Managua, Nicaragua – Nicaraguan President-elect Daniel Ortega says he will not return to the days when his Sandinista government sent censors to La Prensa or parked tanks in front of the newspaper’s offices.
Even though the former Marxist revolutionary refused to talk to most media during the campaign, media moguls are taking a wait-and-see approach to the new leader.
“Our doors remain open to properly interpret his government.
The ball is in his court,” said Xiomara Chamorro, political editor of La Prensa, the country’s largest circulation daily. “But we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt,” said Chamorro, whose reporters had no access to Ortega during the campaign.
After his election last week, Ortega moved rapidly to mend fences with the Roman Catholic Church and the business community, two of the three sectors hardest hit under his rule from 1985 to 1990.
Ortega, 61, has yet to reach out to members of the news media, though he has publicly promised to embrace freedom of expression and has been tolerant of the feisty, opposition media.
“They can say what they want. There is freedom of expression here even to say any crude thing, any slander,” he said in his victory speech after his Nov. 5 election. “I harbor no sentiment of hatred or revenge against those sending this kind of message, this dirty campaign.”
Similar sentiments were expressed by Ortega’s Sandinistas immediately after forcing dictator Anastasio Somoza to flee in 1979.
“It was like this into the first six months of the 1980s,” said Chamorro, whose paper was heavily censored after Ortega was first elected president in 1984. “It was a honeymoon. Now we’ll see how long this honeymoon will last.”
