AA
Share
Among my childhood memories is one of Doña Violeta, appearing one night at the door of our house in Managua’s Colonia Mántica, knocking urgently and calling out to my parents, her neighbors: “Humberto, Gloria, they took Pedro!”
It happened the night Rigoberto López Pérez shot Somoza in León, on September 21, 1956. I was eight years old, and from the staircase I watched and listened to Doña Violeta until I was sent to bed.
Her husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, director of La Prensa, was a target of Somoza’s hatred. It was the newspaper people needed to survive in a country ruled by a family of tyrants. As long as it wasn’t censored, it served as an unequivocal voice of moral resistance against the Somoza dictatorship — a kind of printed banner for the most incisive political thinking in the country.
After Pedro Joaquín’s assassination in January 1978, and following the triumph of the Sandinista revolution 18 months later, the newspaper remained true to its critical stance — this time against the revolutionary government — and was once again censored. Doña Violeta, who had joined the first Governing Junta in 1979 but stepped down in dissent the following year, came to embody the spirit of La Prensa.
As the Sandinista I was then, I can’t say I celebrated when she won the [1990] elections.I didn’t celebrate at all, but over time I came to appreciate her more deeply, especially as Daniel Ortega’s ambition and actions—and what remained of the FSLN—began to reveal themselves. Eventually, those qualities intensified, leading Nicaragua into another tyranny.
The first hint I had of Doña Violeta’s instinctive wisdom came in the ’90s, when I started encountering those known as “contras” at social gatherings or around the city. After years of war, I was astonished to see how hostility between the two sides seemed to vanish. We were talking in small groups, sharing friendships, and reconnecting warmly with old friends separated by what had seemed like insurmountable political barriers. I recall thinking that that was little short of a miracle in a country of hot-tempered passions like Nicaragua. As I observed what was happening, as I listened to Doña Violeta cheerfully scolding this group or that, as if we were all her children, I began to understand the magic her maternal warmth was working. She treated Moors and Christians with no spirit of revenge. Her tone, her presence, invited us to view the country as a common home, to share it, and cure it of its multiple wounds.
There wasn’t a hint of arrogance in her. She didn’t pretend to be a know-it-all, a great intellectual, or a messianic, all-powerful figure. She didn’t talk about love—she simply bestowed it with humble simplicity and great dignity.
During her time in office, she wasn’t seen as an adversary, and because of that, she gradually won over many people. We began to like her and to believe that maybe we could live in peace and build a different country—one where we listened to each other and stopped persecuting and killing one another.
Doña Violeta wasn’t the model of that feminine utopia I wrote about in my novel El País de las Mujeres, but she did inspire in me the idea of a different kind of power—one with the gift of care, a power capable of mothering and bringing calm; a power filled with tenderness. I went to her house and interviewed her for the novel. We sat in her study, surrounded by photos of her, Pedro Joaquín, and their children. She showed me Pedro’s bloodstained shirt and spoke about answering a call of love for the country when she agreed to run as a candidate. We laughed over several of her anecdotes, including one about a difficult conversation with Salvadoran guerrilla leaders regarding the weapons caches she wanted them to empty and remove. It was a very tense meeting, she admitted—until she noticed that the leader with the highest authority was wearing a jacket with a loose button about to fall off. She said to him, “Look, so-and-so, lend me your jacket”—and to his astonishment, she got up, fetched a sewing kit from her presidential office desk, and sewed the button back on.
“Blessed remedy,” she told me. “From that moment on, everything rolled smoothly.” Then she added, “We’re all just human, mija. Who doesn’t need a button sewn on now and then?”
Later, she led me to a room where she kept souvenirs from her presidency. And here I’ll reveal a secret that now feels both powerful and symbolic: “On the day the next president was inaugurated, I didn’t put my own presidential sash on [Arnoldo] Alemán; I had another one made and kept the original,” she said with a mischievous smile.
That’s how it was, and that’s how it will be remembered. She was, and still is, our true President—the original—whose period shines ever more brightly with the passing of time.
Hail to you, Doña Violeta. You will live on in our memory, and in the memory of the Nicaragua that one day will know how to honor you as you deserve.
