As of this writing, Daniel Ortega´s regime has arrested the chief opposition candidates and principal leaders of the opposition. The subject of this article, Cristiana Chamorro, was the first to be arrested, and is currently under house arrest but completely cut off from any communication with family, lawyers, etc. This article provides a historical context to the current actions of Ortega, and explains why Cristiana´s candidacy is so threatening to the regime.
The ghost of Doña Violeta that is chasing Daniel Ortega
by Amalia del Cid, Eduardo Cruz in La Prensa June 6, 2021
The memory of having been defeated in 1990 by a woman who he did not consider an opponent on his level continues pursuing Daniel Ortega. The trauma has become personified in Cristiana Chamorro, the daughter of Doña Violeta.
That day there was very little left of the “fighting cock” who had maintained a contentious attitude throughout the electoral campaign. Facing Doña Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was a haggard man due to several nights without sleep, with the melancholy demeanor of a fallen rock star. Daniel Ortega began to cry, and Doña Violeta embraced him.
“My boy, nothing is going to happen,” she said to him. And she invited him to sit by her side in a rocker, as she herself would tell in her autobiography, Dreams of the Heart. Daniel Ortega had come to the house of Doña Violeta to congratulate her on her electoral triumph. A chapter had just been opened in Nicaraguan history that has not yet completely closed.
Defeated in the general elections of February 25, 1990, Ortega turned over the presidency of the country; but his critics state that in his heart he never accepted the results. For 16 years he dedicated himself to “governing from below” until in 2007 he finally was able to return to power, where he now has been for 14 consecutive years.
The memory of that unexpected defeat has pursued him since the night in which he heard, stunned, the first numbers from the Vote Reception Boards. When he was back in the presidential seat, Ortega arranged them to completely control the electoral branch, in order to not go back to free elections, and now he has unleashed his repressive apparatus against Cristiana Chamorro Barrios, who leads the popularity polls as the opposing presidential candidate in the face of the elections this coming November.
Pursued by supposed crimes of money laundering and a prisoner in her own home, the youngest daughter of Doña Violeta has become the principal political target of the dictatorship. 31 years after those elections, the ghost of the woman with a head of cotton and white dress continues tormenting Ortega.
Cristiana
Almost all the polls favored Daniel Ortega, who insisted on calling his principal opponent, Doña Violeta, “the candidate of Yankee imperialism.” It was also rumored that the Sandinista Front has invested $20 million dollars in their electoral campaign, and led by the “strong men” of the revolution, the red and black party was filling large plazas.
On the other side, Doña Violeta was a fragile housewife who at that time moved about on crutches or in a wheel chair, and her campaign activities were continuously attacked by “divine mobs” armed with stones and machetes.
For these and other reasons “the defeat of the Front was not expected”, admits Henry Ruiz, one of the nine commandantes of the Sandinista Revolution. For Ortega, he says, “it was an unpleasant surprise, traumatic, so much so that at the inaugural ceremony he arrived dressed as cock fight promoter.”
According to the former comandante, Ortega never had respect for his opponent. “He always referred to her as “the old lame lady”, never recognized the ethical and moral stature of Doña Violeta. It seemed to him that she was a domestic lady.” But due to that housewife, “Ortega and his wife suffered a trauma and that trauma you are seeing now,” points out Ruiz. In addition, he adds, Cristiana is the name of the daughter of Doña Violeta and they (Ortega and Murillo) “described a revolution that no longer exists as “Christian, socialist and in solidarity.” That name sounds terrible to them.”
Dressed in white
Of Doña Violeta´s children, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios is the one that most looks like her, and the one who was by her side during her administration as president of Nicaragua, taking charge of the social tasks of a first lady. She is also the daughter who was by her in the moment in which she received the news of the death of her spouse, the journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, murdered in a Managua street on January 10, 1978.
For Luis Sánchez Sancho, seeing Cristiana automatically brings back to him memories of Doña Violeta. He was the head of information and press for the campaign of the National Opposition Union (UNO) for the 1990 elections. “When we saw Cristiana dressed in white these days, for those of us who were there, the memory of the image and figure of Doña Violeta immediately comes to mind, because in addition they look alike,” he stated.
Cristiana does not just evoke her mother because of her figure, also because of her message. “Their points of view, their vision of Nicaragua are practically the same,” points out Sánchez Sancho, currently editorial writer for the daily newspaper La Prensa. “Her democratic, republican, reconciliating thinking is the same that her father and mother had.”
