became a wealthy man through companies he established under the aegis of the Interior Ministry, and his reputation, like that of other Sandinistas, was further tarnished by allegations that he had helped himself to confiscated properties in the weeks before the FSLN's shock defeat by an anti-Sandinista alliance led by Violetta Barrios de Chamorro, in the 1990 elections. Though Borge became a congressman for the FSLN and editor-publisher of the Sandinista newspaper Barricada (which closed due to bankruptcy in 1998), he seems gradually to have shed many of his revolutionary ideals, even to the extent of supporting the creation of the North American Free Trade Area (Nafta). In the late 1990s he became embroiled in sexual scandal after a female party member accused him of forcibly kissing and touching her when she worked as his interpreter. But Borge was one of the few members of the FSLN's original leadership to remain loyal to Ortega, who returned to power at the head of an elected government in 2006 and was reelected last year. At the time of his death Borge was serving as ambassador to Peru. Tomás Borge's first wife, Yelba, was killed by Somoza's National Guard in 1979. He is survived by his second wife, the Peruvian singer and actress Marcela Pérez Silva, and by six children. Tomás Borge, born August 13 1930, died April 30 2012