The persecution against the Chamorros: the Ortega regime is cruel to the family of ex-president Violeta Barrios

In a mansion in the La Palmas residential complex in Managua, a 91-year-old woman absent-mindedly contemplates the tragedy her family is going through. “Thank goodness he doesn’t know everything that’s going on,” said a relative. Two of her children are in prison. Another fled into exile to avoid the same fate. Two other nephews are also in prison. The family diary of which she was formerly president is taken over by the police.

Mrs Violeta Barrios de Chamorro He has Alzheimer’s and his health has been “reserved” for several years. If she was healthy, she would probably also be in prison. And if her husband were alive, he would be jailed, because the reasons they attacked her family are the same that led her once to be President of the Republic and her husband to be shot dead by hitmen on a street. from Managua.

“The most painful thing for me was separating from my mother because of her poor health,” he says. Carlos Fernando Chamorro, 65, the youngest of four Chamorro Barrios brothers, a famous Nicaraguan journalist who fled the country through blind spots in mid-June to avoid being captured. “Doing journalism and reporting the truth is not a crime. I will continue to do journalism, in complete freedom, from outside Nicaragua “he said, announcing his exile. On Tuesday, the public prosecutor indicted Carlos Fernando “for the offenses of laundering money, property and assets; diversion and detention; and abusive management ”.

Christian Chamorro, 67, was director of the Violeta Barrios Foundation and earlier this year she expressed her willingness to run for office and challenge Daniel Ortega for the presidency in next November’s elections. She quickly became a favorite with opponents, not least because she spoke about the defeat that her mother, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, inflicted on Daniel Ortega in 1990. On June 2, she was eliminated from the electoral race when she was placed under house arrest for “money, property and asset laundering”.

She was the first of seven opponents to express their intention to run as presidential candidates and ended up in prison.

Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios, 69 years old, is another of the inmates. “Are you going to dare?” Asked journalist Tifani Roberts of Univisión television channel, referring to potential candidates who had previously been detained by the Daniel Ortega regime. “I don’t know,” Chamorro said. “In politics, you should never say no. On June 25, 48 hours after this interview, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios was detained for “treason”.

Before, on June 8, he had been arrested Juan Sebastián Chamorro, The first cousin of Cristiana, Pedro Joaquín and Carlos Fernando. Juan Sebastián was a visible candidate for the opposition’s presidential candidacy. Son of Xavier Chamorro, former director of the disappeared El Nuevo Diario, and younger brother of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal.

The other Chamorro detained is Juan Lorenzo Holmann Chamorro, managing director of the newspaper La Prensa, who The Ortega regime opened a case for “customs fraud and money laundering of property and assets” shortly after police took over the newspaper that the Chamorro family had run for 95 years.

Of the four Chamorro Barrios brothers, only Claudia is free and in Nicaragua. With fear. She and other relatives took in Ms. Violeta in the former family home which serves as a museum in memory of her husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, assassinated on January 10, 1978. There, in a room of the house is the motorbike he used, in an urn the bloody clothes he wore on the day of his death, his books and several of his photos line the walls.

Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal was a Nicaraguan politician and journalist who he faced the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle and was shot for his ideas.

“It is because these are the principles of the struggle of Doctor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the most laudable and highest values ​​in defense of public freedoms, democracy and human and economic development of Nicaragua and that by his uninterrupted fight it has contributed considerably to generate a culture of social and political awareness among the citizens of the Republic of Nicaragua ”, says Law 813 of the National Assembly which in October 2012 declared it “National hero”.

The same Daniel Ortega who signed the law declaring Pedro Joaquín Chamorro a hero is the one who now viciously persecutes his family. “I am absolutely convinced that my father’s ideology is a cornerstone of the new Nicaragua which is shared by all who are persecuted, by those who are imprisoned, by those who have been massacred,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro. “This basic idea that we want a republic, that we want democracy with social justice, the dictatorship is afraid of that and of the people who represent these values.”

The Chamorro family descends from a Spanish branch that arrived in Nicaragua in the 18th century. Over the past 200 years, seven members of this family have served as presidents of Nicaragua, including Ms. Violeta Barrios, whose triumph in February 1990 spelled the end of the Sandinista Revolution that ruled the country for a decade.

“In Nicaragua, there is blind repression,” says Carlos Fernando Chamorro. “I don’t believe that the starting point of the crackdown is to identify families but rather to identify people who are in the crosshairs against the regime because of what it is doing. My sister Cristiana and my first cousin Juan Sebastián are imprisoned mainly because they were political competitors who could defeat the dictatorship of Ortega, it is part of this campaign to eliminate political competition and they invented charges to stop them and silence them ”.

“And if Pedro Joaquín is imprisoned, it is also because he was in this line of replacement of the presidential candidates of Ciudadanos por la Libertad (CxL). And for the same reason all the others are imprisoned, Medardo (Mairena) Miguel (Mora), Arturo Cruz, for the same reason political leaders and civic leaders are imprisoned, ”he adds.

“I believe there is a nastiness,” he said. “It is an act of indiscriminate persecution, but there is a fury to try to lynch, to discredit what the Chamorro surname symbolizes and the Chamorro surname is mainly associated with my father, who is a symbol in Nicaragua. , a symbol of his patriotic ideology, and my mother too, because he represents the one who defeated Daniel Ortega in the elections of 1990, and especially because of his integrity and because he shares these same values”.

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