Censorship Stains Image of Managua Regime

As Nicaragua inaugurates an elected president today, heavy censorship of La Prensa, the nation’s only opposition newspaper, stands out like an unsightly stain on the new democratic trappings of the Sandinista government.

The muzzled daily continues to circulate, but its top editor has gone into self-imposed exile, protesting the censor’s crackdown. The censorship, which has reportedly increased sharply since the Nov. 4 election, leaves this nation of 3 million people with no independent news media free to criticize the leftist government.

Commander Daniel Ortega, who heads the government junta installed after the Sandinista guerrillas seized power in 1979, won the election and will be sworn in as president today.

Ironically, the inauguration date was chosen to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, La Prensa’s longtime editor and publisher. The Sandinistas revere Chamorro’s memory for the long struggle he and his newspaper conducted against the Somoza clan, which ruled Nicaragua like a family fiefdom during four decades until it was overthrown by the Sandinista revolution.

Chamorro was succeeded as La Prensa’s top editor by his son, also named Pedro Joaquin, now 33 and one of the country’s leading opposition figures. La Prensa has always espoused Western, liberal values, and the son believes the revolution has been taken over and betrayed by the Marxists who oppose those values--including freedom of the press--just as much as Somoza did.

The son announced in mid-December that he will not return to Nicaragua until censorship of La Prensa is lifted. He is now living in neighboring Costa Rica, where his wife and children took up residence almost a year ago.

Jaime Chamorro, brother of the late Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, is in charge of La Prensa while his nephew is in exile. Smoking a fragrant Nicaraguan cigar in his office, he likened the censored newspaper to a dormant rose bush waiting out the winter.

“It is alive, but it has no buds, no flowers,” he said. “It is so censored that it almost says nothing,”

With a circulation of 70,000, however, La Prensa sells more copies than either of the country’s pro-government dailies. The opposition newspaper still makes a profit and serves as a symbol of resistance to the Marxist-Leninist tendencies of the Sandinistas, Chamorro said.

Vows to Keep Publishing

“Many people say that they will leave the country when La Prensa no longer comes out,” he said. He vowed to keep publishing the newspaper and to keep fighting the censorship.

Early last year, after the government announced that elections would be held in November, opposition parties demanded an end to the censorship of La Prensa as one of the conditions for their participation in the contest.

In apparent response, a government decree in July lifted censorship of all published material except that related to national security. The government said security matters must be censored because it is battling guerrilla forces supported by the United States.

According to a study conducted by La Prensa, the amount of material censored from the paper dropped from a high of 45% in the days before the decree to 7% immediately afterward. But, according to Jaime Chamorro, the official censor soon resumed penciling out some political and economic material. In October, 16% of the newspaper’s content was censored, he said.