Chamorro
By 
Violeta Barrios Torres was born in 1929 to a wealthy, conservative family with significant land holdings near the Nicaraguan-Costa Rican border, on the Atlantic side of the nation. Cattle ranching was their game and of course dominating the lives of the workers and locals who lived on the land in classic caudillo style. She was sent to the best schools in Nicaragua and then to the United States to become fluent in English and be educated in really great schools, unlike virtually anyone else in the nation who was not among the very wealthy. She attended a fancy Catholic high school in San Antonio and then Blackstone College in Virginia, which was an all-girls Methodist college that closed in the 1950s. But her father died while she was in college and she returned to Nicaragua without graduating.
In 1950, she married Pedro Chamorro. He was a rich newspaper owner who was in opposition to the Somoza regime. It’s hard to imagine just how horrible the Somozas were, although it shouldn’t be since it was American support that allowed him to stay in power for so long. Corruption was the order of the day. So was torture and murder. It was extremely dangerous to be in opposition to the government. But Chamorro was rich and elite enough that he could get away with it, at least for awhile. Still, he frequently was arrested between 1952 and 1957. They had five children and Violetta mostly stayed at home raising them during these years, living the life of an elite wife. But in 1957, Pedro Chamorro led a revolt against Somoza. It failed miserably and he ended up in exile in Costa Rica. Violetta left their children with her mother and joined him there. Because she owned so much land from her family, they had a good income even when he was forced abroad.
In 1978, the Somozas finally had enough of Pedro and killed him. This was one of the outrages that finally took the Somozas too far by uniting the opposition, as varied groups came together with the singular goal of getting rid of these monsters. Violetta then took over the newspaper. It remained a key instrument in opposing the regime. Chamorro’s death helped unite the various factions who opposed Somoza and so Violeta Chamorro stepped into an unsettled situation, still at great risk to her own person as she knew from the government, but also from the various factions who would not trust a rich landowner.
When the Sandinistas marched into Managua after Somoza finally fled the nation, they did so carrying pictures of the dead newspaper editor. The initial coalition government included Chamorro, as it did other moderates who hoped for a democratic regime with an open media. But this unity faded pretty quickly. Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were after all Marxists. Somoza had so fleeced the nation of everything valuable (remember that the family stole all the relief money and supplies that flooded into the nation after the 1972 earthquake that flattened Managua) and there was so much fear of the United States interfering in the new government as it had done in Nicaragua so many times before that the Sandinistas decided to tie their anchor to the Soviet Union in order to ensure aid and security. They took over the media and made it part of the state. At this point, in April 1980, Chamorro resigned from the government.
The Nicaraguan civil war split the Chamorro family as it split so many. One son ended up an active Contra. Others were hard-core Sandinistas, with one being ambassador to Costa Rica and another editing the major Sandinista newspaper. Chamorro herself, again running La Prensa as an independent newspaper in a time when that was very risky, was on the side of the Contras. And for whatever bad things you want to say about how the Sandinistas operated the government in these years, the Contras were some of the most horrible human beings who ever existed, engaging in a CIA-funded rampage of murder, rape, and torture that was a gargantuan orgy of human rights violations and a violation of U.S. law by the Reagan administration funneling money to this against the explicit orders of Congress. The Sandinistas shut down La Prensa’s offices from time to time and Ortega personally threatened her with a thirty-year prison sentence for treason, but nothing actually happened to harm her or attempt to actually imprison her. Still, anyone who respects the principle of freedom of the press has to at least acknowledge both Chamorro and Ortega here, more or less in the context of the developing world’s battle for liberation in the Cold War, where such principles were usually respected neither in rhetoric or in the breach. I think it’s important when evaluating issues like this to put away western standards of democratic liberalism and engage in the context of the reality on the ground at the time, standards with which the United States certainly influenced for the negative in nations they controlled or influenced.
