During the national insurrection in Nicaragua against Anastasio Somoza, my family’s newspaper, La Prensa, opposed his regime with all the resources at its command (including a loan of $50,000 to the Sandinistas, which has never been paid back). Indeed, it was the assassination of La Prensa‘s editor, my older brother Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, on January 10, 1978, which ignited all of Nicaragua into the final battle against Somoza and his regime. When that battle ended in July 1979 and the Sandinistas entered Managua, the whole country celebrated. But the Sandinistas soon betrayed the revolution that had brought them to power. Among the first pledges they broke was the one concerning freedom of the press.
Early on, the Sandinistas mandated a series of repressive laws which gave the government virtually unlimited restrictive powers over the press and other media. Between August 1979 and September 1980 alone, the Sandinistas issued three ordinances—the General Law on Communications Media and Decrees #511 and #512—which made freedom of expression contingent upon a range of deliberately ambiguous criteria, and established prior censorship for whatever the Sandinistas arbitrarily decided were economic and national-security matters.
In short, repressive legislation was mandated and enforced well before the state of emergency declared on March 15, 1982 and before the contras had given the Sandinistas the pretext to do what they had been doing all along.
From the beginning, we at La Prensa had made up our minds to support the revolution, but without giving up our independence—a policy that was bound to cause trouble. Thus, as early as September 1980, after the first massive anti-government demonstration on the Nicaraguan Atlantic coast (the Miskito Indians protesting the Cuban presence in Bluefields), the government ordered La Prensa to stop reporting about the region without prior government approval.
In general, however, since La Prensa‘s opposition to Somoza was firmly on record both nationally and internationally, the Sandinista campaign against the paper took a while to get started. In the first days there was a series of friendly talks and visits with the Sandinistas, including one meeting which took place at the home of my brother Xavier, the third of the Chamorro brothers, who like the rest of us was a shareholder in the family paper. Present at the meeting were Daniel Ortega (a member of the ruling junta, but not yet President) and his companion Rosario Murillo, who had been our elder brother Pedro Joaquin’s secretary at La Prensa for twelve years.
Both Ortega and his companion explained to us what “revolutionary journalism” should be, and were candid about the kind of newspaper they wanted in Nicaragua. So we were not too surprised when, soon after that, while everyone in Nicaragua was still euphoric over the triumph of the revolution, the Sandinistas started referring to La Prensa as “the traitor newspaper,” for certain minimal criticisms we had made of the new regime. Nor were we surprised when they began trying to gain control of the paper themselves. Before doing so, however, they had to get rid of the old management.
As a step in this direction they offered to appoint La Prensa‘s co-editor, Pablo Antonio Cuadra, ambassador to Spain, and to appoint me ambassador to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (with residence in Buenos Aires)—thereby getting us both conveniently out of the country. This would have left the paper in the hands of Xavier Chamorro, who had suddenly discovered the benefits of Sandinismo. When we turned down the Sandinistas’ gambit, they contrived a plan which would later become known as “Operation Trojan Horse”: on Sunday, April 20, 1980, on direct orders from the Sandinista comandantes, a group of La Prensa employees affiliated with one of the Sandinista unions took over the paper from inside, shutting down operations for over a month.
When, after all this, La Prensa‘s board of directors still refused to give in, the Sandinistas sent an emissary to the home of two members of the board—Carlos Holmann and his wife Ana Maria—with an ultimatum from Bayardo Arce, one of the nine comandantes of the National Directorate: if the board did not consent to the Sandinista proposals, they would confiscate not just La Prensa but everyone’s personal property as well. The Holmanns indignantly stood up and asked the emissary to leave.
By the end of April the pressure had intensified, and the Sandinistas summoned La Prensa‘s directors to a meeting with three comandantes: Bayardo Arce, Carlos Nuñez, and Humberto Ortega. The comandantes insisted that the only person acceptable to them as editor of La Prensa—the only one they considered “consecuente” (sympathetic and understanding)—was Xavier Chamorro. They stated further that although we did not realize it, we were being used by the CIA to injure the revolution. After a few more exchanges along these lines, I finally told Bayardo Arce that as long as La Prensa still belonged to its legitimate owners we would go on acting as its directors. If the Sandinistas wanted it otherwise, they would have to confiscate the paper and put their own names on the masthead. The comandantes, having expected a different response, were surprised and confused.
