The Jaguar Smile

13 DOÑA VIOLETA’S VERSION

Back in Managua, I had one more ghost to meet. In 1978, when Somoza’s growing greed had alienated large sections of the Nicaraguan oligarchy, the editor of La Prensa, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, had started looking like a possible replacement. Somoza had him assassinated, and by doing so sealed his own fate; after that, everyone, even the US, wanted him removed. Chamorro’s ghost, shaking its gory locks, appeared at the tyrant’s feast and sat down in his chair.

I went to the offices of La Prensa to meet Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, Pedro Joaquin’s formidable widow, matriarch of the deeply divided Chamorro clan. Her elder son, Pedro Joaquín junior, was in exile in Costa Rica; her younger son, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, was the editor of the Sandinista daily Barricada. Of her late husband’s brothers, one, Jaime Chamorro, was director of La Prensa; the other, Xavier Chamorro, was the publisher of El Nuevo Diario, the paper set up by the large group of disaffected journalists who resigned from La Prensa after the revolution, claiming that its editorial line had become too conservative. One of her daughters, Cristiana, worked at La Prensa (she came in to shake hands during my talk with her mother); the other, Claudia, was the Sandinista ambassador to Costa Rica whom I’d met at Daniel Ortega’s house.

Doña Violeta herself was wholly undivided. Her opposition to the FSLN was without shadows or grey areas. ‘This is a communist state,’ she said. ‘The government says we’re Cia, we’re the Reaganite paper. That’s OK. Under Somoza we were told we were yellow journalists, we were communists. But we have always stood for peace and democracy. Our leader on the day we were closed down was headed, We are for peace. These are the beliefs for which my husband Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was assassinated. They will always be our beliefs. We are not the communists here.’

The first thing I noticed about Doña Violeta was that she wore a great deal of jewellery: gold bracelets and earrings, and quantities of black coral. I had grown unaccustomed, in Nicaragua, to such display, so it struck me in a way it wouldn’t have done in London or New York, or even Bombay. There were no concessions being made, the jewellery announced, to the spirit of the ‘new Nicaragua’.

The second thing was the frequency with which she would refer to her late husband. It put me in mind of a much younger woman in very different circumstances: Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, who, knowing that the source of her mass appeal was a ghost, referred to her dead father in every public speech. (She called him Shaheed sahib, Mr Martyr.) The martyred Pedro Joaquín had been respected right across the political spectrum, and Doña Violeta was making sure that he was not hijacked by her opponents.

She was a poised, slender woman, very elegant, with short grey hair. Her voice was a fighter’s voice: tough, unrelaxed, premeditated. Our interview proceeded down familiar lines. ‘In the last four and a half years,’ she said, ‘we have been more heavily censored than in all the Somoza decades. Thus we see, and the world sees, that the government is taking off its mask, and revealing itself as a Marxist-Leninist, totalitarian state.’ The term Marxist-Leninist, in Doña Violeta’s mouth, was a final condemnation, a judgment from which there was no appeal. ‘The TV and radio are state controlled,’ she said. ‘This paper was the only thing left, and now it has been taken away.’ I queried her assertion about the radio — there were, were there not, numbers of independent local radio stations? And wasn’t I right in thinking that there was no pre-censorship of the air-waves? — but she swept on. I was handed a dossier of documents relating to the closure of the paper. As she took me through them, she did a rather peculiar thing.

One of the documents was a photocopy of the announcement, published in Barricada, of the ‘indefinite suspension’ of her newspaper. She had underlined two lines near the bottom for my attention. They read:

That is: ‘this Directorate has resolved to suspend for an indefinite period the publication of the daily La Prensa’. Doña Violeta drew my attention to the words ‘this Directorate’. As I knew, she said, the nine-man supreme body of the FSLN was known as the ‘National Directorate’. ‘So this proves that the decision to close us down was not taken by the government, but by the party.’ It was one of her themes: in Marxist-Leninist Nicaragua, the party was the only real power.

As the document was in Spanish, I didn’t examine it closely until after the interview. Then I found that it was clearly headed: ‘The Directorate of Communications Media of the Ministry of the Interior’. The same legend was to be found, in display type, at the foot of the announcement. It was obvious that the words Doña Violeta had underlined referred to this directorate, and not to the FSLN nine; that, in fact, the document she had handed me proved the exact opposite of what she said it proved.

Doña Violeta also complained, several times, that the Nicaraguan government was the only body with the resources to ‘travel everywhere, make any propaganda they want, to tell the whole world their version of what is happening here.’ Yet during our interview she mentioned at least two very recent speaking tours of her own, one to Portugal and the other to the United States, ‘where I addressed many US Congressmen of all parties on the subject of La Prensa and the life of my husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.’ And where was the editor of the paper at present? He was abroad. Anyone who read the Western press knew that international journalists beat a daily path to the doors of La Prensa, the conservative businessmen’s association COSEP, and such opposition politicians as the Liberal, Virgilio Godoy, not to mention Cardinal Obando y Bravo. The idea that the Nicaraguan state could control world opinion — Doña Violeta’s poor-little-me ploy — was a second piece of transparent disingenuousness. ‘They can say anything they like about us,’ she protested, ‘and we never have a chance to put our case.’ ‘You’re putting it to me,’ I pointed out, ‘just as you do to everyone else who comes here.’ She gave me her most patrician look. ‘I hope, Mr Rushdie, you will not misrepresent what I am telling you.’

‘I’ll try my hardest not to,’ I promised her.

‘I want to explain,’ Doña Violeta said, ‘that Daniel Ortega is not a true president, a president by popular support. The elections were not fair.’

