Power with Tenderness
Doña Violeta was, and continues to be, our President, the original one, from a period that shines ever more brightly as time goes by.
By Gioconda Belli (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – Among my childhood memories is one of Doña Violeta, who appeared one night, knocking on the door to my house in Managua’s Colonia Mantica, and calling out to my parents, her neighbors: “Humberto, Gloria, they took Pedro!”
That happened the night that Rigoberto Lopez Perez shot Somoza [Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the first of three dictators from the Somoza family], on September 21, 1956, in Leon. I was eight years old, and from the stairs I watched and listened to Doña Violeta until they ordered me to go lie down.
Her husband, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, director of La Prensa newspaper, was an object of hatred to Somoza and his followers. It was the newspaper that was needed to live in a country ruled by a family of tyrants. During the periods when it wasn’t censored, it was a clear voice of moral resistance against the Somoza dictatorship. It was a sort of printed banner of the most accurate thinking on national politics.
After the assassination of Pedro Joaquin [January 1978], after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution 18 months later, the newspaper continued its critical line, this time against the revolutionary government. Again, it was censored.
Doña Violeta, who formed part of the first Government Junta in 1979, then left in dissent in 1980, embodied that 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 it at all, but I came to understand her worth much better as time passed, and the ambition and actions of Daniel Ortega and what remained of the FSLN began to come clear. Eventually, these qualities would be exacerbated to the point of leading Nicaragua into another tyranny.
The first hint I had of Doña Violeta’s instinctive wisdom came in the nineties, when at social gatherings or around the city I began to encounter those people known as “contras.” After years of war, I watched astonished how the hostility between one band and the other seemed to disappear. We were all talking now in our little groups, one with the other, sharing friendship, having pleasant reencounters with old friends with whom politics had created seemingly insurmountable 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 touch of arrogance about her. She didn’t pretend to be a know-it-all, nor a great intellectual, much less a messianic and all-powerful figure. She didn’t talk about love – she bestowed it with complete simplicity and great dignity.
During her time in power, she never came across as an adversary. Because of that, she won many over, and we began to love her and to believe that we really could live in peace and make a different country where we listened to each other and stopped persecuting and killing each other.
Doña Violeta wasn’t the model for that feminine utopia I wrote about in my novel, El Pais de las Mujeres [“The Country of Women”], but she did inspire in me the idea of a different power, with the gift of caring, a power capable of nurturing and soothing; a power with tenderness.
I went to her home and interviewed her for the novel. We sat in the studio full of photos of herself, Pedro Joaquin, and their children. She showed me Pedro’s bloodstained shirt; she talked to me about answering a call of love for the country when she accepted becoming a candidate. We laughed together at some of her anecdotes, such as one about a difficult conversation with Salvadoran guerrilla leaders regarding the weapons deposits she wanted them to empty and remove. A very tense meeting, she admitted, until she noticed that the leader with the highest authority was wearing a jacket with a loose button, that was about to fall off. She told him: “Look, so-and-so, lend me your jacket – and to the astonishment of the leader she was alluding to, she got up and got a sewing kit she kept in the desk of her presidential office, then sewed it back on for him.
“Blessed remedy,” she told me, “from there on, everything rolled right along.” And she added: “We’re all just human beings, my daughter. Who doesn’t need a button sewed on?”
Later, she led me to a room where she kept the souvenirs of her presidency. And here I’ll reveal a secret that now seems powerful and symbolic. “The day the next president was inaugurated I didn’t put my own presidential sash on [Arnoldo] Aleman; I ordered another one made, and I kept the original,” she told me with a mischievous smile.
That’s how it was and will go down in history. She was, and continues to be, our President, the original, the one from a period that shines ever more brightly as time goes by.
Hail to you, Doña Violeta. You’ll live in our memory, in that of the Nicaragua that one day will know to honor you as you deserve.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.