Violeta Chamorro
Violeta Chamorro was president of Nicaragua from 1990 to 1997, the first woman elected president in the Americas, the widow of the editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro whose murder in 1978 had begun the revolution against Somoza, the publisher of his paper La Prensa who had sat in the Sandinista junta of 1979 and left it in 1980 when the paper was censored. She was chosen in 1989 as the candidate of a coalition of fourteen parties from the Communists to the Conservatives against Daniel Ortega, campaigning in a wheelchair with a broken knee and in white, the mother who would end the war. She beat him on 25 February 1990 by fifty-five per cent to forty-one in an election that every poll had said she would lose. After that the Sandinistas handed over power, the first time a revolutionary government had lost an election and gone. The seven years were the end of the Contra war, with the rebels disarmed by June 1990. The army was cut from ninety thousand to fifteen and left under the Sandinista general Humberto Ortega, which her own coalition never forgave. There was the hyperinflation of thirteen thousand per cent ended by the new córdoba, and the state farms returned or sold. There were the Sandinistas' property seizures of their last weeks, the piñata, left largely in place, and the debt forgiven by the Americans and the Russians, and a peace that held. She was born in Rivas in 1929 into a landed family, was educated in Texas and Virginia, married Chamorro in 1950 and shared his exiles and imprisonments under the Somozas. She ran the paper after his death with her children divided, two of them Sandinistas and two against, which was the country at her table on Sundays. The presidency was run largely by her son-in-law, the minister of the presidency, in a co-government with the Sandinista opposition that kept the army and the unions quiet and the coalition furious. The economy that grew from 1994 did so from the bottom of a well. The transfer to Arnoldo Alemán in January 1997, the first from one elected president to another in the country's history, was the achievement. She lived in Managua with osteoporosis and then a brain tumour, left for Costa Rica in 2023 when Ortega's government took La Prensa and jailed her children's generation. She died in San José in June 2025 at ninety-five, in the exile the man she had beaten had made for her family.
- Lived: 1929 CE – 2025 CE
- Nationality: Nicaraguan
- Roles: president, publisher, politician
