Jaime Chamorro Cardenal

Jaime Chamorro Cardenal (23 October 1934 – 29 July 2021) was a Nicaraguan newspaper editor and publisher. A civil engineer by training, journalism was the family business, as his father owned the newspaper La Prensa. Chamorro joined La Prensa in 1974, where he worked for 47 years and served as publisher for 28, from 1993 until his death in 2021.

Early life Chamorro was born in Granada, Nicaragua, on 23 October 1934, to Margarita Cardenal Argüello and Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Zelaya, who had become sole owner of La Prensa in 1932.

When he was 10, harassment from dictator Anastasio Somoza García forced the newspaper to close and his parents went into exile in New York. Pedro Joaquín, Anita and Ligia also left the country to pursue their studies, while Jaime and Xavier went to Granada, staying with their grandmother Isabel Argüello de Cardenal.

Career In June 1959, following his brother Pedro Joaquín, He was jailed for eight months as a consequence. The FSLN shut down La Prensa in 1986, accusing it of sympathizing with the US-backed Contras, and Chamorro, then the newspaper’s senior editor, left the country until the paper reopened the following year, under a new peace accord.

In the late 1980s he was also a leader in the Conservative Party. In 1987 he published Frente a dos dictaduras : la lucha por la libertad de expresión (trans. Facing Two Dictatorships: The Struggle for Freedom of Expression), comparing the Somoza regime to FSLN rule in the 1980s particularly as regarded suppression of speech. Discussing the book in 2021, he argued the Somoza dictatorship had been more liberal in this regard because they had not captured all the institutions the FSLN had, like the judiciary. Chamorro died on 29 July 2021, at age 86.

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