PROFILE, Page 62Don't Call Her ComradeVIOLETA CHAMORRO will answer to dona, but Managua's grande dame,publisher of La Prensa, wants no part of the Sandinistas she oncesupportedBy John Moody/MANAGUA
As the elegant gray-haired woman sets down a bouquet of flowers
in Managua's Central Municipal Cemetery, a man dressed in rags
approaches to wash the gravestone she has come to visit. Breath
foul, hands filthy, he bends to kiss her fingertips and rasps,
"Dona Violeta, you're looking more beautiful than ever."
"Well -- older, anyway," she says with a smile, pressing
cordobas on him as he swishes greasy water over the simple concrete
marker.
Whether hoping for a bigger tip or simply moved by her
attention, the man suddenly proclaims, "If your husband were here
today, Nicaragua would be a happy land."
"Don't get yourself into trouble," the woman admonishes,
concerned for both of them.
But, of course, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro -- Dona Violeta to
even the hardest-line members of Nicaragua's Sandinista government
-- believes precisely the same thing. Otherwise she could not
devote her life to a cause that has torn asunder her country, her
family and her young girl's dreams of a happy life with a good man.
Dona Violeta, 59, is president and publisher of Nicaragua's
opposition daily La Prensa (circ. 50,000 to 75,000, depending on
the availability of newsprint). Even more, she is a living reminder
of what Nicaragua might have been had her husband Pedro Joaquin
Chamorro Cardenal not been gunned down eleven years ago, a year
before the Sandinistas came to power.
Though the leaders of Nicaragua's Marxist government detest
her politics and have often tried to intimidate her into silence,
they have been known to troop dutifully to Dona Violeta's
comfortable four-bedroom house across from a parklet in Managua to
talk things over. Chamorro knows her enemy and has not the
slightest hesitation about addressing the commander of the
revolution and President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, like
a naughty schoolboy -- or worse. The last time Ortega visited her
home, he noticed that a nine-year-old picture of him with members
of Nicaragua's first postrevolutionary government, including Dona
Violeta, was gone. Pointing to the wall, he teased her, saying,
"Something's missing."
"Yes," she replied stiffly. "I had to take it down. Every time
I came into this room and saw your picture, I felt sick to my
stomach."
Of late Dona Violeta's name is heard more and more often as a
possible presidential candidate to oppose Ortega in next February's
national elections. While she has repeatedly denied any such
ambitions, a gleeful light fires up her eyes when the subject of
challenging Ortega comes up. And she has reason to be optimistic.
A recent survey concluded that if the election were held tomorrow,
the Sandinistas would lose to the opposition. When Ortega is pitted
against Chamorro by name, the polls show her a slight favorite.
Chamorro has long been the best-known woman in Nicaragua, and
the family whose name she bears has been one of the country's
wealthiest and most powerful for generations. "I am a symbol, I
know that," she says. She is also an anomaly: an influential woman
in a macho society, albeit one that claims to have eradicated
sexism. What probably makes her most dangerous to the regime,
however, is the fact that she can -- and regularly does -- act with
the courage of those who have nothing left to lose.
The daughter of a wealthy ranching family, she had been married
to Pedro Joaquin Chamorro for 27 years when he was assassinated in
1978, probably on the orders of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
A year later, the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza, thanks partly to
La Prensa's valiant editorials and the Chamorro family's money.
Then the widow Chamorro watched in horror as the Sandinistas, whom
she had mistaken for unorthodox social democrats, revealed the
extent of their allegiance to Moscow and Cuba and their disdain for
democratic politics.
She saw her family split into feuding factions. One of her
sons, Pedro Joaquin Jr., 37, was until recently a leader of the
Nicaraguan resistance, which directs the military insurgency of the
contra rebels. Her other son, Carlos Fernando, 33, is editor in
chief of the Sandinista daily Barricada, and has run editorials
calling his brother a traitor. Daughter Cristiana, 35, is a
director of La Prensa. Her sister Claudia, 36, was the Sandinista
Ambassador to Costa Rica until last year. The private pain of the
Chamorro family is a microcosm of Nicaragua's national agony. And
Dona Violeta is the prism through which it is seen.
Chamorro's assessment of the Sandinistas is withering. In
Nicaragua the 43-year Somoza dynasty is remembered with loathing,
yet she says, "The Sandinistas, without question, are worse than
Somoza ever was. The Sandinistas are a disaster. After ten years
of them, there's nothing to eat. I had hoped, oh, how I hoped, that
their revolution might be for the people. But it's all for
themselves."
Since the government lifted a ban on its publication on Sept.
19, 1987, La Prensa has run exposes of government corruption and
inefficiency, reported the existence of an underground prison for
political detainees, and claimed that opponents of the regime have
been executed and buried at night. To Sandinista charges that such
stories lack substantiation and that she is a tool of the
government's enemies, she replies, "If it weren't for La Prensa and
the Chamorros, those boys who call themselves our comandantes would
still be hiding in the mountains."
Comandantes do not like to be called boys, and both Dona
Violeta and her newspaper have been singled out for harsh treatment
over the years. The walls of her home are often defaced with
insulting graffiti. As for La Prensa, it has been shut down by
government decree five times in the past decade, once for 451 days.