And if Cristiana makes him think about Doña Violeta, with much more reason does it make Daniel Ortega think of her, who in the judgement of the editorial writer “stores in his memory with a lot more resentment the `tragedy´ of having lost the elections and having seen himself forced to turn over the government.”
Don Luis stresses the word “forced”, because Ortega was one of the members of the National Directorate of the Sandinista Front who initially refused to recognize the results, and only did so because of “international pressure and the pressure from other members who believed that they should be recognized.”
For the editorial writer, the persecution that currently the youngest daughter of Doña Violeta is suffering is due to two principal factors, one political and the other emotional.
The first “concrete and real” fact that “a candidacy of Cristiana would be a serious threat for Ortega, because she can perfectly defeat him in free and clean elections.” The other comes “from the memories and resentments that Ortega sees personified in Cristiana, the ghosts that come out of the closets and torment him.”
The former guerrilla commandante Dora María Téllez also thinks that Ortega “had a great trauma with the electoral defeat” of 1990, because he was not expecting it and because, in addition, he looked on his competition as “a lady who did not have the skills that he thought that he had.” He suffered a terrible humiliation on being displaced from power by a person he considered his inferior.
Nevertheless, she maintains that current harassment of Cristiana has more profound explanations. Like many others, Daniel Ortega quickly realized that “she catalyzed an important sympathy who have a historic memory.” The fact that the daughter of the martyr Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and Doña Violeta Barrios challenges the dictator “has a very powerful emotional presence that encourages a ton of people.”
Meanwhile, Téllez analyses “on the other side of the mirror the opposite phenomenon is unleashed: Ortega´s followers are depressed with the candidacy of Cristiana.” And all this is connected to some elections held 31 years ago.
So, it is not just a matter of the trauma that Ortega might have, but also the emotions that the memory of Doña Violeta can awaken through her daughter, in opponents as well as sympathizers of the Ortega Murillo regime.
For the former guerrilla fighter, the situation also responds to an unquestionable “personal resentment” of Daniel Ortega and his wife, Rosario Murillo, toward the Chamorro family. In its heart, she says, “Ortega has a type of social resentment” which is manifested in phrases like “they believe themselves to be untouchable.” “That is why the search of the home of Cristiana took so long, to inflict on her a humiliation needed by him and Rosario.”
Murillo, Téllez thinks, would seem to have another type of resentment toward the Chamorros. “She worked with Pedro Joaquín, she was his secretary, maybe that makes her feel inferior, I do not know, because she was not a poor and marginalized young person.”
Rosario and the Chamorros
The lives of Rosario Murillo and Cristiana Chamorro Barrios have intertwined at different moments, since Murillo at the age of 18 started to work at La Prensa, around 1968, and Chamorro Barrios was a young 15 year-old women who soon would alternate her time between Nicaragua and outside the country for purposes of studying.
At that time there was a person who connected them: Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the director of La Prensa, boss of Murillo and father of Cristiana. It cannot be said that he brought them together, because Claudia Lucía Chamorro, the sister of Cristiana, does not remember that both had been close, because Cristiana at times was outside the country, studying.
Today, 53 years later, Cristiana is a prisoner in her own home, accused of money laundering by the regime that precisely Rosario Murillo directs along with her husband, Daniel Ortega.
For different reasons, Chamorro Barrios and Murillo are women who at some moments have been connected to a possible arrival to the presidency of Nicaragua.
Murillo is the daughter of the landowner Teódulo Murillo and a woman of the wealthy class of Niquinohomo, Zoilamérica Zambrana, the niece of General Sandino. Her father sent her to study in Europe and on returning to Nicaragua she started to work at La Prensa, where she formed a good working team with Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal and Pablo Antonio, the directors.
With aspirations to be a poet, she joined the Sandinista Front (FSLN), which at that time was fighting against the dynasty of the Somozas. And in 1978 she united maritally with Daniel Ortega, who became president of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
When Ortega lost power in 1990, one of the more important crossings in the lives of Murillo and Cristiana Chamorro Barrios happened, who was the right hand of Doña Violeta. Later on in 1997, the step-daughter of Ortega, Zoilamérica, accused him of sexual abuse and Murillo decided to support her husband, something that for many, including Cristiana, gave her more influence over him.
