Barricada and Beyond: Journalism in Nicaragua

Less than five years ago, Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of the Nicaraguan weekly Confidencial, was at the center of some dramatic events in Central American journalism. Chamorro is the son of Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the famous journalist who was gunned down in 1978 by the Somoza dictatorship, and of Violeta Chamorro, the former elected Nicaraguan president.

In 1980, at the age of twenty-three, Chamorro was appointed editor of the official organ of the Sandinista Front, Barricada. He directed the paper until 1994. During the tumultuous 1980s, Barricada’s journalists and editors held to a professional imperative in their reporting and managed to maintain a degree of distance from the Sandinista leadership. When the Sandinistas lost power in 1990—to a coalition headed by Chamorro’s anti-Sandinista mother—Barricada seized the opportunity to pursue a less partisan, more pluralistic journalism. In 1991, the paper was formally relaunched, with its guerrilla-at-the-barricades logo removed. Chamorro and other senior editors pushed for a diversity of op-ed commentary, wider consultation of sources in reporting, and a broader news, sports, and entertainment agenda.

Meanwhile, the Sandinista Front was plagued by factional disputes in the aftermath of the election defeat. A more “orthodox” faction, led by former president Daniel Ortega, pushed for direct party control over the newly autonomous Barricada and, in October 1994, pushed Chamorro out. Barricada staff protested and waged a rhetorical war in the paper’s own pages against the party leadership. In the end, most of Barricada’s editorial staff resigned or were forced out. The paper folded in February 1998.

I have interviewed Chamorro on more than a dozen occasions over the last decade. The following conversation took place in July 1998 at a restaurant in Managua.

Mr. Jones:

What lessons do you draw from the Barricada experience?

Mr. Chamorro:

Well, what can we say? One angle would be that transitions don’t always produce the results you’re looking for. You can have different outcomes. Barricada is one way of showing that you can have a positive transition [after 1990], but at the same time a regression [after 1994]. There’s no way to predict that political transitions will always lead to the modernization of the press, or pluralism, or whatever.

J:

It’s not necessarily a linear process?

C:

That’s right. How do you explain that? I don’t think it’s just a question of the power struggle within the Sandinista Front. It’s partly that, but I think a very important point is how permanent the conception has been, on the Left, of the press as an extension of the party apparatus. That idea is still there. For me, that is what explains most of the problems between the Front and Barricada, before 1994 and after ‘94. I don’t know very well the experience in, say, El Salvador, because in El Salvador the FMLN [leftist rebel group] never had a newspaper. But they had radio stations, and I’ve talked to colleagues from there [who have said] it’s more or less the same problem.

One question we cannot answer completely is how viable—in economic and journalistic terms—was the project we were putting together [at Barricada]. But even though we didn’t have the time to see all its potential or economic results, I think it was viable in the medium term. I think the Barricada experience was very rich and important for Nicaraguan media. When this project was aborted, we were getting close to the point of becoming more or less accepted as part of the national journalistic culture. I don’t think we’d reached that point, but we were close to it. That’s something I wrote as my final words when Barricada closed [in 1998]. I said I didn’t know how conscious people were that when the project was cut short in 1994, not only did the Sandinista Front lose an opportunity, but also the country lost a newspaper. A national newspaper, or a newspaper that was starting to become a national newspaper.

J:

Can we speak in abstract terms...