Rosario Murillo: the powerful and omnipresent “co-president” of Daniel Ortega

Unmistakable with her multi-colored suits and hands full of rings and bracelets, Rosario Murillo is the increasingly powerful and ubiquitous wife of the president Daniel Ortega, who on Sunday will be elected for a fourth consecutive term in Nicaragua, with her at his side.

“Here we have two presidents because we respect the 50-50 principle, that is, here we have a co-presidency with comrade Rosario,” Ortega said a few days ago, touching her shoulder, during an act broadcast on national television.

Smiling, the vice president continued to sign document after document that her daughter and assistant Camila gave her at the head table where her son Laureano was also.

“Every day he is communicating with our people, making known everything that is being done for the benefit of Nicaraguan families, without making political differences, without making ideological differences,” Ortega continued.

The couple will be for the second time the presidential formula of the ruling Sandinista Front (FSLN, left), which will keep Murillo, 70, as the first successor to Ortega, five years older.

Since 2007, when Ortega returned to power after the revolution he led in the 1980s, Murillo has been his sole spokesperson and since 2017 his vice president.

It is the visible and operational face of the government, with a high capacity for work. He accompanies Ortega in all his public appearances and in political corridors it is said that no official moves a finger without his authorization.

He has been reporting for 14 years on the work of the government, the weather, the day’s saints, natural disasters, the advance of vaccination … everything, as a poet that he is, with a metaphorical language, speaking of peace and harmony, always mentioned to “God” and the “Virgin”, and describing their adversaries as “diabolical”, “terrorists”, “outlaws” and “junkies”.

– Relative of Sandino –

She met Ortega during the fight against the Somoza dictatorship (1937-1979) and after years of living together they married in 2005.

He was born on June 22, 1951 in Managua. His mother, Zoilamérica Zambrana Sandino, was the niece of General Augusto César Sandino, the nationalist hero for whom the FSLN is named.

Her father Teódulo Murillo was a wealthy producer who “adored” his daughter “for the intelligence she showed” and her interest in books and poetry, says the writer Fabián Medina in his book “El Preso 198”.

When she was 11 years old, her father sent her to study secretarial work in England and Switzerland, where she learned English and some French. On one occasion, on vacation in Nicaragua, her mother made her marry Jorge Narváez, from whom – according to Medina – she became pregnant at 15 years of age. With him she had two children, Zoilamérica and Rafael.

Divorced from Narváez, she married the journalist Hanuar Hassan, with whom she had a child whose death, in the 1972 earthquake, inspired her to write her first poems in 1973.

In 1968, she came to work for the newspaper La Prensa as the secretary of the then director Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, a staunch critic of Somocismo assassinated in 1978 and whose wife Violeta Barrios was the first woman to govern Nicaragua between 1990 and 1997.

Today, two children of Pedro Joaquín and Violeta, Cristiana -presidential candidate- and Pedro, are detained among a forty of important opponents of Ortega.

Mother and “persecutor”

In 1969 he joined the FSLN and in the 1970s he helped found a movement of artists opposed to Somoza.

In 1977 he went into exile to Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica, where he met Ortega, with whom he returned to Nicaragua in 1979 when the revolution triumphed, and headed cultural organizations.

In his memoirs, the late poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal tells about the influence that Murillo had on Ortega since then, and how he tried to boycott his work when he was Minister of Culture.

“If she doesn’t get what she wants, she has no scruples, just like Daniel Ortega,” the writer Gioconda Belli, who was a friend of Murillo in the 1970s, once commented.

With Ortega he had seven children. When in 1998 Zoilamérica accused her adoptive father of sexual abuse, Murillo turned her back on him and declared that she felt “ashamed” of her daughter.

“I would have understood that she kept silence, but not that she became my main persecutor,” said Zoilamérica recently in Costa Rica, where she lives in exile.

Murillo marked his own style. She also loves the large necklaces and earrings that stand out in her curly hair, she decorates official ceremonies with flowers and years ago she had a hundred huge trees of life installed in Managua, made of metal and colored, a symbol of power.

Among Nicaraguans there is talk of their supposed esoteric beliefs. The writer Gioconda Belli describes her as a “superstitious” woman.