In the end, a compromise was worked out whereby a new Sandinista newspaper—El Nuevo Diario—was created. Xavier Chamorro left La Prensa to become editor of the new paper, taking with him those staff members who were Sandinista supporters and a substantial financial settlement. On May 26, 1980, thirty-five days after the attempted takeover, La Prensa resumed publication. It quickly doubled its circulation and once again became Nicaragua’s leading newspaper.
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In 1981 the Sandinistas changed their tactics and began a systematic campaign of harassment and intimidation against La Prensa. We were forbidden to publish a variety of items, including editorials or letters to the editor touching in any way on the banana crop or on the government’s negotiations with the Standard Fruit Company; any kind of news or commentary about the temporary shutdown of the independent Nicaraguan Permanent Committee on Human Rights; any reference to a poll taken by La Prensa which showed the regime to be losing the support of the people; any mention of the former Sandinista war hero Edén Pastora who, after growing disillusionment with the revolution, had gone over to the opposition. We were also forbidden to allude in any way to the fact that we were being censored.
Between July and October 1981 alone, the Sandinistas closed down La Prensa five times: on July 10 (forty-eight hours), for publishing photographs of Catholic billboards destroyed by unknown vandals; on July 29 (forty-eight hours), for an article on the wedding of Prince Charles that supposedly showed disrespect to Carlos Fonseca, one of the founders of the FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front); on August 19 (seventy-two hours), for having reproduced a news cable attributing statements to Foreign Minister Miguel D’Escoto, which the censor said were false (later La Prensa proved that the statements had indeed been made by D’Escoto); on September 29 (forty-eight hours), for publishing an interview in the September 27 edition that contained charges against government functionaries and hence supposedly harmed the nation’s economic stability; on October 2 (forty-eight hours), for repeating the previous “crime” of September 27. There were also other occasions when the Sandinistas arbitrarily closed La Prensa without giving any reason at all. They did this simply for purposes of intimidation—to show us they could close the paper whenever they wanted to.
To describe each and every shutdown of La Prensa in detail would be tedious, but it is worth noting that we were never once permitted the right of defense or appeal on any of these occasions. Every forced closing of the paper depleted our financial resources and compelled us to impose a form of self-censorship—but, despite these hardships, La Prensa‘s circulation kept growing. Then came the state-of-emergency declaration of March 15, 1982, which carried with it a whole series of new and more sweeping restrictions against the press. In addition to these restrictions, the government censor, Captain Nelba Cecilia Blandón, felt obliged to issue her own decree, requiring all media, both written and broadcast, to submit their daily programs or editorial copy to her office for prior censorship.
On top of all this, a new terror swept through Nicaragua in the form of Sandinista mobs which the government unleashed at will against its opponents. These turbas divinas (“divine mobs”), as the Sandinistas called them, were an updated version of earlier Somocista mobs. For the sheer power to intimidate, however, the Sandinista turbas far surpassed their predecessors. On repeated occasions they attacked La Prensa installations and besieged the homes of its owners and functionaries (including my own, and those of the widow, son, and mother of the former editor), throwing stones, painting obscene words and slogans on the walls, pounding on doors, and hurling insults at the people inside. Only after they grew tired, or when the “operation” was considered finished, would the attackers finally depart, leaving behind defaced walls, broken windows, smashed vehicles, and terror. Since the mobs were protected by the police and led by one or another Sandinista functionary—sometimes a man, at other times a woman—they could attack with impunity.
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On one occasion three of us working late at the paper were forced to spend the night in our offices because the mob, attacking after the work day was over, prevented us from leaving. In the course of this particular siege, the chief of a Sandinista patrol arrived on the scene and told me not to worry, nothing would happen because he was on the job (supposedly to protect La Prensa from the mob, but in reality to supervise them). All in all, some 20 percent of La Prensa‘s employees left the country during this period, because of threats or acts of physical violence against them.
On another occasion, La Prensa was attacked by a mob during the night. To keep them from entering, two of our security guards fired their pistols in the air (one had a .38, the other a Magnum .357) and then turned a fire hose on the crowd. This enraged the mob leaders who ordered an assault. The guard with the Magnum .357 fired one shot at the leaders, but the other guard did not fire at all. In the general confusion, further shots were fired by unidentified persons and two people were injured. Suddenly the Sandinista security forces arrived on the scene and occupied La Prensa, arresting everyone in the vicinity.
Following this incident, Tomas Borge, Minister of the Interior, summoned me and two other staff members, Pablo Antonio Cuadra and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Barrios (son of the slain editor), to his office and made the following proposal: if La Prensa agreed to condemn the security guards for assaulting people who were peacefully protesting La Prensa‘s “counterrevolutionary attitude,” the newspaper (still occupied by Sandinista police) would be returned to us and the security guards would not be punished. We told Borge that while we regretted what had happened, the security guards were only doing their job and their weapons had been duly registered with the Sandinista police.