I said that most foreign observers had agreed that they were the fairest ever seen in Latin America, and that surely the fact of an eighty per cent poll indicated that the people had, in fact, given both the elections and the President their backing?

She replied: ‘That’s what they say, but it’s not true. The poll was not so high.’

‘How high was it?’

‘I don’t have the figures right now.’

When we returned to the issue of the paper’s closure, Doña Violeta had powerful points to make. I asked: ‘I’ve heard it said, often, that one reason for the closure was that you would publish alarmist stories, about the shortages, for example.’ She replied, ‘They censor everything. I’ve told you, four and a half years of censorship. So we can publish nothing that has not been authorized.’ It was her best argument: when censorship was already so severe, why close the paper?

‘The government says that in time of war your editorial line is unacceptable, that you support the counter-revolution,’ I said. She repeated, unanswerably: ’Everything we printed was passed by the censor’s office. We would send our articles along with “filler” articles as well, which we would have to use if they turned down our copy. No blank spaces were permitted; no photographs of Hollywood screen goddesses.

‘Sometimes,’ Doña Violeta added, ‘there would be things that the people needed to know. We would print them — we published in the afternoons, and Nuevo Diario and Barricada come out in the mornings — and we would be censored. Then, the next morning, the same stories would be in the other papers. They had not been censored. We would protest, and then we might be allowed to publish, but it was too late then, obviously.’

I asked: ‘Do you have examples of stories that the other papers were permitted to publish, while your versions were censored?’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at the moment.’

I asked: ‘How can you say that the paper is the same as it always used to be, when three-quarters of your journalists quit and started up a rival daily?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they were all Marxist-Leninists. At La Prensa we always follow the line of my late husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro.’

‘But if these were the journalists who wrote the paper in the time of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and if they resigned when the paper was under a new editorship, doesn’t that mean that the paper can no longer be what it was in your husband’s time?’

‘Journalists,’ she said. ‘They come and go. It is like when somebody dies, there is always someone else to take his place. It changes nothing.’

She had referred a few times to an offer worth ‘many million dollars’ which, she claimed, had been made by Xavier Chamorro of El Nuevo Diario to La Prensa’s Jaime Chamorro. ‘They wanted to buy the paper. So, you see? Several months ago, they had already had the idea to close us down.’

But surely that was not the only interpretation? Perhaps La Prensa’s former employees had wanted to regain control over the country’s most prestigious title? Doña Violeta remained adamant. She insisted that the offer proved that the FSLN (which did not own El Nuevo Diario, although it did put money into it) had been plotting for a long time to shut her paper down.

I said: ‘The government claims to have proof that you have taken CIA money, Heritage Foundation money.’ ‘Let them produce it,’ she challenged. ‘We have not. But the Marxist government takes money from the Soviet Union and Cuba. And the only people who are truly dedicated to real democracy, they close down.’

Doña Violeta had been a member of the junta that had ruled Nicaragua between the fall of Somoza and the general elections. (The other members had been Alfonso Robelo, the big businessman, now in exile and political leader of the Costa Rica-based ARDE counter-revolutionaries; Moisés Hassan, the ‘Egyptian’ mayor of Managua; Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramírez.) She resigned her seat after just nine months, because ‘they were not interested in my views. When I agreed to be in the junta it was not for personal gain or anything like that. It was out of a true desire to help build a democracy here. But I soon saw that things were already controlled from outside … it was not the authentic thing.’

‘From outside?’ I asked. ‘Could you give some examples?’

‘Easily,’ she said. ‘After nine months I knew we were not fulfilling the oath of office I had taken.’

‘But some examples?’

‘The advisers who came were Cubans,’ she said.

‘What made you resign, though?’ I asked. ‘Was there some issue, some last straw, something you really couldn’t stand for?’

‘It was for my conscience,’ she said. ‘They wanted the memory of my husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and the prestige of this paper, to legitimize the junta. It was meant to be democratic, pluralist. But I quickly saw that wasn’t true.’

‘But,’ I asked one last time, ‘what was it that proved that to you?’

‘Anyone who comes to Nicaragua can see,’ she said. ‘You must understand that the majority of our people are true Catholics, not like these religious people who try to divide the Church. The people of Nicaragua who are not Marxist-Leninist are very sad. That is why we have this war of Nicaraguan against Nicaraguan.’

What was her solution, I wondered. ‘The situation in Nicaragua should be resolved without the intervention of Soviets, Cubans or North Americans,’ she answered. ‘But nothing will be resolved in this country, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars are spent, until Daniel Ortega learns to talk to the people.’

I agreed with Violeta de Chamorro that the closure of La Prensa was wrong. Apart from anything else, it was evident from the banned articles pinned up by the front door that, because it challenged and argued, it had been the best paper in town. (Not much of an accolade, considering the anodyne nature of the competition.) But her treatment of me did not indicate a profound respect for the truth. She seemed to have no objection to a little helpful massaging of the facts. Also, oddly, she had been the hardest person, of all the people I spoke to, to pin down to specifics. It was usually the politicians’ way to make large general allegations unsupported by actual facts and cases. Strange, then, to find a journalist who was so airy about producing hard evidence when requested to do so.

I left with her injunction not to misrepresent her ringing in my ears. I have tried not to do so. But the truth is that I found the idea that this aristocratic lady was closer to the people than the likes of, oh, Carlos Paladino in Matagalpa, or Mary Ellsberg in Bluefields, or even Daniel Ortega, very unconvincing. And I’m practically certain that my scepticism had nothing to do with the jewellery.