The strange poetry of Ortega Murillo family and their references to pain, power and death

In La Prensa May 17, 2026

From “poems” of child deaths and old cravings for power, passing through harsh episodes of torture and sex in jail, to family resentments which criticize the blood line of the Ortega Murillos

Before Juan Carlos Ortega Murillo published a piece in his social networks which unleashed polemics and conjecture, under the suspicion of being a critical harpoon against his mother Rosario Murillo, other poems had already unveiled the strange poetic vein of the Ortega Murillos.

Before going back in time and delving into the past, let us look at the detonator of the conflict: Juan Carlos decided to publish a text which lends itself to all types of interpretations, including, of course, the suspicion of being directed to the rigid and quasi police control of his mother Rosario.

The text does not seem to be innocent for someone like him, with a Licentiate in Social Communication from the Central American University, experienced in basic reporting in the old El Nuevo Diario and a regular reader of García Márquez and Vargas Llosa.

Poem in the middle of a gale

The context of the poem is linked to the polemics around the son of the dictatorial couple: his wife Xiomara Blandino has been the target of reprisals and the repression of Murillo, while Juan Carlos himself has disappeared from family photos and extra-official versions place him in indelicate disagreements with the family politics of his mother.

Such discrepancies have resulted – according to press versions – in the separation of Juan Carlos from the leadership of Channel 8, the family businesses, and the separation of Xiomara from the Ortega Murillo family circle, as well as the loss of her freedom and rights.

It is not strange, therefore, that the press and social networks identify in the text a criticism of his mother, with phrases that seem to fit with the incendiary family direction of Murillo:

Uninhabitable

“The value of blood

Is determined by love.

…Your emptiness someday I will bury

Because fear is your god

and does not allow you to be

You are destroying everything…

You lost the way, you distorted the world…

You are destroying everything…”

Uninhabitable

The value of blood

is determined by love

What was in your heart?

The purest path to truth

passes through accepting the inevitable place;

finding ourselves in our own fragility, mortality

fragility, mortality

our story; history in life

by inheriting, to inherit

our story; fragility,

mortality

From fear and sadness I want

to learn

The emptiness someday I will bury

I am tired of seeing how you fall

you are going down, don´t you see it?

Your emptiness someday I will bury

because fear is your god

and does not allow you to be

You are destroying everything…

You lost the way, you distorted the

world…

You are destroying everything…

How terrible it is to raise these words

from the uninhabitable side of my heart.

More song than poem

The text in question was also clarified by the author himself: “It is unfortunate, but not unexpected, that someone always comes out trying to manipulate writings that only respond to processes of personal introspection and review,” he wrote in his social networks four days after its publication.

Not everyone saw in the text about the discord a “poem” in that precise literary sense.

The poet, writer, and literary critic Carlos M-Castro sees it more as the lyrics of a song in process.

“I do not follow Juan Carlos Ortega on social networks, so I am unaware if he tends to publish texts like this one or if it really is atypical. In my judgement what he shared reads more like the draft of a song than a poem,” he said.

“Let us remember that JC Ortega was a member of a rock band, Ciclo, and if one does an exercise of imagination it is not difficult to integrate these lines into a musical structure like the songs of Ciclo which can be heard on the radio,” he noted.

And in terms of its quality as a poem “it leaves a lot to be desired” he says: “As a song, I insist that it would still be a draft which would have to be polished more, but it is not completely bad (on the level of the songs of Ciclo, for the record).”

Even though Ortega Murillo already “clarified” it, the sensation which remains is that it is polemic, but the text in itself is no more polemic than the poem of his father, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, when he was a prisoner in the 60s and 70s.

The crude “poem” of Daniel Ortega

In the case of Ortega Saavedra, his relationship with poetry and lyrics is more limited, maybe due to his formation in high school in Science and Literature and his unknown habit for reading.

During his imprisonment between 1967 and 1974, Daniel Ortega wrote some fragmentary texts with explicit references to torture under the prison regime of the dictatorship of the Somozas.

These texts circulated in a restricted way in their time, according to a Nicaraguan poet and writer in Managua who asked that his identity be reserved out of fear of reprisals.