In 1987, with the Contras wreaking havoc on the nation, a bunch of opposition parties decided to form a coalition to defeat the Sandinistas. Chamorro was centrally involved in this. When she decided to run to defeat Ortega, her focus on was on her religious roots. Nicaragua is perhaps the most religious nation in Latin America, which is remarkable given the competition. She had a very short agenda. She would end the civil war (obviously, since why would the U.S. keep trying to kill Nicaraguans through their proxies if Ortega was gone) and ending compulsory military service, also unnecessary if the U.S. would leave the nation alone.
Let’s be clear—the United States government was deeply involved in Chamorro’s election. The CIA and the Bush administration were determined to defeat Ortega and wanted to tip the playing field a bit. Bush was probably the person who knew more about Iran-Contra than anyone else, but he never had to testify or reckon with this legacy at all. A CIA man all the way, he would stop at nothing to get rid of the Nicaraguan Marxists. Bush appealed to Congress to change the law against using National Endowment for Democracy funds to support a candidate in an election. Congress, still reeling from the Iran-Contra scandal, refused to do so. A compromise was eventually crafted that still kept the money away from direct funding of candidates, but with a $9 million package to monitor the polling, train poll watchers, etc. But the real expenditure of that money was a lot more hazy than Congress wanted. Much of the money had to be spent through the Ortega government and he basically refused, not trusting the U.S. Moreover, the CIA spent $500,000 to buy exiled Nicaraguans plane tickets so they could return home to vote for Chamorro.
The election was expected to be close. But Chamorro won pretty handily, outpolling Ortega 55-41, which some minor parties getting the rest of the vote. Pre-election polling thought of it as closer to 50-50. In fact, the election was quite closely monitored, led by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, who had persuaded Ortega to hold elections in the first place. Observers from across Latin America were there. It was a free and fair election. Ortega deserves a lot of credit for this. As for Chamorro, probably she won out of weariness rather than dislike of the Sandinistas. The people of Nicaragua knew that the American government would continue to oppress them in any way they could so long as the Sandinistas held power. Chamorro had enough credibility as an anti-Somoza figure to be palatable to a lot of voters who might have preferred Ortega if the U.S. was not involved. And don’t underestimate how much power the U.S. and Contras had here. Contra attacks did not just kill people. It decimated the economy as they were often targeted at infrastructure. Plus the Contras were engaging in significant election violence. One Canadian observer noted 42 different killings by the Contras in election-related violence in October 1989 alone. So, she won.
Since Chamorro’s alliance had no political agenda at all except for getting rid of the Sandinistas, there was no real sense of where she would go. Mostly, her legacy as president is ending the war. The U.S. did indeed stop funding the killing of Nicaraguans after the election. The moment she was elected, George Bush ended the embargo against the Nicaraguan government and also paid off the nation’s debts to the World Bank and IMF. But the U.S. was heavily responsible for turning Nicaragua into a mess. It needed billions in aid to get back on its feet. And Congress was not going to give that. Over two years, Congress gave Chamorro’s government about $500 million, which just was a drop in the bucket of what was needed. The U.S., as it has done throughout its history, was not going to clean up its mess.
As a president, Chamorro primarily deserves credit for not instituting a counterrevolution. That was the goal of the coup to get rid of Evo Morales in Bolivia and will absolutely happen if the right ever takes back power in Venezuela. There were plenty of people in Nicaragua who wanted to return to the Somoza years. But Chamorro balanced the government between hard-line right-wingers and Sandinistas themselves, including Daniel Ortega’s brother. This led the Nicaraguan right to accuse her of being pro-Sandinista, which was certainly not true. She wanted to stabilize the nation under a market economy, not create a violent counterrevolution to settle scores. In this, she did about as well as one can expect. She tried to keep at least some of the Sandinista agrarian reforms, including land redistribution, which caused consternation among right-wing quarters as well. One can see why she would take a more balanced approach: her own children were divided.
