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Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (born October 18, 1929), is Nicaraguan political leader and publisher
and former President of Nicaragua. She was born in
Rivas, Nicaragua.
In 1952, Chamorro's husband, Pedro Chamorro, took over the
anti-Somoza newspaper La Prensa and was frequently jailed
for its content. Violeta Chamorro ran the newspaper after her husband's assassination in 1978.
La Prensa participated in the Sandinista-led revolution that
overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, and
Chamorro became a member of the interim Junta of National Reconstruction that replaced
Somoza. In April of 1980, however, she resigned from the junta, angry over Sandinista power
in the government. During the 1980s, La Prensa vigorously attacked Sandinista policies and President Daniel Ortega and was subjected on several occasions to partial or total
censorship by the Sandinista government, which accused the newspaper of taking money from the United States and thus supporting
the US-backed overthrow of the government.
In 1990, after nearly a decade of Contra warfare and economic sanctions, Chamorro
became the presidential candidate of the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO), a coalition of 14 political parties that ran against
the Sandinistas in that year's national elections. UNO received 55 percent of the vote, and Chamorro became president of
Nicaragua from 1990 to 1996, when Arnoldo Alemán was elected in her
place.
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