Violeta Chamorro dies, the woman who defeated Ortega in Nicaragua and the first elected president of America

In 1990, when he assumed his mandate, he received a country that crossed a civil war and enormous economic instability.

“I felt a great anguish in my heart upon receiving a country at war and destroyed. The homeland I inherited was a society torn by the division,” he said in his memoirs Heart dreams.

The 1990 elections in Nicaragua are recognized as the first democratic in the country.

After the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979 and after almost 10 years of civil war, Nicaragua celebrated elections.

Surveys published in international media gave the victory to the Sandinista Revolutionary Daniel Ortega, by then president, but with 55% of the votes the presidency was won by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who was the candidate of the National Opposition Union (one), consisting of 14 opposition parties.

His triumph, Sofía Montenegro, sociologist and researcher told BBC, represented “the defeat of the revolution, the end of the war and the arrival of the democratic transition.”

His victory, said the writer Sergio Ramírez, was “a key circumstance for Nicaragua, because Mrs. Violeta wanted to carry out a policy of reconciliation after such a prolonged war, and at the same time lay the foundations of a lasting representative democracy, in the midst of great contradictions, with the hard line of the Sandinista front on the one hand, and with the hard line of each other.”

Ramírez, who at that time was vice president of Nicaragua on the Sandinista front, has recognized in several interviews that he never imagined defeat.

“I have always thought that my candidacy was the product of the circumstances, and that I gave myself to her so that Pedro and Nicaragua could succeed through me,” Violeta wrote in his autobiography.

He was born on October 18, 1929 in Rivas, a city to the south of Nicaragua. Daughter of the landowner Carlos Barrios Sacasa and Amalia Torres Hurtado, was one of the seven children of marriage and were a rich family.

“Although in Rivas we were considered a wealthy family, my dad worried not to incur an offensive opulence, aware of our privilege position,” he wrote in his memoirs.

When he was 14 years old, his parents sent her to improve her English to the United States. Then, he tells his autobiography, the idea was to go to England and then to Switzerland to complete his education.

It did not happen like this: when she was 18, her father died, she returned to Nicaragua and was responsible for the house.

A few years later, in 1950, he married Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and moved to live in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital. Soon her husband had become the main opponent of the Somocista military regime in Nicaragua (1937-79). Next to him lived exile, imprisonment, accusations, torture and threats.

“Reside in Nicaragua was equivalent to living with the constant threat of death about our heads. We knew that his death was not going to occur at the end of a long and painful disease inside a hospital room, but because of a murder. That was something we usually talked about, even in the presence of our children,” he said in his memories.

Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, director of the newspaper La Prensa, the greatest and most influential of Nicaragua, was shot dead on January 10, 1978. His death is considered the beginning of the end of the Somocista dictatorship.

Some time later, Barrios de Chamorro endorsed her husband's slogan: “Nicaragua will be a Republic again.”

When Violeta, as they affectionately called him, won the presidency, there were many criticisms for his lack of experience in politics.

There were even those who assured that it would not be the one who would truly direct the Central American country, but its son -in -law Antonio Lacayo, Minister of the Presidency and who was his right hand during the mandate.

“Violeta Chamorro, inexperience to power,” the newspaper El País titled on February 26, 1990, after his triumph.

A month later, in an interview to that same media the president responded to the criticism: “I know that they say that I am completely illiterate, but I do not care, for one ear it enters me and on the other I get out; I send in one and nobody tells me what I have to do … Here the only one that is I am, violet neighborhoods of Chamorro.”

Years before he had been a member of the National Reconstruction Board, the transition government that was established after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution in 1979, but in 1980 he resigned because he felt that “the hopes of the Nicaraguan people had been betrayed.”

There were several factors that gathered to win the presidency against Ortega, said Mariano Fiallos, former president of the Supreme Electoral Council, in the documentary THE TRANSITION: THE YEARS OF DOÑA VIOLET.

“Among them, the problems of the government of Daniel Ortega can be cited, the great mistakes made by the Sandinista government. The intervention of the United States perhaps a very important factor, the shortage, the war …”.

The 1990 was a polarized Nicaragua, which already had about 50,000 dead by the war between Sandinism and the counterrevolution, funded by the United States.

It was a country that had an economic blockade of the United States, a hyperinflation of 33,000%, according to the figures of the Central Bank, and where the Patriotic Military Service was established, which forced young people to be part of the ranks of the Army to combat the counterrevolutionaries.

The polarization that the Central American country lived could well be told from Chamorro's own house.

Of their four children, two were Sandinistas and two opponents. Claudia was an ambassador of the Sandinista government and Carlos Fernando was the director of the official Barricada media; On the other hand, Christian was the director of the press and Pedro Joaquín was a member of the political directory of the Contra.

Despite the political differences, on Sundays, his Christian granddaughter Lacayo Chamorro told, everyone was going to dinner at Doña Violeta's house and “the norm was not to talk about political issues.”

“They never stopped coming home to share with me a meal and be interested in my health,” he wrote in his autobiography.

At the beginning of his government he had to deal with strikes and demonstrations, many of these led by the Sandinista front.

His government received criticism at the beginning for having left Humberto Ortega, brother of Daniel Ortega, as head of the Army, but also for his economic adjustment programs: there were privatizations, reduction of public spending and began working with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

“His greatest achievement was pacification, disarmament and demilitarization of society. He made a triple transition: from the war to peace, from a state economy to a market; and restored freedoms and threw the foundations for democratic institutions,” said Sofía Montenegro.

In September 1990, in one of the images of his presidency, there was an act in Managua where thousands of weapons were buried in La Paz Park.

“Under a painful civil war that anguished the many women who saw their children go to the front of Battle, and many of them return in coffins, Mrs. Violeta represented the mother who dressed in Blanco provided the necessary peace and the long -awaited national reconciliation,” Luis Sánchez Sancho, who was head of information and press of the electoral campaign of the one, told BBC world.

The Montenegro researcher highlights how being a woman defined the mandate of Barrios de Chamorro.

“He demystified with his maternal style, casual and without searching political machismo and authoritarian paternalism that has characterized the exercise of the power of men and militarism. Without proposing it, it became a reference for the women of the country and I would dare to say, of the continent,” he said.

When Chamorro finished his mandate, the Constitution of Nicaragua prohibited presidential re -election. She also had no intention of trying.

“He never intended to re -elect. Rather, he said he was desperate to deliver and return home,” said Eduardo Enriquez, editor in chief of the newspaper La Prensa, and that by then he was director of the TVNETICIAS NEWS.

Daniel Ortega himself recognized the president's work.

“For me, the most positive of Doña Violeta's management was in favor of reconciliation. She contributed greatly to having advanced much faster in what depolarization is …”, said Ortega in the documentary THE TRANSITION: THE YEARS OF DOÑA VIOLETreleased in 2005.

The last days of the life of Violeta Barrios passed in Costa Rica.

In October 2023, he left his house in Las Palmas, in the Nicaraguan capital, the same in which she lived with her husband Pedro Joaquín and that after her death became a kind of museum.

There was the car where he had been killed, his bloody clothes, his glasses, his motorcycle and dozens of photos of his.

After his death, his family reported: “His remains will rest temporarily in San José, Costa Rica, until Nicaragua is again a Republic, and his patriotic legacy can be honored in a free and democratic country.”

And they added: “We thank the Nicaraguans, in all parts of the world, for their prayers and their solidarity, and especially to the people and the government of Costa Rica, who welcomed her during these last years of her life.”

The former president died in Costa Rica, leaving behind a Nicaragua governed by the man whom he once defeated at the polls.

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