Assassination Of Pedro Chamorro Didn't Happen As Myth Suggests

IN the spate of personal profiles that were published after Violeta Chamorro's upset victory over Daniel Ortega, one of Nicaragua's most cherished folk myths was unfailingly presented as historical fact.

By now, almost everyone has seen ``Dona Violeta'' described as the widow of a crusading newspaper publisher who was murdered in 1978 because of his long opposition to dictator Anastasio Somoza.

From the standpoint of human interest, the story was a natural grabber. But from the standpoint of historical accuracy, it was also factually flawed.

The profile of the winner that was circulated by Reuters was representative.

Violeta Chamorro, the news service trustingly reported, ``was thrust into the limelight after the 1978 assassination of her husband, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the publisher of La Prensa newspaper and a tireless opponent of . . . Somoza.

``Chamorro was gunned down in a Managua street on orders of Somoza supporters,'' Reuters added. ``Public outrage over his death fueled a massive popular insurrection which toppled Somoza in July 1979.''

That's one way to compress history. With imagery of Somoza riding high until he committed the fatal blunder of having his most persistent critic bumped off, whereupon all of Nicaragua rose up as one and sent the dictator packing.

The way it really happened, however, was that news of Chamorro's murder left Somoza as appalled as the rest of the nation - though

admittedly not for the same righteous reasons.

``My God!'' the dictator exclaimed, realizing the repercussions that would surely follow. ``Whoever did this did me no favor.''

But the man who ordered Chamorro's death wasn't trying to do Somoza a favor. He was interested only in eliminating an adversary who threatened his own despicable livelihood.

The man behind the ambush slaying of Nicaragua's most respected publisher was Dr. Pedro Ramos, a right-wing Cuban exile who lived off the blood of the nation's poor. Literally.

Ramos was the single most prosperous exporter of human blood plasma in the Western Hemisphere. His donors were desperately poor people, who were paid a

pittance for their blood at a private clinic the locals referred to contemptuously as La Casa de Vampiros, or ``The House of Vampires.''

Health safeguards were almost non-existent at the Ramos clinic, which thrived on the social inequities of Somoza's economy. An unemployed father might

sell a pint of his blood in the morning and return to have another pint drained from his veins that very afternoon under another name. To the attendants, all poor people looked the same, anyway.

Chamorro was a political conservative and an ally of business interests that weren't part of Somoza's sprawling empire. But the exploitation practiced in the House of Vampires outraged the publisher's basic sense of decency and he attacked Ramos relentlessly in the pages of La Prensa.

When pleas, threats and even attempted bribes failed to deter Chamorro, Ramos took out a contract with a petty thug named Silvio Pena to murder him.

On the morning of Jan. 10, 1978, Pena and a pair of accomplices in a Toyota pickup stopped Chamorro on his regular route to the office and Pena carried out his end of the contract by blasting the publisher at point-blank range with a sawed-off shotgun.

It was as brutally simple as that!

La Prensa immediately blamed Somoza for the outrage and everyone accepted this charge as fact. Chamorro's huge funeral ended in rioting, which was followed by a two-week national strike.

The ``popular insurrection'' was already under way by then. But the Sandinistas benefited enormously from the wave of anti-Somoza feeling that swept the country, and most of the business people outside of the dictator's circle quickly aligned themselves with rebels they had previously held in contempt.

Only 18 months after Chamorro's murder, the Sandinistas rolled into Managua in triumph. By then, the House of Vampires was shuttered and forgotten.

As for Dr. Pedro Ramos, the man who altered the tide of history reportedly had re-settled himself comfortably in - where else? - Miami.

Could he have been one of Ollie North's donors?

Jack McKinney is a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.