According to his memory, in the 80s Murillo tried to stop their dissemination because she considered them unhelpful for the public image of a strong man for Ortega, but the poet Francisco de Asís Fernández published part of that prohibited material in 1986, as “revolutionary verses” in the book The Anthology of Nicaraguan Political Poetry.

Its publication generated discomfort within the political and family environment and it was not without reason: the writings showed an Ortega disordered, explicit and unfiltered.

In prison (fragment of Ortega´s “poem”)

“(…) kick him, like this, like this

In the balls, in the face

in the ribs.

Pass the cattle prod, the bull-penis whip,

talk, talk you son of a bitch

let´s see, water with salt,

talk, we don´t want to fuck with you (…)

“If you give me food, you fuck me

for three cigarettes I suck you off.”

Crude and unfiltered

The strange verses of Daniel Ortega have not gone unnoticed by writers.

Alma Guillermoprieto, a Mexican journalist and writer who has covered Latin American conflicts since the 1970s, published an extensive report titled “The toxic couple that controls Nicaragua: the history of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo,” in the newspaper El País on December 11, 2021.

There, quoting the writer Sergio Ramírez Mercado (his novel, Tongolele no sabía bailar) and the journalist and writer Fabián Medina (his book, El Preso 198), Gullermoprieto quotes two poems of Ortega behind bars.

“It can be said that Ortega began to really live in jail. He was the son of an itinerant father, a neighborhood boy who with his friends joined the Sandinista Front of National Liberation (FSLN), at that time a very small organization, as a team responsible for raising money: they attacked stores and banks. The first time they arrested him and tortured him he was 15 years old; a year later they arrested him and tortured him even more in Guatemala, they jailed him again in Nicaragua and he went free thanks to a general amnesty. In 1967, at 22 years of age, he was sentenced to 14 years for robbing a bank, but he was released 7 years early, when his guerrilla comrades kidnapped several hostages in a party and exchanged them for him and another 13 prisoners. Some poems which Ortega published a long time ago talk above all about his life in prison and they are rough. “If you give me food you fuck me/ for three cigarettes I suck you off,” begins one. In another he describes the tortures that the penitentiary authorities inflicted on him almost for fun: “Kick him, like this, like this/ in the balls, in the face/ in the ribs. / Pass the cattle prod, the bull-penis whip/ talk, talk you son of a bitch.”

Alma Guillermoprieto

For M-Castro, the “poetic” effort of Ortega, as well as his personality, are less fascinating than the facets of Murillo.

“They are much less cryptic poems than Murillo´s (less artistically elaborate as well) and somewhat hard to read.”

“In the piece Guillermoprieto quotes a famous interview that Ortega did with Playboy many years ago where he, while talking about when he met Rosario defined himself as a man of action more than of words. Probably his `foreboding poems´ must be seen in his acts more than in his texts. As a figure (to complement a bit the response), he is much less interesting and complex than his now co-president,” he says.

Murillo through her poems

But if we are talking about polemics and strangeness, Rosario Murillo surpassed by a large margin the poetic attempts of her son Juan Carlos and her spouse, Daniel.

Murillo is the more constant figure in this terrain. Born in Managua in 1951, she began to write poetry in 1973, a year after the 1972 earthquake which devastated Managua.

At that time she was working as the secretary for Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal in the newspaper La Prensa.

From that time came a poem full of resentment about her tasks in the newspaper, which, according to her, kept her from developing her career as a poet.

She titled it The difficulties of a poet who among desks, typewriters and other innumerable things scribbled down poems and rewrote them.

“I wanted to write you a poem

those of mine with jumbled words

fresh like the grass of the yard

full like the vase under the eave

I wanted to write you this poem that I am saying to you

but you now see that I could not

I had to exhaust my fingers endlessly

making tons of envelopes

folding papers, closing the envelopes, sealing them

I had to pick up the phone and respond melodiously

no, he is not here, no he has not come

yes, of course, come in

I had to make myself smile showing four teeth…”

Born in grief

He poetic production began marked by the death of a son during the earthquake.

