“Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it but it molds it to its purpose.” – Oscar Wilde
Great literature and history are forever intertwined, lovers in an eternal dance. Each feels the creative sparks and rhythms of the other. Literature uses history as a lens to craft narratives that ponder many of man’s eternal questions, while history looks to literature for aesthetic inspiration and digestible narratives. For centuries, great thinkers have used literature to enrich their understanding of historical events by focusing on people. Historians can gain new perspectives and see a richer, humanized world that illuminates personal stories by applying thematic and artistic choices of literature onto real-life events.
Macbeth tells the story of the eponymous Scottish general whose tragic flaw — vaulting ambition — leads to his downfall. One of Shakespeare’s most well-known and oft-quoted plays, Macbeth has been staged and adapted countless times, and many of its most famous lines have seeped into every corner of culture and society. Despite the depth and complexity of Macbeth’s character, popular audiences have been beguiled by his wife, Lady Macbeth. Although she appears in only a couple of scenes, her boundless ambition, evil, and calculated coldness have stunned readers and play-goers alike, and references to her character are seemingly just as commonplace as those to her husband.
For the September 23, 2021 issue of the New York Review, Stephen Kinzer, former journalist and current Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, wrote an article entitled “Ortega in His Labyrinth,” detailing the political crackdown and autocratic trends of Nicaragua’s current president, Daniel Ortega. In the article, Kinzer discusses Ortega’s wife and vice president of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo.
“Certainly the most bizarre aspect of this dictatorship is that it is not classic one-man rule but a lugubrious partnership between Ortega and Murillo,” Kinzer writes. “She is also his vice-president, heir apparent, and, many believe, the Lady Macbeth figure who decides what orders emerge from their heavily guarded compound in Managua.”
How similar are these women? Lady Macbeth, one of the finest creations of arguably the greatest author in the Western canon, is an enticing and rich character, and scholars have debated her motives and political calculus for centuries. There are many notable similarities between her and Murillo that highlight the Nicaraguan vice president’s psychology and political ambitions, but there are important differences too. The lovers dance and sway together, but they are two distinct characters.
Background
Rosario Murillo was born on June 22, 1951, in Managua, Nicaragua. Her father was a cotton farmer, but her mother was of notable descent as the grand-niece of General Augusto César Sandino, a revolutionary who fought against the United States occupation of Nicaragua from 1927 to 1933. Revolution and an interest in politics are perhaps in her very DNA.
But, first, Murillo was sent to school. Unlike most other Nicaraguans, Murillo enjoyed an upper-middle-class childhood. Her family took many vacations to Costa Rica, and she was sent overseas for schooling. After studying art at an institute in Switzerland and earning language certificates in English and French from the University of Cambridge and the University of Neuchâtel, respectively, Murillo returned to Nicaragua in the late 1960s.
At this time, Nicaragua was under the rule of an autocratic family dynasty. From 1934 to 1979, members of the Somoza family established a brutal military dictatorship, holding the presidency and other important positions within the government. Meanwhile, during the late 1960s and 1970s, Murillo had a tumultuous personal and political life. She married and divorced three times, had two children, taught at a local university, joined an opposition newspaper La Prensa as an editor’s secretary, and, most importantly, joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), a resistance group that eventually morphed into a revolutionary political party. Fittingly, the FSLN takes its name from Murillo’s great-uncle.
In 1977, Murillo met Daniel Ortega, one of the nine military leaders of the FSLN. Two years later, Ortega, the FSLN, and other dissident groups ousted the Somoza dictatorship and established a new junta government in which Ortega was one of the most powerful and influential members. At the same time, Murillo became Ortega’s de facto wife, and the pair had six children over the next ten years. Ortega had risen to power, and with him, Murillo too.
“Look like th’ innocent flower, / But be the serpent under ’t”
In Act 1 Scene 5, Lady Macbeth reads a letter from Macbeth and learns of the witches’ prophecy that he will be king. Although she doubts whether Macbeth is cruel enough to take action and kill Duncan (“Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of kindness”), Lady Macbeth beseeches him to be ruthless — to appear sweet and innocent while harboring cold-blooded ambition and cruelty in his soul.
