Word: violeta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That attitude was nourished practically from the moment Violeta was born, on Oct. 18, 1929, in the southern Nicaraguan town of Rivas, near the border with Costa Rica. Her father, a wealthy landowner and cattle rancher, sent his seven children abroad to 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...
...love story was to have no sunset. Only after their marriage did Violeta understand fully her husband's commitment to ending the Somoza dynasty, which had ruled since 1936. Before the Somozas came to power, four Chamorros had been President of Nicaragua. Pedro Joaquin's editorials left no doubt that he hoped someday to continue the family tradition. His political outspokenness got him thrown into jail four times, but each time he emerged 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...
...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...
Accepting a place on a five-member national governing junta dominated by the Sandinistas, Violeta was soon appalled by the course the country's new rulers were taking: "I began to see an excessive militarism, an exaggerated Cuban presence and less interest in democratic ideas." She resigned from the junta in April 1980 and turned her attention to her paper...
...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...