Word: violeta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...question has hovered menacingly since Violeta Chamorro's upset win last February in Nicaragua's presidential elections: Would the defeated Sandinista National Liberation Front (F.S.L.N.) relinquish control of the army and police force that kept it in power for ten years...
...calls himself, is in no rush to return to the civilian life he abandoned eight years ago to take up arms against the Sandinistas. As he sat beneath a tree in the dusty backwater village of San Marcos in northern Nicaragua last week, Ciguena, 25, explained that he supports Violeta Chamorro, whose National Opposition Union (U.N.O.) defeated the Sandinistas at the polls two weeks ago. But Chamorro has called on the contras to disband, and Ciguena doubts that she can function as President without him and his fellow fighters. "The Sandinistas," Ciguena warns, "are very treacherous. If we turn...
...husband's assassination on a Managua street in 1978, widely pinned on Anastasio Somoza Debayle, ignited the popular outrage that a year later brought the Sandinistas to power. Exploiting Violeta's symbolic value as the widow of a martyr, the victorious rebels persuaded her to join a coalition junta. She accepted but soon fell out with Ortega and his fellow Marxists. Chamorro left the government in 1980 and became publisher of La Prensa. The job automatically made her the most prominent and vociferous enemy of the Sandinistas in the country...
...Dona Violeta's early campaign appearances were frightfully inept. Confronted with issues she had not mastered, she often berated her questioners or deferred to running mate Virgilio Godoy. By January she had learned to stick to prepared speeches and emphasize her personal appeal. Her radiant smile and motherly concern warmed Nicaraguans chilled by a decade of Ortega's martial scowls...
Empathy may be her greatest virtue as President. Nicaraguans have been killing one another in revolution and civil war for more than a decade. Who knows these divisions better than Dona Violeta? She is the widow of a man murdered for his political beliefs, and a mother reviled as a traitor by two of her children, who are committed to the revolution. Yet never have her Sandinista son and daughter been unwelcome in her home. That kind of tolerance ; is hard for an embittered nation to summon up. It should help to have an exemplar who has experienced anguish firsthand...