Nicaragua Divided: La Prensa and the Chamorro Legacy

"A unique and insightful presentation of the essential writings and ideas of Chamorro (very well translated)...clearly and gracefully written. Edmisten puts current Nicaraguan politics into perspective and gives the reader a sense of the complexities of the present situation."--Charles Ameringer, Pennsylvania State University

In the late summer of 1989, a coalition of anti-Sandinistas nominated Violeta Chamorro to challenge Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega in the February 1990 elections. In this story of Chamorro’s late husband, La Prensa publisher and editor Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, and of their family, Patricia Edmisten clarifies the interrelationship of family, politics, and economics critical to an understanding of the Nicaraguan conflict and people. As a Time article has suggested, "The private pain of the Chamorro family is a microcosm of Nicaragua’s national agony."

The book’s fulcrum is Chamorro’s 1978 assassination, an event that galvanized anti-Somoza forces and brought the Sandinista front to power. Edmisten traces the family’s fortunes from the beginnings of the antagonism between the Chamorros and Somozas to the Iran-Contra affair and the present ideological division among the Chamorros, a division Edmisten finds typical of Nicaraguan families today and one that reflects the polarity in Nicaraguan society.

Into the historical narrative Edmisten weaves gracefully translated passages from Chamorro’s writings and a touching selection of her interviews with Violeta Chamorro and other family members and La Prensa employees, along with photographs of the family and of historic La Prensa front pages. Although the work is carefully documented, its journalistic style gives it special appeal for the general reader.

Associate professor of education at the University of West Florida, Patricia Edmisten first visited Nicaragua in 1981 with an Oxfam-America study group.

“A unique and insightful presentation of the essential writings and ideas of Chamorro (very well translated)…clearly and gracefully written. Edmisten puts current Nicaraguan politics into perspective and gives the reader a sense of the complexities of the