Subsequently, there was a trial and La Prensa, taking over the guards’ defense, was able to establish in court that one person had been wounded by a .38 and the other by a .22. Since the only guard who fired used a Magnum .357, someone else had obviously discharged the other pistol in order to incriminate us. Despite this and other details, the two guards were sentenced to three-year terms, half of which they served in prison, and the other half on parole.
In the meantime, the military occupation of La Prensa had lasted for three days. Since the security guards were in jail, there was no legal justification for the takeover, but the Sandinistas had their own motives: they used the time to go through La Prensa‘s archives and make extensive photocopies of what they found there. (At least 2,000 such copies were made, according to the meter we had on La Prensa‘s xerox machine.) They also brought in expert locksmiths who forced open locked doors and desk drawers, as we found out when we finally got back to our offices and discovered that most of the documents in our files had been rearranged.
The Sandinistas also used the mobs to attack the distribution points throughout Nicaragua where La Prensa was sold. Many owners and employees of these agencies were harassed, to a point where many of them were finally forced to stop selling La Prensa. Thus it was not only freedom of the press that was (and is) threatened in Nicaragua but also the freedom to work, since many people made their living selling the paper. We were also told by a number of La Prensa agents that some of the people who turned up in these mobs had made a living doing the same thing under Somoza.
The willingness to welcome back old Somocistas seems to be a fundamental characteristic of Sandinismo: many of the same thugs who once worked for Somoza now fill the state agencies and are successfully integrated into the Sandinista Defense Committees and other government positions where their services are appreciated. That is why many of us in Nicaragua say that Sandinismo is Somocismo of the Left; it is Somocismo writ large.
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In addition to attacking distribution points, the Sandinistas also carried out personal attacks against staff members and employees of La Prensa. On July 24, 1982 Horacio Ruiz, one of the paper’s most respected editors, was forced into a car on a Managua street by four men, two of whom carried machine guns. Ruiz was beaten so severely that he lost consciousness. When he regained consciousness, he was told by one of his assailants, “Now you will find out what the mobs are.” They then beat him once more, and one of the men with a machine gun threatened to kill him. Finally Ruiz was driven to a remote spot and thrown out of the car.
La Prensa‘s account of the attack was partially censored. We were not allowed to mention the machine guns, for instance, or to respond to blatant and absurd discrepancies in the government’s version of the incident (Barricada and El Nuevo Diario, the two government papers, attempted to write it off as the anger of a “jealous husband”). We were also prohibited from mentioning denunciations of the attack that had been carried by various international news agencies.
Other La Prensa reporters have been imprisoned on trumped-up charges: Luis Mora Sanchez and photographer Jorge Ortega Rayo, for having allegedly worked with the counterrevolution (Sanchez was imprisoned twice, the second time in a cell with a violent gang that beat him up); Norman Talavera, for having cooperated in the publication of a censored Catholic newspaper (the Sandinistas were trying to intimidate Talavera into giving up coverage of Church events in La Prensa); Alejandro Cordonero and Enrique Garcia, for publishing a mimeographed newsletter of limited circulation called Prisma. Cordonero and Garcia were interrogated for fifteen days, and the questions they were asked dealt exclusively with their work at La Prensa. About all these arrests we were forbidden to publish anything.
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The grounds for censorship of La Prensa were equally trumped-up. To justify their policy, the Sandinistas at first claimed that it applied only to information or news pertaining to national security; later, they justified it on grounds that the country was in a state of war, and drastic measures were necessary. But these excuses and pretexts were a form of juridical propaganda aimed at the outside world. Inside Nicaragua, the people knew better. They knew that what was being censored usually had nothing to do with national security, and that it was being kept from the public because it took issue with the regime’s politics, its system of one-party government, its corruption (embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds, large-scale waste), and its creation of a monstrous bureaucracy to implement the dictates of an emerging octopus state. They knew further that it was not just political and administrative affairs that were subject to censorship but all expressions of popular protest, all forms of pluralistic activity, all references to the endeavors of the Catholic Church, and all incidences of natural disaster such as floods, bad harvests, and the like.
