Word: chamorro
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...could no longer maintain that low profile after his mother-in-law, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, defeated the Sandinistas and became President of Nicaragua in April 1990. Lacayo, who served as Chamorro's campaign director, immediately began shaping the new administration; according to insiders, he picked the President's Cabinet and made the controversial decision to retain Sandinista General Humberto Ortega Saavedra as head of the armed forces. Lacayo's official title is Minister of the Presidency, but some feel he might as well be called Mr. Presidency. "Dona Violeta conferred absolute power on Antonio from the beginning," says...
Lacayo toils 14 hours a day in an office that would be used by Vice President Virgilio Godoy Reyes if he and Chamorro were on better terms. Until this month, Lacayo's sister Silvia was the country's treasurer, and her husband Alfredo Cesar Aguirre is president of the National Assembly. Lacayo's cousin heads the Central Bank, and all three national newspapers are directed by Chamorros, including the pro-government La Prensa, where Lacayo's wife Cristiana is president. During a two-hour interview, Lacayo bristled at the suggestion that he and his family wield inordinate power...
...Lacayo presides over an insiders' network that mocks Chamorro's vows to run a "transparent" administration. Last November the government ordered 400,000 new passports, claiming that the old documents were no longer any good because the Sandinistas, in their final months of power, had issued papers to non-Nicaraguans with no right to citizenship. Under Nicaraguan law, the printing contract, worth more than $1 million, should have been open for public bidding. It was not. Although at least one other company made an unsolicited offer to do the job more cheaply, the contract was awarded to Continental Trading, which...
Nicaraguans agree that Chamorro -- guided by Lacayo -- has kept her two central campaign pledges: to end the nine-year conflict between the Sandinista army and the U.S.-backed contras, and to eliminate the military draft. Her administration is also slowly repairing the economic meltdown produced by Sandinista mismanagement, the war and a U.S. embargo on trade that was lifted only last year...
...useful in important therapeutic ways. It is useful to have leaders such as Czechoslovakia's Vaclav Havel, Poland's Lech Walesa, the Philippines' Corazon Aquino, Nicaragua's Violeta Chamorro, who have all suffered directly, in order to deal with the challenge of change for a society at that moment. There is an extraordinary burden that ordinary people endure when they recognize, perhaps after decades of having been submissive, slavelike, that freedom calls for a different set of imperatives, for a certain capacity for individual decision, judgment and action. I also think it's rather important, for the creation...