Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who rose to the presidency of Nicaragua in 1990, presenting herself as unity figure in the wake of civil war and becoming the first woman elected to govern a Central American country, died on Saturday morning at her apartment in San Jose, Costa Rica. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her son Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, who said she had been in poor health for many years.
Ms. Chamorro was thrust into the forefront of Nicaraguan politics by the assassination of her husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a newspaper editor who was critical of leftist Sandinista revolutionaries and a fierce opponent of their nemesis, the Somoza family dictatorship, which began under President Anastasio Somoza García in 1936.
Ms. Chamorro served as president in the 1990s, at the end of a period in which the country had been shaken by war. She left the day-to-day management of government to a son-in-law and positioned herself as a symbol of unity in a profoundly divided country.
Her policies earned scorn from both left and right. In later years, though, public opinion surveys suggested that she was the most admired figure in Nicaragua, a symbol of reconciliation bathed in a Madonna-like aura of deep Christian faith.
Violeta Barrios was born on Oct. 18, 1929, in the Nicaraguan town of Rivas, near the southern border with Costa Rica, to Carlos Barrios Sacasa, a rancher, and Amalia Torres. Theirs was a wealthy family; she traced her ancestry to a Spanish officer who arrived in Nicaragua in 1762. Other ancestors included aristocrats, landowners and two Nicaraguan presidents.
She attended Roman Catholic boarding schools and then spent periods at schools in Texas and Virginia. In 1950 she married Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a scion of one the country’s most prominent families and a descendant of several presidents.
“I never suspected what would come afterward,” Ms. Chamorro wrote in her autobiography, “Dreams of the Heart” (1996).
Pedro Chamorro became editor of his family’s newspaper, La Prensa, and turned it into a focal point of opposition to the American-backed Somoza government. When Mr. Somoza García was assassinated in 1956, Mr. Chamorro was among those arrested and tortured.
He became involved in conspiracies against the Somoza dictatorship, which continued after Anastasio Somoza García’s murder under one son followed by another, and attacked it in print. During the 27 years the Chamorros were married, Pedro spent four years in prison as well as periods in exile and under house arrest.
In that time, Ms. Chamorro never sought a political role. In the 1970s, revolutionaries from the Sandinista National Liberation Front launched a broad rebellion that overthrew the corrupt dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Mr. Chamorro disapproved of the Sandinistas’ leftist ideology and did not support them.
On Jan. 10, 1978, as the rebellion was gathering force and Mr. Chamorro’s editorials in La Prensa were becoming ever fiercer, he was assassinated, at 53, in Managua, the nation’s capital, thrusting his widow into the political limelight.
As the Sandinistas were surging toward victory, Ms. Chamorro reluctantly agreed to become a member of a revolutionary junta, which took power on July 19, 1979. Her rationale, she later said in her autobiography, was that she and others in the middle class “still thought of the Sandinistas as sons and daughters of our friends, children we could influence or order around.”
Once it became clear that the Sandinistas were determined to push the country toward a socialist form of government modeled in part on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, Ms. Chamorro resigned.
In 1984, the leading Sandinista member of the junta, Daniel Ortega, was elected president of Nicaragua. (After serving in that office for six years, he was elected to it again in 2007 and has held onto power since then, exercising increasingly authoritarian rule.)
Ms. Chamorro’s family, like many in the country, was deeply divided over politics during the contra war of the 1980s. One of her sons, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, became editor of the official Sandinista newspaper. Another son, who bore his father’s name, supported the American-backed contra rebels in their war against the Sandinistas.
But Ms. Chamorro believed in “the need for unity in the midst of conflict, of maintaining love in a time of hate,” said Richard Millett, an American historian who has written extensively about Nicaragua.
“The most remarkable of many remarkable things was her ability, throughout the most polarized times of the ’80s, to get the whole family together on Sunday for dinner,” he said.
In addition to her son Pedro, Ms. Chamorro is survived by her other son, Carlos; two daughters, Cristiana Maria Chamorro Barrios and Claudia Lucia Chamorro Barrios; and 12 grandchildren.
Ms. Chamorro maintained her close ties to La Prensa, which received support from the United States as it became a center of anti-Sandinista sentiment. The government imposed censorship on the paper and, in 1986, finally ordered it closed.
“My husband gave his life so Nicaragua could be free,” she said in an interview after La Presna was closed. “This is not the kind of government he dreamed of.”
The newspaper was eventually allowed to reopen, and in 1989 the contra insurgency, a U.S.-backed rebellion that took tens of thousands of lives, came to an end. A clause in the peace treaty called for a free election, which was scheduled for February 1990. Fourteen anti-Sandinista parties agreed to unite behind a single candidate who would run against the Sandinista incumbent, Mr. Ortega.
When it became clear that no politician could command broad enough support to win, the remarkable idea emerged that Ms. Chamorro should be asked to run as the National Opposition Union candidate. She was the widow of the country’s most renowned martyr and, because she had no background in partisan politics, had not alienated any of the country’s fractious opposition groups.
When asked in an interview if she felt prepared to govern Nicaragua, she replied: “Of course I am. I have enormous faith in God. He will illuminate me and show me how to do what my conscience dictates.”
During the campaign, Ms. Chamorro usually appeared dressed in white to symbolize personal and political purity.
“All across the world, people like you are burying Communism and proclaiming democracy,” she told voters at a rally in Granada, the old colonial capital. “So set your watches. Set them to the same hour as Poland, as Bulgaria, as Czechoslovakia, as Chile. Because this is the hour of democracy and freedom — this is the hour of the people!”
In a result that stunned many people in Nicaragua and around the world, Ms. Chamorro won the election with 55 percent of the vote. Former President Jimmy Carter, who was in Nicaragua to monitor the election, helped persuade Mr. Ortega to leave power peacefully.
When she became president, Ms. Chamorro’s decision to compromise with the defeated Sandinistas angered some of her conservative supporters. She allowed Sandinista officers to continue heading the army and the police, arguing that forcing them out might lead to another eruption of violence. She did not demand that they return homes, businesses and other properties they had appropriated for themselves during their last months in power. Nonetheless, some Sandinista factions staged strikes and blockades that made it difficult for her to govern.
Critics from the left said she was too friendly with the United States and too eager to make economic reforms that they said benefited the wealthy elite rather than the poor masses.
After leaving office in 1997, Ms. Chamorro retired from public life. In 2018 she suffered what was called a “cardiovascular accident” and came under medical care. She was taken to Costa Rica by air on Oct. 17, 2023, and had been living there ever since.
By then, her family had suffered a new round of repression from a government led by her onetime junta partner Mr. Ortega. Her son Pedro and her daughter Cristiana were arrested and imprisoned in 2021. Cristiana Chamorro had hoped to run against Mr. Ortega in elections scheduled for that year, but every candidate who expressed interest in contesting the election was jailed.
Cristiana and Pedro were among 222 political prisoners who were released in 2023, expelled from the country and deprived of their Nicaraguan nationality.
“She was a symbol in a deeply maternal way,” said the novelist Sergio Ramírez Mercado, who was the Sandinista vice president of Nicaragua during the 1980s and is now, from exile, one of the country’s leading literary figures. “She governed in the style of a mother with a divided family, with love but also firm authority. Her power lay in her ability to reconcile the irreconcilable.
“In this way, she made history,” he added, “and to the question of who was the best president of Nicaragua in the 20th century, I would not hesitate to answer that it was her.”
Jeré Longman contributed reporting.
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