Now and then the government ended up censoring itself. One such case was an interview given by Captain Nelba Blandón, the government censor, to Eloy O. Aguilar of the Associated Press. In the interview, Captain Blandón defended censorship as “an instrument for defending the revolution” and declared that while some people abroad might not understand it, the Sandinistas were not going to let the press be used as a tool for “destabilizing society.” Since La Prensa subscribed to the AP wire service, we tried to publish the interview, but Captain Blandón deleted it. When Aguilar returned to Nicaragua, he asked Captain Blandón why she had, in effect, censored her own remarks. Her reply was revealingly totalitarian: “Because the statements I gave you were for publication outside the country, not for here in Nicaragua.” As an old Nicaraguan proverb puts it: “Light outside and darkness in your house.”
In setting up their repressive machinery, the Sandinistas sometimes received help from the large number of foreign sympathizers (the so-called “internationalists”) who are currently living and working in Nicaragua. Early in the revolution, for example, the government decided to discredit La Prensa by launching a campaign of calumny and misinformation against it. Several members of the “internationalist” community—most of them Chilean—took part in this campaign, working in conjunction with the Sandinista-dominated National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN). UNAN spent a considerable amount of state funds to publish and distribute a pamphlet supposedly proving that La Prensa was “counter-revolutionary,” and had received advice and counsel from El Mercurio, the Chilean newspaper which was allegedly involved in destabilizing Salvador Allende’s regime.
Another Sandinista smear campaign alleged that La Prensa had received funding from the CIA. The background of this campaign was as follows. In 1985 La Prensa received a grant of $100,000 from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). In 1986 we received a second grant of $50,000. In neither of these cases was La Prensa paid in cash. The money went to our supplier, who in turn shipped us the ink, chemicals, and other raw materials necessary for publishing a newspaper.
As is well known, the NED is funded by the U.S. Congress, and its board of directors is bipartisan. Moreover, the grants were publicly announced by the donor. Nonetheless, the Sandinistas used the ensuing publicity to assert that La Prensa was receiving money from CIA agencies, and continued to repeat this transparent lie as an “established fact.” But this is not surprising, coming as it did from a regime which invariably links anyone who disagrees with or opposes it with the CIA—a regime whose established facts have been shown over and over to be established lies.
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II
The actual process of censorship was nervewrackingly methodical. After the day’s edition of La Prensa was completed, we were required to send three copies of every page (including advertisements and comic strips) to Captain Blandón’s office, along with two pages of “filler”—material that had previously been approved and hence could be substituted for whatever the censor decided to cut out. This decision, which had once taken about two hours, later averaged between four and six, and in March 1986 actually reached the absurd level of six hours and fifty minutes. The delay was deliberate, of course, and served, among other things, to hurt La Prensa financially, since it sometimes entailed increasing the number of work hours by as much as 60 percent.
After the censor had finished her job, we were sent a memo stipulating the changes that had to be made. Where, formerly, we had at least been permitted to call in these changes by telephone, cutting down somewhat on the delay, we were now required to send the corrected copy back to the censor for a second going-over. This additional procedure—which could be called dual censorship—added another hour to the already prolonged delay, thereby furthering the Sandinistas’ aim of making La Prensa both bland and belated in its coverage. Whereas the two government newspapers, Barricada and El Nuevo Diario, came out early in the morning, La Prensa was lucky to appear at seven or eight that evening, by which time the “news” was either old or totally diluted. Sometimes, in fact, that day’s paper did not come out until early the following morning. Throughout this process, needless to say, the government never acknowledged what it was doing. Directives from the censor reached our offices bearing the slogan “Free Nicaragua,” and the word “censor” itself was never used—the official term was “revise.”
Between the time the Sandinistas came to power, and April 1986, there were forty-two instances when La Prensa could not be published at all owing to excessive censorship (though on several of these, we ourselves made the decision not to publish, as a form of protest). Many times the cuts made were so drastic that even the additional filler did not suffice to make up an edition, in which case nothing could be done, since we were not allowed either to leave blank spaces or to publish the censor’s directives about cutting certain passages—another instance of the censor censoring herself.
When an article came back from the censor’s office, it came with one of three possible directives: we were told either to cut the article entirely, to cut out certain paragraphs, or to change the headline. The first of these directives was obviously the most drastic, but the second was not much better, since deleting large sections of an article could change its meaning to a point where the editors had no choice but to withdraw it entirely. Where headlines were concerned, the censor specialized in distorting the meaning of an article in the hope, presumably, that the reader would skip its contents and go on to something else. For instance, we once published a verbatim announcement from the Minister of Industry. Since the announcement concerned a pending decline in industrial production, we headlined it quite straightforwardly industrial production will decrease by 20 percent next year. The censor found this unacceptable, however, and after a number of go-rounds finally agreed to future industrial production announced.