Murillo initially plays the part that Lady Macbeth recommends. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Murillo had a limited role in the government, mainly working with the Ministry of Culture and leading the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (SACW). On the surface, the job seemed appropriate for Murillo; she was a poet herself. Murillo published a string of books of poetry in the 70s and 80s, albeit not in Shakespearean iambic pentameter. However, with Lady Macbeth-like flair, Murillo was calculating and ambitious. She reportedly quarreled with other government officials, even using the political machinery and personal influence to fire people who did not support her views.
Although Murillo generally kept a low profile during Ortega’s early years as president, boundless ambition continued to slither through her body, both at home and in the workplace. In 1998, everything would change, and Murillo’s political and personal rise would begin.
“I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this.”
In Act 1 Scene 7, Macbeth has agreed to Lady Macbeth’s counsel and is planning on murdering Duncan that night. Nevertheless, Macbeth has moral doubts, tacitly bolstering Lady Macbeth’s claim that he is too full of the milk of human kindness. Unwilling to let Macbeth watch his political future slip away simply because of inaction, Lady Macbeth mercilessly taunts him, attacking his masculinity and proclaiming that she is more masculine than he is. Even further, Lady Macbeth declares that she has felt a baby’s suckle, and yet she would smash the baby’s brain to bits for political gain.
Murillo did not murder a child. But, in effect, she came quite close. In 1998, Ortega was running for reelection when Zoilamérica Narváez Murillo — Murillo’s then thirty-year-old biological daughter and Ortega’s stepdaughter — held a press conference. Zoilamérica said that, since the age of eleven, Ortega had sexually harassed, assaulted, and raped her. A political scandal ensued, and Ortega’s future political ambitions — and, thus, Murillo’s ambitions too — hung in the balance. Murillo had a choice: to back her daughter or her husband. Rather than defend her own flesh and blood, Murillo bashed the emotional brains of her daughter, effectively disowning her and casting doubt on her credible accusations, citing that evil spirits were influencing and affecting her thinking. Murillo later added to her treachery by apologizing to her supporters that she had given birth to a daughter who betrayed Sandinismo and its political values.
Of course, Murillo knew that she was lying to both the public and herself. Murillo had made a pact with the devil, who just so happened to be the former (and future) president and her husband. Ortega’s political future depended on Murillo concealing the truth about her daughter’s accusations. Murillo put political ambition ahead of her children, discrediting her daughter and sacrificing their relationship to advance her own political future. After betraying her daughter and standing by her husband Murillo’s political power skyrocketed. In 2006, Murillo became communications director for Ortega’s reelection campaign, which he eventually won, albeit only by securing 38% of the vote. Later, she became a de facto foreign minister and held other significant positions within the government. In 2016, Ortega elected her to be his vice president, and many news publications have deemed them “co-presidents.”
In Kinzer’s opinion, Rosario’s implicit nod to Ortega is the cornerstone of their political and personal relationship in the 21st century.
“Daniel [Ortega] and Rosario [Murillo] were in a situation where each of them had something huge to give the other and without it they are nothing; with it, they are everything,” Kinzer said in an interview with The Politic. “What Ortega had to give her is power. And what she had to give him was the secret. ‘That is going to destroy you, but I am not saying it. And therefore you have to share power with me. Meanwhile, we will rule the country together.’”
Kinzer interpreted that Lady Macbeth was motivated at least in part by self-interest, propelling Macbeth into action to pursue his political ambitions so that, one day, Lady Macbeth could become queen. Murillo thus resembles Lady Macbeth in that she used her political and personal leverage over Ortega to spur him into pursuing political power so that she could share power with him and perhaps eventually succeed him and become president.
While this idea is alluring, it misrepresents Shakespeare’s text. Like almost all of Shakespeare’s histories and politically-oriented tragedies, Macbeth is adapted from a story included in Holinshed’s Chronicles, a compendium of narratives (some factual, some fictional, some flailing in between) that tells the histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland published in 1577. In the original story, Lady Macbeth spurs, bullies, and charms Macbeth into actively pursuing the crown for her selfish political ambitions. She believes that she has total control over Macbeth, so once he becomes King, she will be able to use her leverage to alter the political structure in her favor. In short, the original version of the Macbeth story in Holinshed’s Chronicles suggests that Lady Macbeth ultimately seeks the crown and is even more power-hungry than Macbeth. Shakespeare, however, purposefully omits this detail, and the folio and quarto texts do not mention or imply that she seeks the throne. Shakespeare thus complicates their relationship and forces the audience to grapple with elusive and ambiguous questions concerning free will. How much free will does Macbeth have? It is clear that Lady Macbeth actively encourages him to kill Duncan, but when does Macbeth’s ability to make his own decisions kick in? For Professor Ayesha Ramachandran, an Early Modern Europe literary scholar who is currently teaching a class on Shakespeare at Yale, readers that blame Lady Macbeth for Duncan’s death and the political chaos that ensues conduct reductive analyses and align themselves with traditionally conservative interpretations.
