Word: dona
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wing Somoza dictatorship in 1978 touched off the uprising that led to the Sandinistas' elevation to power. Since winning the nomination of the United Nicaraguan Opposition (U.N.O.) coalition last September, she has managed to improve on a thoroughly inept start. But her campaign still lacks both substance and imagination. Dona Violeta does not discuss issues. She appears. She smiles. She presses flesh. She departs. Her stump speeches are long on teary references to her late husband and short on almost everything else...
Alfredo Cesar, one of her chief strategists, promises she will stay close to home once the campaign formally opens Dec. 4. But Dona Violeta needs more than that to defeat the well-organized Ortega. U.N.O. must reach its natural constituency among those hurt most by the Sandinistas. Even the U.S. is uncertain how strongly to back her. While Ortega is one of Bush's least favorite heads of state, lavishing U.S. resources on a lost cause could succeed only in making Ortega more difficult to deal with in a second term. Still, the U.S. will spend $9 million to support...
...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...
...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...
...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...