Titled Christmas Song, the poem is a piece which the now co-dictator dedicated to her third son, Anuar Joaquín Hassan Murillo, who she bore with her second husband, the journalist Anuar Moisés Hassan Morales.

The text had been hidden and forgotten for decades after Murillo ordered her books of poetry published in the 1980s be disappeared, after the electoral defeat of the FSLN in 1990.

Nevertheless, the text was revived under other dramatic conditions: in the National Dialogue of May 2018, when Murillo and Ortega faced the students who led the social protests.

There, before the clergy who served as mediator and the circle of power of the FSLN, the student Victor Cuadra read to her face, verse by verse, the painful poem while the face of Murillo transformed from surpise to rage.

“Christmas Poem

To my son killed in the earthquake

I walk today

with birthing pains in every step

with the womb breaking

and mother pieces

flying over empty spaces (…)

(…) I feel the son who springs from blood

I feel the skin hanging

I have veins in one knot

there is a son spilling into the night”.

Rage unleashed

In their political naivete, the students maybe thought that reading Murillo a poem about her dead son would move her to stop the wave of repression that at that time had taken the lives of 58 demonstrators.

Hours later, Murillo, with rage and pain, recognized the poem and explained the tragedy which motivated her to write.

“For me that poem means a lot, it reflects the pain of a mother and of many mothers who have lost our children in different moments and different circumstances,” she said through the official media.

“That December (1972) was very painful, I had to pick up my son at the home of my father and mother, who had the second floor fall on him and I saw that the little angel, who inexplicably was still flexible and warm, did not seem to be a dead child,” she remembered at that time.

“He seemed to be a sleeping child, and picking him up, feeling him and singing to him, and afterwards writing that poem, for me meant a lot. It has to do with that irreplaceable loss of our children, and that is why I say: All us mothers have the same pain and the same suffering, all of us want peace,” she continued.

The reading it seems touched her heartstrings because Murillo did not return to the dialogue and the repression continued until finishing, months later, with at least 355 deaths in the protests and her repression campaigns.

Old dreams of power

Years before, in 1985, Murillo published a book of poems titled In the splendid cities where she already imagined at that time the scenarios which decades later, she would impose as co-dictator.

The poem I need to arm heaven with my songs, revealed then the fixation of Murillo with the choreography which she imposed on the public events of Ortega, including the gigantic photos of Sandino, Carlos Fonseca, the plazas with the slogans, the music idolatrizing the FSLN and even a draft of the so-called Trees of Life (“lights and colors”) which she ordered be installed throughout the country:

“I want a tree with flowers

a plaza with flags and choirs

a slogan conceived in the people

a refrain repeated in echo.

I want the face of Carlos Fonseca

a Sandino, a Rigoberto, a Rugama in the wind

I want a dawn, a collective prayer

and a love with predicate, verb and subject.”

The fears of Murillo

Nevertheless, manifesting her dreams of power and past grief, Murillo also wrote another poem which, if it is not foreboding, at least expresses her old fears of losing power.

“I am afraid and I do not know how to say it

I am unprotected!

There is an unending line of ants

who stare at me

at the point of accusing me of some crime

pushing me to fall

tangling up my already entangled legs

rejoicing in my silence, in my many questions

imagining me on the ground

small ants, very small, minimal

mediocre, tiny, minute,

poor lonely ants

looking for how to go up the staircase

disguised as party ants.”

“If she was not so pernicious”

According to the poet and writer Carlos M-Castro, that poem of Murillo titled I am afraid of so much reality circulated long after the tragic events of Abril 2018.

The poem was published in the book In the splendid cities in 1985 and was used as a type of “weapon” against Murillo by poets and youth starting in 2018.

For him, it is complex to identify the characteristics of the current controversial figure of Murillo in her poems.

“In general I would say that it is difficult to talk about poems that reveal characteristics of what today her “public figure” represents in terms of evil, it is worth clarifying what it is that we read and evaluate from the outside, because we cannot, and maybe do not want to treat her as a real person,” he says.

According to the poet M-Castro, “the poetic work of Murillo is relatively vast, and if you want to find this or that, you will certainly find it. What I would just say is that as a figure she has a complexity which would be fascinating if she was not so pernicious for so many people.”