The following is a transcript of episode 30 of the weekly El Faro English podcast, Central America in Minutes.
MURILLO: Good afternoon to our beloved families of our blessed Nicaragua, in particular to our beloved moms. We embrace you on behalf of all Nicaraguan families.
GRESSIER, HOST: Co-president Rosario Murillo uttered this message to Nicaraguans on May 29. Seven years had passed since the Mother’s Day Massacre, when state security forces murdered 19 people in cold blood who were protesting escalating murders and repression of dissidents during the 2018 mass uprising.
Weeks earlier, on May 7, the head of the Nicaraguan Army, an institution deeply implicated in those crimes, pledged the military’s obedience to the new constitution, which made Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo joint commanders-in-chief. Now, at least on paper, Murillo will hold onto power should Ortega die.
This is our special June episode of Central America in Minutes. How did Rosario Murillo, without being elected to that office, become co-president? And just how durable is her newfound power?
A political debt
GRESSIER: Of the many key moments in the rise of Rosario Murillo, three dates stand out. The first was June 27, 1998.
ORTEGA: Rosario told me that she wanted to ask the Nicaraguan people for forgiveness for having a daughter who betrayed the principles of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
GRESSIER: That’s Ortega in a video of a party rally archived by Confidencial, standing next to a quiet Murillo, who looks distraught. Ortega’s future hung in the balance: A month earlier, his step-daughter Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo accused him of sexual abuse before the Human Rights Commission in Managua.
Murillo defended her husband, accusing her daughter of lies and manipulation. In a 2019 documentary, five years after fleeing to Costa Rica, Zoilamérica recounted that, when she was young, her mother had privately acknowledged Ortega’s pedophilia, while at the same time blaming her daughter for the abuse.
Murillo, a poet, met Ortega, the guerrilla commander, prior to the fall in 1979 of dictator Anastasio Somoza. Before the Revolution, she worked as a secretary for journalist Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, whose 1978 murder helped catalyze Somoza’s overthrow. Ironically, Ortega and Murillo’s sweeping crackdown since 2018 led to the illegal occupation of newsrooms, political imprisonment, and now near-total exile of the press.
The FSLN had ceded power in 1990 in the country’s first free election. After Zoilamérica’s accusation, Murillo’s backing kept Ortega afloat as he tried to make a come-back. In 2001, he announced he would forgo his parliamentary immunity. “His defense argued that the statute of limitations had expired,” the documentary summarizes, “and his case was closed in two days.”
Murillo managed Ortega’s 2001 and 2006 campaigns. When he was sworn-in as president in 2007, she became spokesperson. In 2017, after Ortega was unconstitutionally reelected to a third consecutive term, she became VP — a major step toward family rule.
Her defense of Ortega is widely argued to have boosted her political trajectory. “It undoubtedly placed an enormous debt on Daniel Ortega’s shoulders, to compensate Rosario Murillo, and it of course put her in a position to collect,” says former FSLN commander and ex-political prisoner Dora María Téllez. “From that point on, Rosario gradually increased her power.”
In a telling example of the paper-thin loyalties and tempers that would later define Ortega and Murillo’s rule, a judge who dismissed the case against him, Managua Appellate Judge Martha Quezada, was removed by the regime in late 2023 during a Murillo-led purge of the judiciary.
A justifying ideology
“Vamos con todo.” The order had been handed down: “Let’s go all in. We won’t let them take away our revolution,” Fidel Moreno, the chief political operative of Ortega and Murillo, informed top FSLN party leadership.
The second date: April 19, 2018. The day before, social security reforms had sparked protests that, in the coming weeks, would spread across the country and —fueled by state repression— morph into armed resistance.
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In emails published by Confidencial, Murillo personally ordered the party to seize control of strategic sites across Managua. Within hours of the FSLN emergency assembly, security forces had murdered the first three protesters on college campuses.
As for Vamos con todo, words often attributed to Murillo personally, “whether she said it or not, she did it,” exiled economist Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a 2021 presidential contender and former political prisoner stripped in 2023 of his citizenship, told El Faro English. The number of casualties rose to 355, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The ruling couple has never acknowledged these crimes, insisting on deriding dissidents and victims’ families as internationally sponsored coup-plotters disturbing national peace. In recent months, United Nations and Argentinian investigators have placed them at the top of the chain of responsibility for possible crimes against humanity.
But 2018 made one thing clear: There is no Ortega without Murillo. “The alliance between them has worked,” says Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo. “He brings the symbolism of a justifying ideology, and she brings the design and effectiveness of that model.”
It was a turning point. Ortega and Murillo went on to enact laws criminalizing “fake news” and imposing a foreign-agents registry and money-laundering code to throttle critical civil society groups. In 2021, they claimed reelection in a sham process including the arrest of seven candidates and the annulment of the two opposition movements.
The regime has cancelled several thousand non-profits and over two-dozen universities and stripped at least 452 Nicaraguans of citizenship. They imprisoned former comrades-in-arms; in February 2022, FSLN commander Hugo Torres, who in 1974 risked his life to free Ortega from prison, died after being forcibly disappeared in custody for two months.
Shifting balance of power
These days, even those still in the Nicaraguan regime’s good graces don’t air their opinions about Rosario Murillo in public without permission.
Here’s the final date: On May 19, 2024, police surrounded the home of Humberto Ortega, Daniel’s brother, after he claimed in an interview that neither Murillo nor her son, Laureano Ortega, were capable of succeeding Ortega. This was just as much a challenge to Murillo as it was an insinuation of Daniel’s fragile bill of health.
Murillo, he claimed, lacked clout with the old guard of the party and military, while Laureano, the protégé, had little political credibility and “accumulated struggle”. Humberto Ortega was confined to house arrest, under which he died of cardiac arrest after declaring himself a political prisoner.
“Like Humberto said, she doesn’t have the same historic strength as Daniel,” argues Mónica Baltodano, an exiled historian, politician, and former Sandinista commander. “There were some spaces left where she didn’t have control, but she clearly has more now. That’s the case of the Army. At one point the Judicial Branch wasn’t in her hands, but she has now made that move, too.”
By all indications, Rosario Murillo has taken the reins in Nicaragua. The big question is for how long, and under what circumstances, she will be able to hold onto them — whether she holds them because Daniel Ortega is still alive and allows her to, or because of a more profound shift in the balance of power.
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Between her political influence in key institutions like the Police, accumulated over the last decade, and her powers decreed in the new constitution, Téllez says that “Rosario Murillo has ended up with more power than Daniel Ortega. He lost power and she gained it. And that alters the balance between them.”
Roman Gressier wrote today’s episode, with production and original soundtrack by Omnionn. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, and iHeart podcast platforms.