Violeta Chamorro: A Woman Who Fought for Peace in Nicaragua
She dreamed of a democratic Nicaragua, and after defeating Daniel Ortega at the polls in 1990, she became the first elected woman president in the Americas.
HAVANA TIMES – “There is no sovereignty without freedom. There is no justice without freedom. There cannot even be a Nicaragua without freedom, because the soul and essence of Nicaragua is freedom.” These were among the most memorable words of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s speech when she assumed the presidency of Nicaragua on April 25, 1990. That day, she promised to restore peace to a people emerging from what had seemed like an endless war.
Chamorro thus became the first woman head of state in Nicaragua and the first in the entire American continent to be elected by popular vote. In a Nicaragua wounded by war, she also became the first figure in power who did not resort to authoritarianism or bullets to govern a deeply divided country.
“I promised during my campaign that Nicaragua would once again become a Republic. Today is the dawn of that Republic, born of the people’s vote, not from shouts or bullets, but from the deepest silence of the Nicaraguan soul: from conscience. It is a beautiful thing for a Republic to rise without bloodshed, like a new sun of justice and freedom! This is the first light of that sun. As one of our poets said, we have been the most persistent democracy of desire in the Americas,” she declared in that first address.
The former president died at the age of 95, on June 14, 2025, in San Jose, Costa Rica, where she had arrived on October 17, 2023, after a prolonged medical condition in Nicaragua and years of retirement from public life. On October 1, 2018, her family had announced that she suffered “a cerebrovascular accident or stroke.” Her health remained guarded from that point on.
“From now on, Doña Violeta will settle in San Jose, under the care and love of her family, accompanied by health personnel and specialized doctors,” her family stated in a statement published in October 2023.
On June 14, the family announced that “Doña Violeta passed away peacefully, surrounded by the love and affection of her children and the people who provided her with extraordinary care, and is now in the peace of the Lord.”
Her legacy endures. She was the former head of state who defeated Daniel Ortega at the ballot box and ended his first government. She led the country toward a reconciliation that once seemed impossible and put an end to the armed conflict.
“Any weapon I find, I destroy and bury forever. I don’t want them. We have already suffered too much,” Chamorro told the Spanish newspaper El País three years after taking office.
With her maternal and down-to-earth way of speaking, she became the most beloved and admired president in the country’s history. Her legacy was peace and reconciliation in a nation that had never known a way to resolve differences other than war and uprisings. Her example remains even though the tradition she began in 1990 has now been reversed by Ortega and his obsession with clinging to power at all costs, evidenced by the brutal repression unleashed since April 2018.
Her Difficult Entry into Politics
Violeta Chamorro recounted in her memoirs how difficult it was for her to assume the presidency of a country left in ruins by the bloody civil war of the 1980s, which left tens of thousands dead. In 1990, after defeating Ortega in a historic election (he has since regained power), Chamorro was inaugurated with the eyes of the world on a nation seeking to rebuild.
“I have faith that if the Berlin Wall is falling, change will also come to Nicaragua,” she predicted in another interview with El País during a visit to London in November 1989. “I have confidence that we will win, because I believe in the wisdom of the people, who have already lost their fear and know that their vote is secret, and that their vote counts,” she said days before the election.
Years later, she would reflect that she believed she won because “I spoke to people in a clear and direct language… I tried to open myself up to them, revealing many of my most intimate feelings and convictions. I showed vulnerability.”
She was elected with 54.7% of the vote in the general elections held on February 25, 1990. In her memoir Dreams of the Heart, she recounted how, when she met with Daniel Ortega, he began to cry.
“I hugged him and said, ‘My boy, it’s okay.’ Then I invited him to sit beside me in a rocking chair,” she wrote.
But taking office was a great challenge for her. “I felt deep anguish in my heart when inheriting a country at war and in ruins,” she recalled in her memoirs.
“The homeland I inherited was a society torn apart by division. Nicaraguans no longer recognized each other as children of the same nation. Partisan and personal interests outweighed the legitimate interests of the people,” recounted Violeta, wife of journalist and Martyr of Public Liberties Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardenal, who was assassinated on January 10, 1978, during the Somoza dictatorship.
Doña Violeta, as Nicaraguans popularly called her, led a difficult government marked by uprisings and protests from the then-opposition Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), led by Daniel Ortega. Although she never aspired to a political career, life had already prepared her for it after the assassination of her husband, who was killed while driving to La Prensa newspaper, of which he was the director.
“I’m not a politician. I married Pedro Joaquín, and when you love someone, you must be with them in all their sorrows and all their joys. That’s what I did, but I have no political experience,” she told Mexican journalist Anne Marie Mergier in July 1979, when asked about her joining the Junta of National Reconstruction, in which she served for only nine months.
She recounted that when she was invited to join the junta, her initial response was no, “because I’m not, nor was I, a politician, and it sounded to me like a lot of entanglements.” On April 19, 1980, she resigned, citing abuses by the FSLN’s National Directorate.
In a letter to the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), made public in 1985, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro explained that “when, after a few months, I saw that the promised direction did not match what was being done, and given the impossibility of making them change course, I withdrew from that Junta without scandal or public recrimination, believing that there would be more chance of correcting the errors being committed.”
