Word: violeta
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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...
...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...
...learned not to talk about our political beliefs. No one's opinion is going to be changed at the dinner table." His mother has come to terms with her family's fate: "They're all adults. They go their way, and I've gone mine. I am Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and I don't have to ask anyone's opinion of anything. Period...
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...