Word: nicaragua
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
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...
...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...