Ortega returned to the presidency in 2007 to no longer leave. At the beginning he shuffled several strategies for remaining in power, because the Constitution prohibited him from being re-elected. He thought about becoming a deputy and establishing a parliamentary regime, taking a lot of power away from the presidency. And likewise, he weighed the possibility that Murillo would be a presidential candidate in 2011, but the old guard of Sandinism rejected her and the Constitution prohibited those who had blood kinship or family affinity with the president from being candidates.
Finally, Ortega violated the Constitution and was re-elected in 2011. In 2016 the Ortega Murillos established themselves as a dictatorship, when Ortega took his wife Rosario Murillo as his running mate in the elections super-controlled by Orteguism.
Murillo does not want the Vice Presidency. She wants the Presidency. But in April 2018 her aspirations went awry with the outbreak of the social protests that were repressed with weapons of war by the dictatorship, causing more than 300 deaths in the civilian population.
In this electoral process of 2021, everything indicates that Daniel Ortega once again will be the candidate with his wife as running mate, and it is here where the paths of Rosario Murillo and Cristiana Chamorro Barrios have crossed again.
Since she was little, Cristiana wanted to be a journalist, but she ended up graduating in History and Philosophy. She started to report for La Prensa, and in the 1980s had a more active role getting to be the director. They were difficult moments of censorship by the government led by Daniel Ortega and the rest of the Sandinista commandantes.
With the triumph of Doña Violeta, Cristiana and her husband Antonio Lacayo, turned into a great support for the president.
At the end of her term, Doña Violeta and her children created the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCH), a non-governmental organization dedicated to strengthening the freedom of expression in Nicaragua and to promoting the leadership of journalists, civil society and to supporting democratic institutions. It is because of this organization that now the Ortega Murillo regime accuses Cristiana of being involved in money laundering.
Dressed in white, as her mother did more than 30 years ago, Cristiana came out to challenge Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo.
Insults, slander and criticism
As Claudia Lucía explains, the relationship of Rosario and Cristiana was not close in the 1970s, when the now first lady and vice president worked in La Prensa, the relationship definitely was broken starting in 2007, when Ortega returned to power and the influence of Murillo on the president began to be seen.
In her opinion articles, Cristiana pointed out how the case of Zoilamérica had been used by Murillo to control Ortega.
Paraphrasing a press release from the Autonomous Women´s Movement (MAM), Chamorro Barrios wrote, “The power of Murillo starts in having traded the integrity of her daughter for the control she now holds over Ortega, his party and the government. Added to this complicity with a crime of sexual rape, is the weight of the accusations against her from all the former compañeros in the previous FSLN government. They accuse her of have exercised for 10 years of the Sandinista Revolution a suffocating cultural dictatorship. And now she returns without providing signs of change that she wants to sell us with a language disguised with `peace and love.´”
Later, she also began to criticize the lack of openness to the independent press that the now dictators showed. Then came the criticisms for the corruption of Ortega Murillo with State assets and Venezuelan aid.
Ortega and Murillo, for their part, dismissed the Chamorros as traitors and oligarchs and blamed them for having sold the railroad in the 1990s. They also pointed them out because Doña Violeta had forgiven the United States a debt that originated during the Sandinista Revolution.
The only cordial moment that occurred in recent years between Rosario and Cristiana happened in 2015, when Antonio Lacayo suffered a deadly accident when the small plane he was traveling in with a North American and a Nicaraguan pilot fell into the Río San Juan. It took some time to recover the cadaver of Lacayo.
In one of her addresses Rosario Murillo said, “We were talking with Cristiana, sharing with her the dimension of the tragedy…I know that she is a very strong person, we know one another well and we know that we have shared moments of grief.”
Probably it was the last time that Murillo and Chamorro spoke. Then came a series of insults on the part of the first lady against the Chamorros, especially when it became known that Cristiana would be a presidential candidate.
Last February, Murillo said about the Chamorro family, “These people who believe they deserve everything and do not deserve anything should pay for their crimes, someday justice will come, someday justice will come. Gang of thieves, all the businesses that the working people of Nicaragua had were given to their immediate relatives, they did not pay more capital to favor their family.”
Cristiana reacted indignantly, pointing out that Rosario Murillo was insulting and slandering her mother and her family. “Murillo is completely mistaken on believing that by attacking the government of Doña Violeta she is going to intimidate us. Her crass communications policy against the first woman president of Nicaragua is not effective and does not absolve her husband before the people, nor does it cleanse the political and historical sin of using the resources of Nicaraguans and fraud to illegally re-elect himself,” she replied.
