Edgar Chamorro

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Edgar Chamorro Coronel, an ousted leader of the Nicaraguan rebel Contras, turned into a critic of the rebels and their Central Intelligence Agency sponsors, even cooperating with the Sandinista government in their World Court case, Nicaragua v. United States. He is a member of the prominent Chamorro family that had provided four of Nicaragua's past presidents.

Edgar Chamorro is the son of Julio Chamorro Benard and Lola Coronel Urtecho. He has six brothers and four sisters[1], and is the nephew of intellectual José Coronel Urtecho. In 1950, 19-year-old Chamorro began studying for the Jesuit priesthood, earning degrees from Ecuador's Catholic University, Saint Louis University, and Marquette University before abandoning it in 1969. He got another degree from Harvard University and founded a public relations and marketing firm, Creative Publicity, in Managua. In 1977, Anastasio Somoza Debayle appointed him to a figurehead post, as a special ambassador to the United Nations General Assembly for a year.

During the Sandinista Revolution, Chamorro sympathized with the rebels, at one point hiding Sergio Ramírez from the National Guard. But as the civil war's climax brought fierce fighting to the capital itself, fears for his family's safety led him to leave for Miami, Florida on June 17, 1979. Somoza fell a month later, but after visiting Nicaragua in September, Chamorro decided to remain in Miami.

By late 1979, Chamorro had become involved in the anti-Sandinista activities of the Miami exile community. He joined the Nicaraguan Democratic Union (UDN), formed the next year by José Francisco Cardenal, which merged into the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) in August 1981. He served on the FDN's political executive committee, which decided to replace Cardenal with a new political directorate. Chamorro was one of the members of the directorate, unveiled on December 8, 1982. With his public relations experience, he took on a spokesman role for the FDN, and based himself in Tegucigalpa, Honduras to liaison with journalists covering the war.

Chamorro was miffed when the FDN directorate, at the CIA's prompting, appointed Adolfo Calero as its president. His not-so-private mutterings that his Chamorro family was more illustrious than Calero's did not help their deteriorating relations. Chamorro was forced out in November 1984, in the fallout from the furor over the CIA's Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, labeled by the press a "murder manual." He turned against the rebel movement, even submitting an affidavit for the Sandinista government before the International Court of Justice in Nicaragua v. United States.

Chamorro is author of Packaging the Contras: A Case of C.I.A. Disinformation (1987). He is currently a teacher of Spanish and Latin at Simon's Rock College[2], and the John Dewey Academy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.