Rosario Murillo, wife of Nicaraguan strongman Daniel Ortega and soon to be his co-president, is known for extravagant diatribes and eccentric outfits. But Nicaraguans are under no illusion. Behind the colorful, hippie-esque exterior, critics say, is a ruthless authoritarian who has helped run her husband’s increasingly dictatorial regime with an iron fist.
No senior official will dare lift a finger without the 73-year-old’s say-so, insiders have testified. Murillo has acted as the Ortega government’s only spokesperson since 2007. Known for her fiery speeches laced with biblical and esoteric references, she preaches “love and reconciliation” while in the same breath branding the opposition “blood-thirsty vampires.”
In 2017, she became vice-president. Long seen as the real power behind the scenes, Murillo is now set to officially become “co-president” after a loyalist parliament on Friday approved a constitutional reform that will also give the pair near-unbridled power over all matters of state.
Poetry and politics
Murillo was born on June 22, 1951, to Zoilamerica Zambrana Sandino — niece of revolutionary hero Augusto Cesar Sandino after whom Ortega’s ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) is named. Her father Teodulo Murillo was a wealthy cattle and cotton farmer who “adored” his daughter for her intelligence and her interest in books and poetry, author Fabian Medina recounted in his biography about Ortega, “El Preso 198” (“Prisoner 198”).
At the age of 11, Murillo’s father sent her to England and Switzerland where she learned English and French and obtained a secretarial diploma. She fell pregnant at the age of 15 with her first daughter and was forced by her parents to marry the father, Jorge Narvaez, with whom she had two children: Zoilamerica and Rafael.
In 1968, she started working at the newspaper La Prensa as secretary to its then editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro — a fierce critic of the dictatorship. Chamorro was assassinated in 1978. His widow, Violeta Barrios, became Nicaragua’s first woman president after beating Ortega — in power for much of the 1980s — in elections in 1990.
Steadfastly loyal
Murillo joined the FSLN, then a guerrilla group, in 1969, and in the 1970s helped found a movement of anti-dictatorship artists. She divorced Narvaez and married journalist Anuar Hassan. They had a son, whose death in an earthquake in 1972 inspired her to start writing poetry.
Murillo went into exile in Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica in 1977 where she met Ortega. This was two years before the fall of the dictatorship that allowed their return home, with Ortega part of a ruling junta before he was elected president in 1985. The pair tied the knot in 2005 — the fourth marriage for Murillo. Murillo has been steadfastly loyal to her husband. When her daughter Zoilamerica Narvaez accused Ortega in 1998 of sexually abusing her in childhood, Murillo sided with her spouse.
The charges were thrown out by a Sandinista judge. Today, Narvaez lives in Costa Rica, where she speaks disparagingly of her mother. “I would have understood that she would keep quiet, but not that she would become my main persecutor,” she told said in 2021.
Murillo has imposed her eccentric taste on the capital Managua, ordering the erection of several tall metal “trees of life” painted different colors and lit up at night. According to Medina’s book “Ortega found in Murillo what he lacked, and Murillo found in Ortega the vehicle she needed” for power.