The Day Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Cried
Doña Violeta confessed that on September 2, 1993, she lived through the most difficult day of her presidency when she announced the retirement of Humberto Ortega, who until then had been head of the Army. “Imagine my shock when I walked out and found Daniel in front of me and Humberto behind me. I felt like they were going to hurt me, but other people stepped in to protect me,” she recounted in an interview with El Semanario. Humberto Ortega died in September 2024 as a political prisoner of his brother.
She said she went to her office, called all her ministers, and told them what had happened. “I handed in my resignation, explaining to them that I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked each of them what they thought, and as each one spoke, they said, ‘Doña Violeta, don’t resign, we need you. Do it for the country.’ They all said the same thing, and I started crying, and well, I had no choice but to go on,” she recalled.
The transition was not easy. “As a peaceful woman and someone far removed from political parties, I cannot deny that I felt fear in the face of the enormous challenges of the great mission the Nicaraguan people had entrusted to me,” the former president explained in her memoirs. Not only did she have to work to disarm the country and reconcile a divided society, but also rebuild an economy left in ruins by war and US intervention under the Reagan Administration.
Chamorro also had to struggle within the National Opposition Union (UNO), the broad coalition of parties under which she came to power, as well as face international pressure, and an Ortega-led sabotage. She also faced criticism from those who saw her as a matron or housewife with no experience in public administration or politics, manipulated politically by her son-in-law Antonio Lacayo Oyanguren (1947–2015), husband of her daughter Cristiana, her closest advisor and Minister of the Presidency.
Doña Violeta responded forcefully to these criticisms in an interview with Spanish journalist Miguel Angel Bastenier just days before taking office in 1990:
“I know people say I’m completely ignorant, but I don’t care—it goes in one ear and out the other. I’m in charge of UNO, and no one tells me what to do. All that talk about who’s really in charge is nonsense. I will appoint my own ministers. I’m just trying to help my country do better than they did (the Sandinistas), who tried to buy the people with handouts. I’m the only one in charge here: Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.”
Three Children in Exile
Three of the former president’s four children are currently exiled and stripped of their nationality by order of Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo’s dictatorship. Their properties were also confiscated.
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios, a former political prisoner of Ortega’s regime, was exiled to the United States in February 2023. That same month, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios was also released from prison and exiled; she now resides in Costa Rica. Both were imprisoned in 2021 after expressing interest in running as presidential candidates.
Meanwhile, her son Carlos Fernando Chamorro, director of CONFIDENCIAL, has been in exile in Costa Rica since June 2021.
Her Life with a National Hero
The former president was born in Rivas in 1929, the daughter of Carlos Barrios and Amalia Torres, and one of seven siblings. Her adult life was marked by the harassment against her husband, his imprisonment, and exile. Pedro Joaquin Chamorro was one of the most outspoken critics of the Somoza dictatorship and voiced his opposition courageously from the editorial pages of La Prensa, one of the country’s few democratic institutions.
She once said she stopped listening to the radio during those years because it terrified her to hear news of arrests or attacks against her husband. But she followed the newspapers religiously—now shut down in Nicaragua under a new dictatorship.
Pedro Joaquin’s denunciations of the Somoza regime’s corruption and killings cost him his life. He was assassinated by regime hitmen while driving to the offices of La Prensa. His death shocked Nicaraguan society. It triggered a wave of nationwide protests that led to the popular uprising spearheaded by the Sandinista Front. Tens of thousands attended the funeral of the man proclaimed a Martyr of Public Liberties, a demonstration of both affection and defiance toward the Somoza regime.
“My grief was inconsolable in the early days of my widowhood. I sought refuge in solitude, refusing to go out or even accept the comfort of my own children. I felt strangely detached from everyone who also mourned Pedro’s death,” the former president wrote in her memoirs.
She also explained in her book: “Only the strength of the invincible love I felt for him allowed me to endure the suffering caused by Pedro’s death.”
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro kept alive her husband’s legacy and the hope of achieving a truly democratic Nicaragua. “I realized that the anguish I felt would never go away and that I had to find meaning in his death. If the blood that was shed could somehow inspire the thousands who followed his casket to rise up against Somoza, then Pedro’s death would not have been in vain. I understood that the sacrifices Pedro and I had made in life had prepared me for that difficult moment. The pain we both endured had pushed us to act.”
That’s why she felt motivated to get actively involved in politics—first as a member of the Government Junta of National Reconstruction (1979–1980), then as a critical voice of Sandinismo while leading La Prensa in the 1980s, and later as the UNO candidate who won the presidency in an election that captured the world’s attention.
In an article titled “Nicaragua, Democratic Transition: A Model Transfer of Power; First in Almost 100 Years”, she insisted that by the end of her term in 1996, it could finally be said that “we have arrived in the ship of freedom at the port of democracy.”
At the transfer of power ceremony in 1997, Barrios de Chamorro said she was handing over “a great Nicaragua.” She also acknowledged both her achievements and her limitations. “For what I couldn’t fulfill and where I made mistakes, I ask for forgiveness,” she declared.
“I can tell Nicaragua, ‘Mission accomplished,’ and I am going home in peace,” she said that day.
One of her last public appearances occurred in June 2008, when Barrios de Chamorro briefly stepped out of her retreat from public life to visit Dora Maria Tellez, who was on a hunger strike demanding a national dialogue and protesting the revocation of her party’s legal status.
Chamorro publicly supported the former Sandinista guerrilla, though she declined to comment on current politics. “I’ve come here because I care about Dora Maria and I support her way of thinking. I’m retired from politics and everything else. All I have now is humanity and heart,” she said in brief remarks to the press.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.