Word: prensa
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...until recently a leader of the Nicaraguan resistance, which directs the military insurgency of the contra rebels. Her other son, Carlos Fernando, 33, is editor in 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...
Since the government lifted a ban on its publication on Sept. 19, 1987, La Prensa has run exposes of government corruption and inefficiency, reported the existence of an underground prison for political detainees, and claimed that opponents of the regime have been executed and buried at night. To Sandinista charges that such stories lack substantiation and that she is a tool of the government's enemies, she replies, "If it weren't for La Prensa and the Chamorros, those boys who call themselves our comandantes would still be hiding in the mountains...
Comandantes do not like to be called boys, and both Dona Violeta and her newspaper have been singled out for harsh treatment over the years. The walls of her home are often defaced with insulting graffiti. As for La Prensa, it has been shut down by government decree five times in the past decade, once for 451 days. Last September a La Prensa editor was abducted and savagely beaten by people he recognized as Interior Ministry agents. The next month the government circulated a memo threatening sanctions against public enterprises that advertised in the newspaper...
...school. Their idea of hardship was bathing in a cold lake at their country cottage. Acute social injustice consisted of being invited to two cotillions on the same evening. When Violeta was 19, she was introduced to an intense-looking young man from Managua whose family owned La Prensa. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro inspected Violeta's deeply sunned face and nicknamed her "Morenita," the dark one. He invited her to the beach. Unmoved by his instant attentions, his city ways and his presumption, she declined. He persisted for months, even after she told him, "For God's sake, leave...
...with even greater popularity, until he became a symbol of the mounting opposition to the dictator. On Jan. 10, 1978, as he drove to work in his red Saab, two shotgun- wielding assassins blew him to bits. Says Jaime Chamorro, Pedro's brother and now business manager of La Prensa: "His death ignited the national insurrection against Somoza. It released 40 years of suppressed rage...