This kind of petty ideological wrangling is daily fare in the Nicaragua of today, a country where the names of opponents of the regime like former world boxing champion Alexis Arguello cannot be mentioned in the press, and where it is forbidden to publish a photograph of Cardinal Obando y Bravo, the archbishop of Managua and the country’s principal Catholic leader. Indeed, the Sandinista obsession with Cardinal Obando has reached such a level of absurdity that the censor once deleted the word “Cardinals” from a headline we ran about the 1985 World Series, and replaced it with the words “St. Louis.”
The level of censorship prevailing in Nicaragua at any given time varied with circumstances. It tended to go down briefly when Nicaragua was the focus of world attention or when important visitors were in the country—such as Jimmy Carter or the former President of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez—only to go up again when the Sandinistas were no longer being observed.
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But censorship was only one of the problems confronting La Prensa under the Sandinista regime; it also faced debilitating economic and material problems. One of these problems was the difficulty of obtaining foreign currency from the government to pay for the imported raw materials without which La Prensa could not operate. A second problem was the paper supply, which was also controlled by the government and stringently rationed. For a certain amount of time, La Prensa had been allowed to publish twelve-page editions, but as of February 1986, the quota was reduced to six.
To remedy the situation, some members of Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) made an offer in April 1986 to supply La Prensa with paper free of charge, but only on one condition: the Sandinistas had to guarantee that the gift would be used as a supplement to La Prensa‘s regular allotment, so that the newspaper could come out in larger editions. Needless to say, the Sandinistas refused to make this guarantee. They made it clear that if La Prensa accepted the donation, the government would not feel obligated to supply any paper at all, and would deduct what the IAPA supplied from La Prensa‘s regular allotment. In a letter to me dated April 29, Rene Nuñez, one of the government ministers, warned that even if it did get additional paper, La Prensa would still be limited to six pages. We had no choice, therefore, but to decline the generous offer.
As though these problems were not sufficient, the government, as of January 1, 1986, had ordered a 100-percent increase in salaries (the third one since they came to power) for La Prensa employees; a few days later the national currency was devalued 250 percent, causing a proportional increase in the price of paper and other raw materials. At the same time we were denied permission to raise the price of La Prensa, so there was no way we could compensate for these additional costs. Another blow fell on February 7, when we were ordered to reduce our weekly number of pages from 68 to 36, thus automatically reducing our advertising revenues by 50 percent. Struggling against this tangle of economic problems that the government itself had created, we were then ordered to reduce our circulation because the Sandinistas could no longer obtain the foreign currency to purchase the paper needed to maintain it.
On April 11, 1986, in the midst of all this, Xavier Chamorro, editor of El Nuevo Diario, suddenly made an offer to buy La Prensa for a substantial amount of U.S. dollars. Both La Prensa‘s employees and its board of directors categorically rejected this offer, suspecting immediately that the Sandinistas were behind it.
What better way, after all, to solve their image problem than by acquiring La Prensa and turning it into a puppet newspaper that would be mildly critical of the government, but not on fundamental issues? Then they could eliminate the cumbersome machinery of censorship and tell the world there is a free press in Nicaragua. Apart from the trickery involved, we were also personally offended by the Sandinista offer, for essentially it was an offer to sell out our ideas and values and thus betray the history and struggle of La Prensa and the memory of its murdered editor—whose own words had been banned from the paper by the Sandinista censor ever since 1982.
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Postscript:
From the moment the Sandinistas made their offer to buy the paper we sensed that something definitive was about to happen, and we were right. On June 26, 1986, the Sandinistas closed La Prensa for perhaps the last time. Shortly thereafter, President Daniel Ortega declared in an interview that the paper would remain closed as long as there was a war on, or until we changed our political attitudes—a statement that would have provoked an avalanche of protests in any free country. But Nicaragua is not a free country; ever since 1979 the Sandinistas have been methodically silencing the country’s independent voices one by one. Now there is one less voice to speak out against the prefabricated reality that the Sandinistas export abroad to confuse and manipulate international opinion.
In a more profound sense, however, we cannot be silenced. The Sandinistas can destroy radio stations; they can shut down newspapers; they can beat, imprison, exile, or murder whomever they please—but they cannot ultimately silence the Nicaraguan people. They cannot censor our thoughts, they cannot imprison our hunger for freedom, they cannot exile our sense of justice. In the end, it is time itself that is against them and not even the Sandinistas can censor, imprison, exile, or murder time.
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