Some surnames are intimately linked to the destiny of the country which has seen them appear, prosper and flourish, sometimes in pain and hardship. This is the case of the Chamorro, big name of a small country, Nicaragua. The family has given presidents, press bosses. A martyr too – Pedro Joaquin, director of the daily The Pressassassinated in 1978 when the Somoza dictatorship was beginning to falter – but also hope: Violetta had been elected president in 1990 by advocating “national harmony”, after years of war between the Sandinistas and the Contras.
Continuing the fight in exile
Today as yesterday, Chamorro remains an important name in Central America. The symbol of a fighting spirit, in the name of a certain idea of Nicaragua. Over time and storms, which have not failed, the Chamorro have been able to take opposite directions; generations clashed. But the sense of commitment never faded. And it is all the more essential today that the country has become in a few years, under the cane of the old revolutionary Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murillo, number 2 of the regime, a sordid dictatorship.
Like tens of thousands of his compatriots, Carlos, son of Violetta and Pedro Joaquin, had to go into exile to escape the violence of the Nicaraguan police apparatus. In 2019, his premises were raided in Managua, he left for the first time. Two years later, his sister Cristiana, who was planning to run for president against Daniel Ortega, was arrested and convicted. Carlos left again.
Leaving, but without giving up or surrendering: from San José, Costa Rica, he continues to run the news site Confidential which he founded in 1996 and continues his investigations into the turpitudes of the Managua regime.
A third repressive wave in Managua
« Today, there are more than 230 political prisoners in Nicaragua “, explains Carlos Chamorro during a visit to Paris, where he came to receive the title of doctor honoris causa from the Sorbonne on behalf of an ex-guerrilla and activist Dora Maria Tellez, detained in Managua since February 2021. “ She was arrested during the second wave of repression, ahead of the November 2021 presidential election, when the opposition was violently muzzled, he continues. Before, there had been the wave targeting protesters in 2018, especially students. As for the third, it is that which followed the elections, and which still lasts. People are arrested every day in Nicaragua… »
Like Dora Maria Tellez, who was health minister in the early hours of the 1979 revolution, Carlos Chamorro, now 66, was a figure of young Sandinista power. In the 1980s, he abandoned family life The Pressdirected by his mother Violetta since the assassination of Pedro Joaquin and committed to the ideas of the opposition, to take the head of the newspaper of the FSNL, the Sandinista party, Barricade. Before distancing himself from the authoritarian drift of Daniel Ortega in the early 1990s – authoritarianism within the FSNL first, then at the head of Nicaragua, which the old revolutionary has been leading again since 2007.
The sinister dictatorship of the Ortega clan
Daniel Ortega still wears the red and black colors of Sandinismo, but this is no more than a sinister caricature. ” Nicaragua is now a family dictatorship, denounces the exile. The FSNL is also a family affair. Nothing else. And the conditions of detention of political prisoners are terrible. Dora Maria Tellez, like three other detainees, has been in solitary confinement for more than 540 days. She is not allowed to read, nor to have a book or a pen. She has lost a lot of weight, visits are extremely limited, every two months or so ».
What to do in the face of such repression? Who can bring a regime engaged in such a headlong rush to its senses? ” It is now up to us, journalists, human rights defenders, academics and intellectuals, and above all the democratic governments of the world, to relaunch, with greater force, the struggle for the release of all prisoners policies “, declared Carlos Chamorro at the Sorbonne, during the Dora Maria Tellez award ceremony. He still and always believes in the power of the press and men of letters. Carlos is a Chamorro.
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In the footsteps of his father
Carlos Chamorro was 21 when his father, an opponent of the Somoza dictatorship, was assassinated in January 1978 at the age of 53. Son of the founder of The Pressthe country’s most important daily newspaper, Pedro Joaquin had run the newspaper since the early 1950s. My father was of course a role model for me, I did not become a journalist by chance », says Carlos, who joined The Press after studying economics. This death, immediately attributed to the regime, shocked the country and contributed to the fall of the dictatorship. ” It is terrible to think that we are again confronted, more than forty years later, with a new dictatorship. And that we must fight again for men and women imprisoned unjustly ».