But let’s be clear. Chamorro was a committed neoliberal at a time when neoliberalism was in the ascendant. The Contra War had led the nation toward massive economic instability, including skyrocketing inflation. If there’s one thing the neoliberals hate, its inflation coming out of government programs. Chamorro gladly went along with international funding agency demands to curb inflation. She privatized state agencies. She placed the Nicaraguan currency on par with the U.S. dollar, but it did poorly. She slashed social services, including free bus tokens for students, child care, health care, and programs for the poor and disabled. As happened throughout Latin America, austerity led to strikes. She again played the centrist role in working through this. The far right was outraged by these strikes and wanted to give the workers nothing. The Sandinistas did not want any of these industries privatized. So Chamorro’s solution was to allow workers to have 25 percent of the stock in the privatized industries, which was a nod to the Sandinistas, who at least wanted workers to get something out of it if it was going to happen anyway.
Chamorro also had to deal with Satan incarnate, by which I mean Jesse Helms. No one enjoyed making Latin Americans suffer of which he disapproved more than Helms. If you go to Cuba, they don’t hate Americans. But they do hate Jesse Helms. Helms-Burton is directly seen as a major part of the problems Cuba faces, though of course it is also giving cover to the failures of the government. Anyway, in 1992 Helms tried to cut off all aid to Nicaragua, claiming that Chamorro was keeping the Sandinistas in power, not purging and killing them to the delight of the bejowled demon. Helms worked his evil magic and Congress took away $104 million in aid after she didn’t completely purge the government to his satisfaction. America man, it’s an awful nation to other countries.
Chamorro was also worse for women than the Sandinistas had been. She was a conservative rich woman and governed that way, opposing the right to choose as well as people living together if they were unmarried. Her austerity measures meant that the Sandinista social programs were curtailed, leading to more women having to support themselves through prostitution. Health care quality declined and costs rose. The FSLN (the acronym for what we call the Sandinistas) stepped up as part of its effort to appeal to the population and regain power by offering health care to women and children who could not afford the new Chamorro rates. Her neoliberal economics were welcoming to international garment factories to open factories in the nation to take advantage of low-wage labor and thus women became to work more and became a greater percentage of the nation’s workforce, though in highly exploitable positions.
The later period of Chamorro’s term saw her in battle with the national legislature. Constitutional reforms in 1993 stripped quite a bit of power from the presidency and put it in the hands of the legislature. That included the power to levy taxes and conscript people into the military, as well as limit the distribution of resources to family members of the president. This was probably a good thing. But Chamorro was outraged and refused to even acknowledge the changes in her own newspaper, which was now more or less the official propaganda rag of the government. Soon the legislature and president each claimed their own legitimate constitution, creating a massive crisis of governance in an already unstable society. Finally, the Catholic Church intervened and while this is almost always a disaster in politics, in this case, the Church mediated the conflict successfully, convinced Chamorro to publish the reforms and admit they were valid, with a few changes that allowed the president to at least negotiate tax changes and foreign aid, while keeping the strong language against nepotism that Chamorro so strongly opposed and that was so telling about her own limitations. Chamorro also refused to prosecute the Contras for their worst human rights violations, which perhaps is not surprising.
In 1997, Chamorro left office without attempting to run for another term, which is good for her in any case since the principle of voluntarily leaving office is critical for a functioning democracy, something that Americans had better remember about themselves for that matter. Her ally Arnoldo Alemán took over and was one of the most corrupt leaders of the world. So that wasn’t great. Seen as one of the global leaders dedicated to democracy, she joined the Carter Center Council of Presidents and Prime Ministers of the Americas Program, which is dedicated to promoting peace and democracy in the region. As she aged however, her health declined and by the mid-2000s so mostly stayed out of public life. She fought osteoporosis and a brain tumor.
Chamorro leaves a complex legacy. She was by no means a great president. But she could have been far worse. Far, far worse. No one comes through Central American history looking great, not with legacies of colonialism, racism, and American domination running up against people seeking liberation but then often committing human rights violations of their own in trying to seek that legacy. Chamorro may in the end have been more or less an American tool, but her principles in seeking peace and stability in her nation at least can let us say that her legacy is complex and not terrible like so many other American tools.
And, given how utterly horrible and awful Daniel Ortega has become upon his return to power, it’s easy to forget Chamorro’s own failings or to call her “good.” And I mean, in the long scheme of Central American history, there are many, many worse leaders. So let’s see her as she actually was, for better and for worse, and not some reflection of contemporary North American liberalism.