Nicaraguan journalist and writer Carlos Salinas Maldonado offers a bare story with the nuances typical of a figure “as disturbing” as the Sandinista leader Rosario Murillo, wife of President Daniel Ortega and second in command of the Nicaraguan government.
“I am the Commander’s wife”is the title of the unauthorized biography of the Grijalbo publishing house that is in bookstores in Mexico and Central America.
In an interview with the voice of americathis author born in 1982 at the very dawn of the Sandinista Revolution, said that Murillo “sees herself as the heir to power” if her companion in battles with whom she has spent more than four decades in “a toxic relationship” were missing.
During the talk with the VOASalinas Maldonado presented his points of view on the complexities he faced to produce this text written from his exile in Mexico, a country that welcomed him in 2018 after the sociopolitical crisis that shook the country and led to to a repression “brutal” and the persecution against journalists and opponents. Many of them went to jail and others like him managed to flee.
Salinas said, however, that before leaving Nicaragua, he was already following this character with “great interest,” who in his opinion “is by far the most fascinating figure in Latin American politics.”
She emphasizes that this is a woman who has managed to stand out in a “macho, deeply religious and conservative” country, and where she invented herself through a mixture of mysticism and religiosity that was accentuated with her personal appearance as an “exuberant in appearance” woman. all aspects”.
“People have not loved her, and here there is a large dose of machismo, expecting a woman in politics to be submissive, everything that she has not been, that was never liked in a country as macho as Nicaragua because Rosario Murillo has always he has broken the rules,” says Salinas.
Approach to the figure
Salinas Maldonado maintains that in order to create this work from a literary perspective, under the Grijalbo publishing label, he took advantage of various reports from published portraits about Murillo in the newspaper The countryfrom Spain, where he works in the Mexico division, which led him to do a lot of research and compile dozens of interviews from people who have met her.
The editors saw material -given the character of the figure- and the interest aroused by journalistic publications, even with translations into Italian, which was thought to escalate with the proposal towards a literary piece “but without failing to the rigor” of the information .
Literary licenses have arrived – explains Salinas to VOA– to accentuate and interconnect the stories of a book that this week reached bookstores in Mexico and several Central American countries except Nicaragua, distribution in the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries and the United States is expected in the coming days, plus sales in line.
The book is also based on the contradictions of a woman who began her militancy in the revolutionary ranks as a young woman from a well-to-do family, who had studied in Europe, descendant of the hero Augusto César Sandino (1895-1934), who embraced the ideals of freedom of his paternal great-uncle and, like thousands of Nicaraguans of all classes, opposed the absolute power exercised by the Somoza dictatorship, which ruled the country for 47 years until the late 1970s, when it was overthrown by the revolution of which she was a part.
“She was a poet who wrote and read her poems outside the churches in Nicaragua against the Somozas dictatorship, she got involved in the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) at a very young age and she was fascinated by the figure of Daniel Ortega and later she became They find themselves in exile in Costa Rica where a rather toxic relationship begins,” he says.
According to Salinas, the book addresses episodes that have marked Murillo’s life that “left him with traumas,” including the fact that he lost one of his children, before meeting Ortega, in the earthquake that destroyed Managua in December. from 1972.
And when it comes to children, another thorny chapter of this figure that readers will be able to break down in the book is the relationship with her eldest daughter, Zoila América Narváez Murillo, who accused her step-father Daniel Ortega in 1998 of alleged rape and abuse. sex when she was just 11 years old, just when the couple had consummated their union in Costa Rica. Murillo’s daughter then said that she had decided to talk about it to achieve her “internal healing” and recognize herself to move on.
Salinas recounts that the episode that was key in the leadership of the couple who aspired to return to the presidency, as these revelations were “an earthquake” for the FSLN. Rosario Murillo -explains the author- decided to side with Ortega “and publicly declared that her daughter was crazy.”
During her testimony, Zoila América he referred to his mother as “absent” during her childhood and adolescence and from which she felt abandoned: “my mother was consumed by multiple occupations or responsibilities, although in reality I was never clear about what she really did. During this time, I felt a certain abandonment and loneliness, my mother was not a close being nor was she aware of me”.
Ortega denies the accusations. One of Zoila América’s brothers, exiled in Costa Rica, has criticized her in the past. In 2019, Juan Carlos Ortega called her “mythomaniac” on Twitter, alluding to his testimony against Ortega.
The honeys of power
For the author of “I am the commander’s wife!” the relationship between Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo is mediated and sustained “by the obsession with power”, arguing that both have needed each other for their own purposes.
“Daniel Ortega at some point needed Rosario Murillo a lot to resurface politically and Rosario Murillo has always needed Daniel Ortega for his political ambitions, it is a very dysfunctional relationship as well and based on an absolute vision for power,” he says.
The voice of america He requested comments by email from the Vice President of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, about this unauthorized biography, but until the time of publishing this note we had not received a response.
On some occasion, Salinas Maldonado said, Murillo responded to a message saying: “We are in contact, brother Carlos.” However, she did not contact him again.
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