ABSTRACT
Violeta Barrios was born into a wealthy Nicaraguan family in 1931 and married Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, editor of La Prensa, and a member of the conservative Chamorro family which dominated Nicaraguan political life until the rise of the Somozas. His murder in 1978, which was universally believed to have been ordered by Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was the trigger for Sandinista-led revolution and the fall of the dictatorship. In 1979 she was invited to become one of the five members of the ruling junta of the provisional Government, but withdrew after a few months and emerged as a leading political opponent of Daniel Ortega Saavedra, who was elected President in 1985. In a country weary of the devastation caused by the long US-sponsored contra war, as candidate of a coalition of 14 parties (including the Communists), however, she defeated Ortega in the 1990 presidential election. As President, her Government was handicapped both by the failure of the US Government to give it adequate financial support, and by the difficulties of demobilizing both the Sandinistas and the contras, and Nicaragua has remained the poorest country on the mainland of the Americas.