“There has been a lot of critique by feminist scholars about how the accusation in Holinshed’s Chronicles about Lady Macbeth’s desire for power is really a way of vindicating Macbeth himself,” Ramachandran said in an interview with The Politic. “How much of this is about the complicated bonds of a deeply patriarchal honor culture in which essentially Macbeth betrays his king? And how do you make sense of that betrayal? You make sense of it by displacing it onto somebody else: ‘but it couldn’t have been Macbeth. It couldn’t have been that he broke the kind of brotherly bond of chivalry and warriorship and soldiership, but in fact, that it was really Lady Macbeth.’”
In a similar vein, foreign policy experts are divided in their analyses of the Ortega-Murillo relationship. Some speculate that it is a true partnership or even a duumvirate where both act as co-presidents; others suggest that Murillo, because of her knowledge of Ortega’s sexual abuse, secretly makes the decisions and holds political power. In an interview with The Politic, Kinzer stated that he believes Murillo holds complete power over Ortega and that, perhaps, Ortega’s passion to return to the presidency in the 20th century was partially due to Murillo’s influence.
Others, however, do not think their relationship is quite that simple. Daniel Johnson (a pseudonym), who has requested to remain anonymous due to fear of persecution for himself and his family, is a professor of history. He thinks that Ortega still holds important political sway and that media narratives of Murillo’s supposed personal-to-political power are overplayed.
“She is the face of the government and I think this leads a lot of people to think that then she is the one who is calling the shots. I don’t think that is quite right,” Johnson said.
“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!”
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are far more alike than Ortega and Murillo in their gender roles. Ramachandran noted that, in early modern Europe, the conventional view was that men and women were biologically the same (except the vagina was an inverted penis). They differed in the composition of their Greek humors. Both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seek to amplify their cruelty, ambition, and inhumanity, all traits they assign to men. It is Lady Macbeth who initially brings up gender imagery when she cries “unsex me”, yearning to overcome her intrinsic femininity and to provide a counterexample to traditional ideas of motherhood and passive femininity. In general, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth both strive to take on the traditional characteristics of masculinity to obtain their political and personal ambitions.
For Johnson, however, Murillo and Ortega actively seek a more stereotypical bifurcation of genders in their political activity.
“I think that there is a division of labor in the policy sphere,” Johnson said. “Everything that has to do with domestic policy, such as social policies, education, healthcare, communication, is hers. But Ortega reserves for himself other areas like national defense, foreign policy, the relationship with the business elite, and other internal political affairs.”
Murillo’s political interests revolve around issues that are interpreted as more “feminine,” while Ortega’s are more “masculine.” (Plainly, the word “domestic” holds stereotypically feminine connotations for lamentable reasons that persist to this day.)
Some analysts suggest that this political division is strategic rather than merely reflecting their personal interests. As the self-appointed communications czar for the government, Murillo is the sole channel through which the administration’s messaging flows. In particular, Murillo has crafted political messaging campaigns that target women and mothers especially, emphasizing family, faith, and hope. Murillo goes out of her way to emphasize her femininity beyond her word choices. Instead of wearing austere or typically masculine professional clothes, in the past 25 years Murillo has donned colorful garments and gaudy makeup. She often wears dozens of bead bracelets, rings on her fingers, earrings, and low-cut bright pink and blue dresses. A France24 article argued that she looks more like a hippie than a traditional first lady. Murillo echoes her sartorial choices with an almost effeminized political messaging program.
Coupled with these themes is a restored Christian faith, though many experts are skeptical of how real this faith is. In 2006, Ortega won the presidency, yet without prior knowledge of the political back deals that occurred throughout 2005, one would be baffled by the hodgepodge of voters who supported him.
