Pedro Chamorro
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Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal (September 23, 1924 - January 10, 1978) was the editor of La Prensa — the only significant opposition newspaper to the long rule of the Somoza family — and husband of Violeta Barrios de Chamorro who later went on to become President of Nicaragua (1990-1996).
Born in Granada, Nicaragua, Chamorro had long been a chief opponent of the Somoza dynasty. While still a law student, he began taking part in demonstrations against the dictator General Anastasio Somoza García and was briefly jailed in 1944 after making an anti-Somoza speech at a rally. That same year, his family’s newspaper, La Prensa, was shut down by the regime, and the Chamorro family fled to Mexico, where he began studying journalism. He returned to Nicaragua in 1948, becoming editor of La Prensa after his father’s death in 1952. While La Prensa was never shut down or completely censored, Chamorro was often jailed because of its content.
Concerned about the plight of his country, where Somoza had crushed all political opposition and amassed a considerable personal fortune, Chamorro remained involved in politics. In 1954, he was jailed, tortured and sentenced to imprisonment on charges of rebellion, but the sentence was commuted to house arrest in 1955.
Chamorro was arrested again in 1956 during a bloody government clampdown following Somoza’s assassination. He was accused of complicity in the assassination but later charged with rebellion and banished to San Carlos, a distant town in northern Nicaragua, in 1957.
He fled to Costa Rica with his wife Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, and organized an expedition in 1959 to overthrow the government of Somoza’s elder son, Luis Somoza Debayle. However, the expedition’s members were captured and Chamorro brought for a third time before a military court, which sentenced him to nine years in prison for treason. Upon his release in 1969, he resumed the editorship of La Prensa, which continued attacking the Somoza regime, now headed by Anastasio Somoza Debayle, younger son of the former dictator.
During a 32-month suspension of constitutional rights, imposed by the government in 1975 after an attack by Cuban-backed rebels, Chamorro headed the opposition Democratic Union of Liberation (UDEL) and campaigned for human rights and the restoration of democracy. His paper became the main opposition platform, bringing the corruption of the Somoza regime into the spotlight of world opinion. During this period, Chamorro and La Prensa were repeatedly censored. The regular procedure was that on the afternoon prior to the day of its publication, all but the first and last pages of the paper had to be submitted for review by a board of censorship composed of three officers of the National Guard. The first and the last pages were submitted on the day of publication.
As if foreseeing his untimely death, Chamorro wrote a letter in 1975 to President Somoza: “I am waiting, with a clear conscience, and a soul at peace, for the blow you are to deliver.” Three years later, in January 1978, Chamorro was killed by unknown gunmen who pulled up beside him in a car and opened fire with machine guns. “His blood has spattered all over Nicaragua,” an editorial in La Prensa mourned. Somoza claimed he was assassinated by Pedro Ramos, a Cuban American entrepreneur whose business had been attacked by La Prensa, but at the time his murder was presumed to be ordered by Somoza, prompting outrage from many Nicaraguans, 50,000 of whom attended his funeral. At his funeral, thousands of people followed the coffin from Managua’s Oriental Hospital to the Chamorro family home, taking turns carrying it.
Following Chamorro’s murder, an estimated 30,000 people rioted in the streets of Managua. Cars were set on fire and several buildings belonging to the Somoza family were attacked. A general strike was called. Outside the capital, unrest flared in a number of cities and towns, particularly in areas where National Guardsmen had massacred peasant farmers during the 2.5 year counterinsurgency effort. The government responded with further violence and reintroduced martial law censorship. During 1978, there were seven machine gun attacks and attempted bombings of La Prensa, now under the management of Chamorro’s widow, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro. Following Somoza's overthrow, she was a part of the FSLN-based junta from 1979 to 1980. Violeta Chamorro was elected president of Nicaragua in 1990.
Speaking about her husband to the participants of the 1998 IPI World Congress in Moscow, Violeta said: “During his whole life, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro was a tireless fighter for democracy in Nicaragua and against the dictatorship of Somoza. This cost him incarceration, torture, exile and finally death. He was warned many times that plans existed to assassinate him, yet no threat detained him from fulfilling his mission to impart the truth and preach democracy.”
It is interesting to note that while many at the time believed that Chamorro was killed by Somoza's "henchmen", President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was unable to find any conclusive evidence that would imply that Somoza had ordered his death during her presidency or before. Another theory holds that Somoza was astute enough to foresee the backlash from killing Chamorro, and that his less politically experienced son, Anastasio Somoza Portocarrero, ordered the murder, but that is unproven also. In fact, it is now popular belief in Nicaragua that the Sandinistas themselves murdered Chamorro in an attempt to make him a hero and bring the people of Nicaragua together against Somoza. Neither theory has ever been proved, and most scholars still believe that it was Somoza, not the Sandinistas, who must bear the responsibility of the assassination.
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