“I’d Like to Ask Rosario Murillo What Happened to You?”
Journalist Alma Guillermoprieto believes that there was “some process of mental degeneration” behind the authoritarian drift in Nicaragua.
HAVANA TIMES – Mexican journalist Alma Guillermoprieto covered the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and the subsequent civil war in El Salvador, being one of the few reporters who narrated the massacre of hundreds of villagers in El Mozote. During that time, she met the current Nicaraguan “duumvirate” Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, and believes that there was “some process of mental degeneration” behind their authoritarian drift.
“It’s really such a deranged process that I can’t frame it in political terms. It’s more like what happened with the Ceausescu’s in Romania. I think, obviously, they’re very skillful and cunning people, but they’ve also gone through some sort of mental deterioration—this duumvirate of Daniel and Rosario—because what they’re doing is not within the bounds of mental normalcy,” the Mexican journalist explains in a phone interview with EFE.
Alma Guillermoprieto (1949) traveled to Guatemala to participate in the Central America Cuenta Festival, a region where she began her journalistic career, beginning precisely in Nicaragua, where she wanted to witness the Sandinista revolution that had taken up arms against the Somoza dictatorship, overthrowing it in 1979.
“I found myself, like many others, swept up in the euphoria of what we sensed would be a triumphant revolution. And to this day, I don’t know why we believed that, what exactly convinced us (…) After the painful blow of the coup in Chile, Nicaragua felt like a glass of water to someone dying of thirst. I wanted to see what that was like—and that’s how I got my start as a reporter,” she recalls, her voice soft and measured.
Until then, Guillermoprieto had no experience as a journalist, nor much interest in it, dreaming instead of being a dancer. “But I had a friend who always insisted I should be a journalist,” she says. “And when the opportunity came, he had a publication called Latin American Newsletters. I called him and said, ‘Alright, I’m ready now’ (…) The next day he recommended me to The Guardian, and I never got off that train.”
In Nicaragua, she interviewed many of the guerrilla leaders who helped the Sandinista Front topple the Somoza regime. She recalls how they gathered at the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, “the only place at the time with reliable electricity and running water.”
She didn’t interview Rosario Murillo, but she did speak with her to coordinate interviews with her partner, Daniel Ortega.
– And how do you remember her?
“She was a woman… very beautiful and, how can I put it? Very tough. And… she seemed to expect the worst from everyone. That was the impression she gave me,” Guillermoprieto recalls.
She can’t understand how that utopian revolution could morph, over time, into an authoritarian regime where Ortega and Murillo—now essentially co-presidents of Nicaragua—have forced so many former comrades into exile, like Cervantes Prize–winner Sergio Ramírez, who now heads the Central America Cuenta festival. Others have been jailed, expelled, or stripped of their nationality—journalists and opposition members alike.
“It’s very strange. I would really like to sit down with Rosario and ask her, ‘What happened to you?’” says Guillermoprieto.
She says she has “of course” requested “that interview, that conversation—but obviously, no.”
“I would love it,” she continues. “I’d love to ask her how she’s lived all these years, because she must’ve lived in a very dark place to have such bizarre paranoias,” the journalist adds.
El Salvador, the massacre and Bukele
Guillermoprieto spent four years in Central America as a reporter, “a long, long time”, between Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, a bit of Panama, until she was hired by the Washington Post and moved to the U.S. capital.
In El Salvador, she covered the 1980s civil war, including the December 1981 El Mozote massacre, where soldiers killed nearly 1,000 peasants. Hard to access, Guillermoprieto was the second reporter to arrive at the massacre site, after her New York Times colleague Ray Bonner.
She avoids reminiscing about that coverage: “I don’t talk about it much, but my articles and those of my colleague Ray Bonner are there.”
At the time, Guillermoprieto wrote: “The first overwhelming impression was the sweet and nauseating smell of the decomposing bodies. We were in Mozote.”
Bonner and Guillermoprieto’s reports provoked a furious response from the Reagan administration, which supported the Salvadoran army and denied what had happened.
Otto Reich, a “Cuban exile—or self-exile”—working for the U.S. State Department, wrote letters to The Washington Post saying she “should be fired.”
“It was an unpleasant time,” she recalls.
Now, after the civil war and the gang violence that followed, El Salvador has entered a new era under President Nayib Bukele, whose “way of governing is clearly authoritarian, and the infamous prison is a display of blatant, brutal human rights violations.”
“But it’s all part of a deliberate performance by Bukele to achieve his goal, which is to instill terror,” she says, lamenting that under the Salvadoran regime, “they arrest and arrest and keep arresting—there is no legal process that ensures prisoners have the right to a defense.”
In neighboring Guatemala—once the region’s bright spot after the election of President Bernardo Arévalo de León—the situation remains troubled due to attacks from Attorney General Consuelo Porras, including against journalists.
“What always strikes me,” she says, “is how much fear a sad little reporter can provoke in someone with all the power in the world. I don’t get it. I don’t understand Bukele in that regard, and I don’t understand Consuelo Porras and her constant attacks on a journalist, a good man like José Rubén Zamora. Why is she so afraid of him? That’s the big question.”