While Ortega had maintained a substantial base after he lost the 1998 presidential election, his constituency was never large enough to win back the presidency. So, in 2005 Ortega tactically reconnected with his Catholic faith, knowing that he needed to attract the support of the Church, a powerful institution in Nicaragua, to gain voters to win back the presidency. Ortega and Murillo had never been religious, yet they had tried to maintain a positive relationship with the Church for political reasons. Many have scrutinized Murillo for her approval of witchcraft and bizarre New Age mystic beliefs. Murillo’s spiritualism is so odd and pervasive that it led her to install colorful, illuminating concrete trees throughout Managua. These trees are supposed to, as Alma Guillermoprieto, a notable journalist who covers Latin American affairs for The New York Review, put it, “channel positive energy from the skies.”
Nevertheless, in 2006 Ortega and Murillo held a large and well-publicized Catholic wedding. Later, Ortega-Murillo and the Church made an implicit deal. The Church endorsed Ortega for president and, in return, Ortega launched a crusade against abortion, turning his back on previous beliefs. Since 2006, Murillo has carefully developed and crafted her political messaging campaign, combining Catholic pleas for charity, unity, and family with sinister displays of autocratic power, threatening dissidents who try to resist. She has shifted the political colors of the party away from red and black, which have connotations of Marxism, towards light blue, yellow, and pink that supplement her New World beliefs. In a sense, Rosario Murillo echoes Lady Macbeth’s cruel language while subverting her rejection of Renaissance-era feminism. If anything, Murillo leans into “feminine” stereotypes to secure political power and swell her and Ortega’s base.
“What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”
Lady Macbeth and Rosario Murillo are similar in many ways: both are ambitious and cruel; both have been assigned blame to vindicate their male counterparts — a subtextually sexist analysis; and both hold much power and sway over their husbands, even if the men have the ultimate authority at the end of the day.
Despite all of this, Rosario Murillo and Lady Macbeth remain fundamentally different. After Act III, Lady Macbeth virtually disappears from the play, only reappearing in Act V. By the final act, Lady Macbeth’s guilt is unbearable. She is nonsensical, emotionally and mentally unstable. At night she sleepwalks and cannot go anywhere without the light of a candle, symbolically echoing the black nighttime that haunts the entire play. Eventually, Lady Macbeth’s guilt becomes so immense that she sees that her only option is to commit suicide. While Lady Macbeth should not be forgiven for her harrowing ambition that led to the death of many secondary characters, readers find a modicum of emotional sympathy as they watch her lose her mind, wracked with guilt.
And yet, Rosario Murillo shows no signs of guilt. As her political power grew throughout the 21st century, so did her merciless cruelty. For the Nicaraguan people, it is a moot point to analyze who “calls the shots” between Ortega and Murillo or who holds the most political power. No matter its nature, their administration has become one of the most brutal and autocratic regimes in the Western Hemisphere.
In April 2018, elderly individuals, young people, public intellectuals, and more took to the streets to demonstrate against the government’s slow reaction to a forest fire that ripped through a biological reserve and a series of social security reforms that increased income and payroll taxes and decreased pensions by 5%. These initial demonstrations quickly morphed into a greater resistance movement against the Ortega-Murillo regime and its encroachment on people’s democratic freedoms. The next day, Murillo made a speech mocking the protesters and denounced their attempts to disturb the peace. The protests intensified, and the administration responded with military force. Along with pro-government paramilitary groups, they killed 42 people in the first week of April protests, adding fire to the flames.
Throughout the summer, protests persisted and swelled, resulting in the worst political violence in Nicaragua since the revolution of the 1970s. The government killed 325 people and injured at least 2,000. In a 2018 report, Amnesty International revealed that the Nicaraguan government used many lethal weapons against mostly unarmed protesters, including AK-47s, sniper rifles, rocket launchers, and armed squads. Many demonstrators were captured and tortured, and foreign journalists were pushed out of the country and persecuted. Human Rights NGOs were harassed and the administration dismissed a mission of the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. In a leaked audio message, Murillo’s secretary can be heard quoting his boss for action, “Vamos con todo,” meaning “Let’s go with everything,” eager to fight the protests with violence and malice. Currently, the EU has sanctions on Murillo, citing human rights violations.
