Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’re sharing Violeta Barrios de Chamorro’s 1986 account of the hopeful early years following the Nicaraguan revolution—and of her dread watching the Sandinista regime, headed by Daniel Ortega, embrace the same authoritarian tendencies it had fought to uproot.

At the time, Chamorro was the head of one of Nicaragua’s largest newspapers, El Diario La Prensa, a position she had inherited from her husband, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, eight years earlier. Chamorro Cardenal, one of the most vocal critics of the Somoza dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1936, was assassinated in 1978. His murder sparked a mass insurrection against the country’s leader, Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Riots turned into a revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a left-wing political movement, which culminated in Somoza’s ouster in 1979. Chamorro, an ardent opponent of the Somoza dictatorship, initially supported the Sandinistas, even becoming a member of the provisional government. But as the Sandinistas grew more radical and took steps to censor the press, she resigned, returning to La Prensa, where she became an outspoken critic of the new regime. “Ironically, a revolution that began with the assassination of my husband, a free journalist, has brought with it the worst censorship that Nicaraguan journalism has ever endured,” Chamorro writes.

Although the Sandinistas had originally launched an ambitious program of social reform, including land redistribution, a literacy drive, and mass vaccinations, it soon became mired in a bloody, decadelong guerilla war, fueled in large part by Cold War animosities abroad. Seeking to suppress the spread of communism in Latin America, U.S. President Ronald Reagan had authorized support for anti-Sandinista guerilla groups known as the Contras. In response, the Sandinista regime embarked on a ferocious effort to flush the Contras out of the country. This crackdown also extended to the press—resulting, in 1986, in the closure of La Prensa. By shutting down the newspaper, “Nicaraguan authorities institutionalized the state’s contempt for freedom of thought, speech, private property, religion and all norms of democratic government,” Chamorro writes. “I tell of this, not as a long complaint of melancholy, but rather as testimony for all democracies to take notice.”

La Prensa eventually reopened its doors—and Chamorro, in a shocking upset, would go on to beat Ortega in Nicaragua’s 1990 presidential election. During her six years in power, she enacted a number of peace reforms, including disbanding the U.S.-backed Contras. But her legacy has not endured; Ortega returned to power in 2006, and has since been reelected to four consecutive terms as president, throughout which he has consolidated an iron rule over the country. Beginning in 2018, the government began to restrict La Prensa’s access to printing supplies; in 2021, authorities raided the paper’s headquarters, effectively sounding the death knell for what by then was the last print newspaper in the country. Many of the paper’s editors and managers, alongside other Nicaraguan intellectuals and critics of the regime, have since fled. The paper’s director, Cristiana Chamorro Barrios—the Chamorros’ daughter—was detained after announcing her bid for the presidency in 2021, and has been under house arrest ever since.