Press Feeling Heat In Nicaragua

When Nicaraguans voted Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega out of office in the stunning 1990 upset election, they put in his place the matriarch of a newspaper publishing family, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

The vote expressed not simply disgust with the Sandinista's authoritarian rule, but respect and admiration for Chamorro and her paper, La Prensa. For decades under the ownership of her husband, Pedro Chamorro, the paper was a staunch opponent of Somoza dictatorships. His assassination in 1978 was one of several violent incidents that touched off the civil war that brought the Sandinistas to power.

These days, though, official hostility and criminal intimidation has replaced those widespread feelings of respect and admiration.

Throughout the spring and early summer, journalists received a mounting number of death threats, including several e-mailed against La Prensa's editorial cartoonist, Manuel Guillén, after the publication of a caricature of Ortega.

Ortega himself made a bizarre statement at a June 18 press conference when he discussed the current Nicaraguan debate about whether the president or the judiciary has authority over the National Police. He used this chilling analogy:

"If tomorrow the president says to the police, go and put a pair of shots into a citizen, or put a pair of shots into Octavio Sacasa [owner of a television station], and then he tells the police put a pair of shots into La Prensa journalists, the police are not obliged to attack just because the president ordered it," Ortega said, according to an account in La Prensa.

International free-press groups have expressed alarm at the anti-press rhetoric and overall climate of hostility. A delegation from the Miami-based Inter American Press Association (IAPA) had already concluded in April that constitutional "reforms" being pushed by Ortega and his odd-bedfellow allies in the corruption-tainted Liberal Party would hinder free expressions. President Enrique Bolaños vetoed one proposal that would significantly change tax exemptions for the news media.

IAPA President Alejandro Miró Quesada, director of the Peruvian daily El Comercio, reacted to Ortega's statement by saying, "public figures have a responsibility to be prudent when expressing opinions which can be interpreted as apologies for crimes or encourage actions that are contrary to press freedom and journalists' safety."

Those fears were realized the night of Aug. 14, when Adolfo Olivas Olivas, a correspondent for La Prensa since 1991, was shot to death by his regular taxi driver just 20 yards from his home in the northern city of Esteli. The driver, Santos Roberto Osegueda, surrendered to police three days later and said he killed the 47-year-old