VIOLETA CHAMORRO: Don’t Call Her Comrade

As the elegant gray-haired woman sets down a bouquet of flowers in Managua’s Central Municipal Cemetery, a man dressed in rags approaches to wash the gravestone she has come to visit. Breath foul, hands filthy, he bends to kiss her fingertips and rasps, “Dona Violeta, you’re looking more beautiful than ever.”

“Well — older, anyway,” she says with a smile, pressing cordobas on him as he swishes greasy water over the simple concrete marker.

Whether hoping for a bigger tip or simply moved by her attention, the man suddenly proclaims, “If your husband were here today, Nicaragua would be a happy land.”

“Don’t get yourself into trouble,” the woman admonishes, concerned for both of them.

But, of course, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro — Dona Violeta to even the hardest-line members of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government — believes precisely the same thing. Otherwise she could not devote her life to a cause that has torn asunder her country, her family and her young girl’s dreams of a happy life with a good man. Dona Violeta, 59, is president and publisher of Nicaragua’s opposition daily La Prensa (circ. 50,000 to 75,000, depending on the availability of newsprint). Even more, she is a living reminder of what Nicaragua might have been had her husband Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal not been gunned down eleven years ago, a year before the Sandinistas came to power.

Though the leaders of Nicaragua’s Marxist government detest her politics and have often tried to intimidate her into silence, they have been known to troop dutifully to Dona Violeta’s comfortable four-bedroom house across from a parklet in Managua to talk things over. Chamorro knows her enemy and has not the slightest hesitation about addressing the commander of the revolution and President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, like a naughty schoolboy — or worse. The last time Ortega visited her home, he noticed that a nine-year-old picture of him with members of Nicaragua’s first postrevolutionary government, including Dona Violeta, was gone. Pointing to the wall, he teased her, saying, “Something’s missing.”

“Yes,” she replied stiffly. “I had to take it down. Every time I came into this room and saw your picture, I felt sick to my stomach.”

Of late Dona Violeta’s name is heard more and more often as a possible , presidential candidate to oppose Ortega in next February’s national elections. While she has repeatedly denied any such ambitions, a gleeful light fires up her eyes when the subject of challenging Ortega comes up. And she has reason to be optimistic. A recent survey concluded that if the election were held tomorrow, the Sandinistas would lose to the opposition. When Ortega is pitted against Chamorro by name, the polls show her a slight favorite.

Chamorro has long been the best-known woman in Nicaragua, and the family whose name she bears has been one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful for generations. “I am a symbol, I know that,” she says. She is also an anomaly: an influential woman in a macho society, albeit one that claims to have eradicated sexism. What probably makes her most dangerous to the regime, however, is the fact that she can — and regularly does — act with the courage of those who have nothing left to lose.

The daughter of a wealthy ranching family, she had been married to Pedro Joaquin Chamorro for 27 years when he was assassinated in 1978, probably on the orders of dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle. A year later, the Sandinistas overthrew Somoza, thanks partly to La Prensa’s valiant editorials and the Chamorro family’s money. Then the widow Chamorro watched in horror as the Sandinistas, whom she had mistaken for unorthodox social democrats, revealed the extent of their allegiance to Moscow and Cuba and their disdain for democratic politics.

She saw her family split into feuding factions. One of her sons, Pedro Joaquin Jr., 37, was 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.

Chamorro’s assessment of the Sandinistas is withering. In Nicaragua the 43- year Somoza dynasty is remembered with loathing, yet she says, “The Sandinistas, without question, are worse than Somoza ever was. The Sandinistas are a disaster. After ten years of them, there’s nothing to eat. I had hoped, oh, how I hoped, that their revolution might be for the people. But it’s all for themselves.” ^

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.

In the 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.

The widow Chamorro favors an informal style, wearing simple clothes that accent her trim figure and filling her home with antique furniture and endless mementos of her husband. A sought-after speaker on the international journalists’ circuit, she spends much of her time outside the country, often popping up at gala occasions like the inauguration of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a longtime friend. When at home, she is driven to the paper’s run-down plant each morning in a blue Toyota jeep. In her air- conditioned office, she puts her feet up to relieve her painful osteoarthritic condition. And, constantly sipping ice water, she scans editorials, signs checks and reviews digests of news events.

Chamorro presides over her fractured family with the same aplomb. At family gatherings, politics are checked at the door. Says Carlos Fernando: “We’ve * 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 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 me in peace.” But when he complied, says Violeta, “I found I missed him.” Finally, having invited her to Mass, he carved a heart into one of the wooden pews. “I was conquered,” she says. They were married in December 1950.

The 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 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.”

To varying degrees, Pedro Joaquin’s survivors came to believe that the ragtag band of rebels known as the 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.

Now she fights her battles on the front pages, and occasionally face to face, with men she believes have betrayed Nicaragua. In the summer of 1987, Ortega signed a Central American peace plan proposed by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias 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.’ ” It did.

Chamorro has no doubt that her husband would oppose the Sandinistas as violently as she does. “I talk to Pedro all the time,” she confides, “and I know what he wants me to do.” She is devoting her life to living out his, and she has no regrets about the decisions they have made, together or apart.