Previously in January of 2021 Chamorro also reproached Murillo for the deaths caused by the governmental repression starting in April 2018, “It occurred to none (of the Chamorros) to give the order to kill, jail and torture their adversaries. On the contrary, this family has suffered murders, jailing, prison, forced exile and cruel torture for defending freedom in Nicaragua.”
This past June 2 the judicial system, controlled by the presidential family, ordered Cristiana Chamorro Barrios jailed in her own home.
“Like family”
Just as Rosario Murillo said in 2015 that she knew Cristiana well, the latter stated in January 2020 that Murillo was “respected”, “well received” and had “a place” in La Prensa, property of the Chamorro family. In 1976 Cristiana remembers, Murillo was imprisoned for nine days and daily her father Pedro Joaquín was attentive to her, directing that food be taken to her.
One of the difficult moments of Murillo in that time was the death of her two year-old son, who she had with the journalist Annuar Hassan, during the 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua. And on that occasion the Chamorro Barrios were not indifferent to her.
Cristiana remembers her in the home of her parents, and her mother Violeta caring for her. “My mom consoled her and put some covers on her,” she has recalled.
Lastly, when Rosario Murillo had to go into exile in 1977, the Chamorro Barrios sent her to some friends in Panama, where she stayed for two months until she was able to reunite with her family and then settle in Costa Rica.
Another anecdote told by Cristiana herself is one that took place a little after the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution in 1979. When Doña Violeta formed part of the Governing and National Reconstruction Junta (JGRN) she ran into Rosario Murillo and saw her “seated behind the men.” “Rosario, one does not sit behind. Come, sit with me,” she said to her.
“My mother was fond of her for all the years that she spent working by the side of my father,” says Cristiana.
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios, the brother of Cristiana, is concerned about what is happening with his sister and also with his brother Carlos Fernando, who likewise is being attacked by the Ortega Murillo dictatorship. He cannot imagine all that his sister had to suffer when her home was searched by the Orteguista Police and thinks that nothing can be expected from Rosario Murillo.
“She was treated very well (in the Chamorro family), but one cannot expect that after so many years there would be reciprocation. A lot of water has gone under the bridge,” he thinks. Claudia Lucía Chamorro Barrios said to the magazine DOMINGO, when her sister Cristiana still had not been arrested, that “politics in Nicaragua is dirty war…Rosario is going to pull out all her tricks and Cristiana has to know that.”
Traumas of the dictator
If Daniel Ortega would have been a true statesman, no resentment, political or personal, on his part or of his wife Rosario, would have been reflected in acts against the Chamorros or any other family.
But Ortega is not a statesman. He demonstrated that in 1990, when after visiting the woman who had defeated him, abandoned “his posture of a civilized man” and in the last days of his presidency “dug himself deeper and deeper”, encouraging his followers to “ransack every corner of the government ,” narrated Doña Violeta in her autobiography.
They took everything that they could. Televisions, cars, furniture, file cabinets, computers. “And what they could not take physically, the Sandinistas gave to themselves with false deeds,” tells the former president. “Overnight a good part of Nicaragua was privatized to the benefit of a group of privileged Sandinistas.”
The problem, Luis Sánchez Sancho now analyzes, is that losing an election is not the same for a democratic politician as for one like Daniel Ortega. For a statesman, an electoral defeat is an eventuality, because he knows that he can lose or win. In contrast, people like Ortega think that “power belongs to them forever or at least for their lifetime, that they will be there until death and they will bequeath it.”
Ortega felt himself to be the owner of power and a woman who he disregarded snatched it from him. “It has cost him, he had killed, he had taken up weapons, he spent seven years in jail to achieve power,” points out Sánchez Sancho. “His mind never admitted that it would be taken from him by some elections.”
Journalists targeted
By June 4th, in a period of only two weeks, the Prosecutor´s Office had subpoenaed 36 journalists, directors of communications media, members of civil society and former workers of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation (FVBCH) over the case of supposed money laundering, opened against that organization and in particular, its former president, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios.
Marcos Fletes and Walter Gómez, former workers of the foundation, were abducted by police and paramilitaries and remained unjustly under arrest in the cells of the regime. Meanwhile Cristiana was placed under house arrest, without first having had a judicial process.
Among the journalists subpoenaed by the Prosecutor are María Lilly Delgado, Álvaro Navarro, Octavio Enríquez, José Adán Silva, Carlos Herrera and Roberto Mora. They are independent journalists who have done projects with the support of the FVBCH.