Beyond the 2018 protests, Ortega and Murillo have attacked democratic institutions almost since the moment they regained power. They won the 2006 presidential election fairly, but in 2008 the administration disqualified two opposition parties from running in the upcoming municipal elections on trumped-up charges, raiding their offices and pressuring them to stop seeking office. The Nicaraguan people took to the streets to protest but to no avail. The Sandinista government went on to win 94 of the 146 municipalities, including Managua, the national capital. However, election fraud was widespread and painfully obvious. Independent observers were refused accreditation and could only watch outside the polling stations.
Over the subsequent decade, the administration continued to attack democratic institutions, including newspapers and other forms of media. During the 2018 protests, La Prensa, the same newspaper that Murillo worked at when she was younger, began to publish negative stories about the administration and their response to the demonstrations. Ortega and Murillo in turn began to harass their offices, journalists, and editors. Additionally, they imposed a blockade on printing materials, such as paper and ink, physically preventing publication. In 2021, their offices were raided again. Now, the administration closely watches their publication. Confidencial, another influential resistance Nicaraguan newspaper, is now forced to work in exile in Costa Rica due to significant pressure from the government.
Nicaragua is the only country in Latin America and the Western Hemisphere without a single free physical-print newspaper. Like many other countries, social media apps such as Twitter and WhatsApp have been useful tools for the resistance, but the administration’s state-media is powerful and widespread. In a recent poll, 79% of Nicaraguans said that they believe there is no freedom of political expression.
In the lead-up to the 2021 elections, Ortega and Murillo ramped up their autocratic efforts. From May to October of 2021, the administration arrested 39 people, all on trumped-up charges. They locked up everyone from student activists to the business elite to former Sandinistas (now political dissidents) to a string of potential presidential opponents. Along with these arrests, Ortega and Murillo use a bureaucratic-like spy network composed of pro-administration people to keep tabs on clandestine opposition. They have utilized these “eyes and ears” to place dissidents under house arrest and to persecute foes. One cannot overstate their cruelty or their autocratic tendencies.
“In 2021, the level of violence against the largely unarmed political movement and the level of cruelty that we see in the treatment of distant political leaders was incredibly vast,” Johnson said. “It’s one thing to throw them in jail, but do you really need to make them go three months without seeing anybody? Those decisions are unexplainable to me. And then of course the widespread use of torture and sexual violence. I don’t know if there is really a political explanation for that. They could certainly have achieved their goals with less cruelty.”
In November 2021, Ortega and Murillo handily won their reelection campaign. Of course, there were few opponents left unarrested to oppose him. The number of Nicaraguans seeking to flee the country and find refuge in the United States has increased dramatically in the past year, even compared to 2018 rates.
Both Nicaragua and Shakespeare’s story points to fundamental questions about the ultimate purpose of power. Through political maneuvering and brutal repression, the Macbeths and Ortega-Murillo have accrued immense power and control over their citizens. Yet Lady Macbeth, wracked with immense guilt, commits suicide after descending into madness, and Macbeth dies at the hands of Macduff, also falling into a delusional state and losing his grasp on reality. Although Ortega and Murillo are immune to feelings of guilt, their loyal base is decreasing in political power. Many Nicaraguans are fleeing the country, and the ones who remain are growing increasingly unhappy with the regime. A Gallup poll sponsored by Confiencial revealed that Ortega-Murillo won 27% of the vote in the 2021 election, rather than the 75% assigned to them by the Supreme Electoral Council. What is the point of power if it withers away, like it has for Ortega and Murillo? Or, is the dogged pursuit of power justified if it withers you away, like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?
Attempting to find analogues for real-world events in literature can be illuminating but has its limitations. Still, analyzing Lady Macbeth sheds light on Murillo’s psychology and helps us identify her most chilling characteristics. More importantly, however, comparing the two characters reveals what is different about them, and allows us to be inspired by literature while still taking into account the political niceties that veer from literature’s finely crafted narratives. For Murillo and Lady Macbeth, their harrowing similarities outweigh their notable differences. Most importantly for the Nicaraguan people, understanding Murillo in the context of Lady Macbeth helps us recognize the murderous viciousness that binds both figures together and fully makes us aware of the danger and cruelty of Murillo’s actions. On February 14, the New York Times ran a misleading headline that read, “Nicaragua Seizes Universities, Inching Toward Dictatorship.” Nicaragua has reached a dictatorship already, in large part because of the Lady Macbeth-like Murillo.