Nicaragua’s first female president, Violeta Chamorro — who died in exile in San José, Costa Rica, on Saturday at age 95 — was best known for her stunning 1990 election victory over the country's ruling Marxist Sandinistas.
Her landmark triumph ended Nicaragua's decade-long civil war between the Sandinistas and U.S.-backed Contra rebels. It was soon followed by the close of bloody Cold War proxy conflicts across Central America — whose gun-running intrigues often played out in Miami, which was a hub in the 1980s for Contra lobbying efforts in the U.S.
But for all the republican spirit and virtues she exuded, Chamorro's legacy, sadly, also includes a distressing failure to make democracy take hold in Nicaragua. In fact, her 1990 opponent, Daniel Ortega, has ruled there as a brutal dictator for the past 18 years.
Doña Violeta, as Chamorro was known, was the U.S.-backed opposition candidate in 1990 amid the Reagan administration's controversial crusade to snuff out Soviet-backed leftist rule in Nicaragua and leftist guerrilla insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala.
She turned out to be a smart, sympathetic pick, a white-attired figure of maternal, healing reconciliation that her country's voters, it turned out, were craving at that moment.
As a challenger she promised to topple the authoritarian Sandinistas and end a civil war that killed as many as 43,000 Nicaraguans. But she was also the widow of a prominent newspaper publisher, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, who had been assassinated by the hated right-wing Somoza dictatorship the Sandinistas overthrew in 1979.
Her family itself was torn by the post-Somoza conflict: her four children were divided in support for the Sandinistas and the Contras.
READ MORE: Nicaragua must 'break its violent cycle of becoming what we fight against'
As President, Chamorro was at first a beacon of hope for democracy.
“We knew," she said after defeating the Sandinistas, "that in a free election we would achieve the kind of democratic republic Pedro Joaquín always dreamed of,” Chamorro said. And she made notably conciliatory if pragmatic efforts to be a unifying leader.
But thanks to a host of factors, including a lack of follow-through support from the U.S. — which instead of aiding her reconstruction agenda scolded her for keeping Sandinistas in charge of some government institutions such as the military — as well as a stark lack of democratic custom in Nicaragua and her own inexperienced missteps, her presidency struggled to establish democratic governance.
"This was not the result of evil intentions," said Miami-Dade College economics professor and Nicaraguan exile activist Francisco Larios.
"And Chamorro did break with [anti-democratic] Nicaraguan tradition in one respect: she did not, when she probably could have, return to office" via re-election.
"But she could not," said Larios, "go beyond the limits of the [pre-democratic] political culture" that remained embedded in Nicaragua.
Deep poverty, especially among former Sandinista and Contra war combatants — who briefly took up arms against each other again during her time in office — still plagued Nicaragua when Chamorro left office in 1997.
Her crude and corrupt successor, Arnoldo Alemán, further discredited Nicaragua's democracy — and in 2006, Nicaraguans again elected Ortega, whose dictatorship has since been accused of killing and imprisoning hundreds of anti-regime demonstrators and dissidents.
Ortega also put Chamorro's daughter, presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro, under house arrest in 2021, and jailed a host of other challengers, to ensure his re-election that year. Cristiana, like her mother, later took exile in Costa Rica.
A funeral mass was held for Violeta Chamorro in Costa Rica on Monday. It was attended by former Costa Rican President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias, who led diplomatic initiatives in the 1980s and 90s to end Central America's civil wars.