Last September a La Prensa editor was abducted and savagely beaten
by people he recognized as Interior Ministry agents. The next month
the government circulated a memo threatening sanctions against
public enterprises that advertised in the newspaper.
In the face of such harassment, Dona Violeta's posture has been
that of a grande dame icily putting a cheeky pigherd in place. When
a visitor to her office greeted her with the standard
postrevolutionary salute, "Good morning, comrade," she fired back,
"Don't you dare call me that. That is a word they use." If her
secretary fouls up, Violeta joshingly threatens her with the fate
that befell Rosario Murillo, who for eleven years was Pedro Joaquin
Chamorro's executive assistant: she married Daniel Ortega.
The widow Chamorro favors an informal style, wearing simple
clothes that accent her trim figure and filling her home with
antique furniture and endless mementos of her husband. A
sought-after speaker on the international journalists' circuit, she
spends much of her time outside the country, often popping up at
gala occasions like the inauguration of Venezuelan President Carlos
Andres Perez, a longtime friend. When at home, she is driven to the
paper's run-down plant each morning in a blue Toyota jeep. In her
air-conditioned office, she puts her feet up to relieve her painful
osteoarthritic condition. And, constantly sipping ice water, she
scans editorials, signs checks and reviews digests of news events.
Chamorro presides over her fractured family with the same
aplomb. At family gatherings, politics are checked at the door.
Says Carlos Fernando: "We've learned not to talk about our
political beliefs. No one's opinion is going to be changed at the
dinner table." His mother has come to terms with her family's fate:
"They're all adults. They go their way, and I've gone mine. I am
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and I don't have to ask anyone's
opinion of anything. Period."
That attitude was nourished practically from the moment Violeta
was born, on Oct. 18, 1929, in the southern Nicaraguan town of
Rivas, near the border with Costa Rica. Her father, a wealthy
landowner and cattle rancher, sent his seven children abroad to
school. Their idea of hardship was bathing in a cold lake at their
country cottage. Acute social injustice consisted of being invited
to two cotillions on the same evening. When Violeta was 19, she was
introduced to an intense-looking young man from Managua whose
family owned La Prensa. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro inspected Violeta's
deeply sunned face and nicknamed her "Morenita," the dark one. He
invited her to the beach. Unmoved by his instant attentions, his
city ways and his presumption, she declined. He persisted for
months, even after she told him, "For God's sake, leave me in
peace." But when he complied, says Violeta, "I found I missed him."
Finally, having invited her to Mass, he carved a heart into one of
the wooden pews. "I was conquered," she says. They were married in
December 1950.
The love story was to have no sunset. Only after their marriage
did Violeta understand fully her husband's commitment to ending the
Somoza dynasty, which had ruled since 1936. Before the Somozas came
to power, four Chamorros had been President of Nicaragua. Pedro
Joaquin's editorials left no doubt that he hoped someday to
continue the family tradition. His political outspokenness got him
thrown into jail four times, but each time he emerged with even
greater popularity, until he became a symbol of the mounting
opposition to the dictator. On Jan. 10, 1978, as he drove to work
in his red Saab, two shotgun-wielding assassins blew him to bits.
Says Jaime Chamorro, Pedro's brother and now business manager of
La Prensa: "His death ignited the national insurrection against
Somoza. It released 40 years of suppressed rage."
To varying degrees, Pedro Joaquin's survivors came to believe
that the ragtag band of rebels known as the Sandinista National
Liberation Front might be the key to dislodging Somoza. When
Somoza, stung by barbed headlines like HIRED ASSASSINS or TIME TO
CLENCH FISTS, ordered La Prensa's office bombed by an airplane and
shelled by an armored vehicle, the Chamorros lent the Sandinistas
$50,000. Dona Violeta believes the money was used to fund the
assault on the National Palace in August 1978. The loan was never
repaid.
Accepting a place on a five-member national governing junta
dominated by the Sandinistas, Violeta was soon appalled by the
course the country's new rulers were taking: "I began to see an
excessive militarism, an exaggerated Cuban presence and less
interest in democratic ideas." She resigned from the junta in April
1980 and turned her attention to her paper.
Now she fights her battles on the front pages, and occasionally
face to face, with men she believes have betrayed Nicaragua. In the
summer of 1987, Ortega signed a Central American peace plan
proposed by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez. Among other
things, the plan required each of the five participating countries
to show that it had a free press. Ortega dispatched an emissary to
tell Chamorro that La Prensa, then still banned, could reopen --
subject to government censorship. "I told him I wasn't interested,"
says Dona Violeta. "He became very nervous and explained to me that
if La Prensa remained closed, Nicaragua would be accused of failing
to meet the conditions in the peace plan. And I told him, `There's
a simple solution to that problem. Let us open without
censorship.'" It did.
Chamorro has no doubt that her husband would oppose the
Sandinistas as violently as she does. "I talk to Pedro all the
time," she confides, "and I know what he wants me to do." She is
devoting her life to living out his, and she has no regrets about
