Rosario Murillo

Rosario Murillo
File:Daniel Ortega, Presidente de Nicaragua recibe a delegación del Ecuador (9571730174).jpg
Personal details
Born	(1951-06-22) June 22, 1951 Managua, Nicaragua
Nationality	Nicaraguan
Occupation	Poet, Spokeswoman

Rosario Murillo (Spanish pronunciation: [roˈsaɾjo muˈɾiʝo]; born June 22, 1951) is a Nicaraguan poet and revolutionary who fought in the Sandinista revolution in 1979. She is married to the current President Daniel Ortega and is the First Lady of Nicaragua, a title she also held in 1985 when her husband became President 6 years after the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza dynasty. Murillo serves as the Nicaraguan government's lead spokeswoman, government minister, head of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers and Communications Coordinator of the Council on Communication and Citizenry. A polyglot, she speaks Spanish, English, Italian and French; she also has the ability to read German.

Early life

Murillo was born in Managua, Nicaragua. She married Daniel Ortega and had eight children. According to Nicaraguan historian Roberto Sánchez, Murillo is maternally related to Nicaragua's national hero, Augusto Sandino.

Murillo attended high school at the Greenway Convent Collegiate School in Tiverton in Great Britain and studied Art at the Institut Anglo-Suisse Le Manoir at La Neuveville in Switzerland. Murillo possesses certificates in the English and French language, granted respectively by the University of Cambridge in Great Britain, and University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. She also attended the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua in her hometown, where she later became a language professor at the Instituto de Ciencias Comerciales and the Colegio Teresiano during 1967-1969.

Sandinista

Murillo joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1969. She provided shelter in her house, which was located in the Barrio San José Oriental in Managua, to Sandinista guerrillas, among them Tomás Borge, one of the founders of the FSLN.

During the early 1970s Murillo worked for La Prensa as an assistant to two of Nicaragua's leading political and literary figures, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro and Pablo Antonio Cuadra. Murillo was arrested in Estelí for her activities in politics. Soon after, she fled and lived for a couple of months in Panama and later in Venezuela. She later fetched up in Costa Rica where she dedicated herself completely to her political work with the FSLN. It wasn't until 1978 that she met her husband, with whom she returned to Nicaragua in 1979. From 1988 - 1990 she served as the Director of the Institute of Culture.

Published works

• Gualtayán (1975)
• Sube a nacer conmigo (1977)
• Un deber de cantar (1981)
• Amar es combatir (antología) (1982)
• En espléndidas ciudades (1985)
• Las esperanzas misteriosas (1990)
• Angel in the deluge (1992) translated from the Spanish by Alejandro Murguía. ISBN 0-87286-274-7