Speaker 1: This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Just a warning, this podcast includes adult language and situations,
Speaker 1: references to drug use, violence, and some things that will
Speaker 1: be very hard to listen to.
Speaker 2: They bring us all together and they take us outside
Speaker 2: into a courtyard and stand us up against the wall.
Speaker 2: This is a firing squad.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Journalista Podcast. I'm Steve StEB your host.
Speaker 1: This is a memoir about the dangerous and improbable life
Speaker 1: of Cookie. Hood party girl, mus mother, journalist warrior. Cookie
Speaker 1: is a classic broad right out of a Bogart movie.
Speaker 1: She looks like she's been through some shit, with a deep,
Speaker 1: coarse voice and a street tough demeanor. She's not famous,
Speaker 1: but she did break the biggest story of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard of, the Iran Contra scandal. It was
Speaker 1: like Watergate nine to eleven, Trump Russia January sixth, all
Speaker 1: rolled into one big clusterfuck now. To be clear, and
Speaker 1: Cookie will tell you this. There were a lot of
Speaker 1: journalists who claim a piece of the Iran Contra story.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of threads to unwind. Let me
Speaker 1: give you a quick overview of that story. Wait on
Speaker 1: second thought, I think I'll let Fox's American dad do it.
Speaker 3: In the eighties there was Cold War trauma. We bought
Speaker 3: the commis inside picker our friends with a contrus. Freedom
Speaker 3: was then Prussolas sent them lots of money for guns
Speaker 3: and land muns. Congress to the Contra money floor just
Speaker 3: because they moved a teeny bit of floor. But then
Speaker 3: a hero claims fort His name was Oliver North.
Speaker 1: Ian Reagan went.
Speaker 4: Around the sissy Congress.
Speaker 3: North North, you see, Nor secretly sold mistress to a
Speaker 3: harmless country called Iran that would always be a grateful ally.
Speaker 3: Then he gave the prophets to the conference genius.
Speaker 1: It all blew up in their faces. You've probably seen
Speaker 1: the iconic image of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North in his
Speaker 1: snappy uniform with his hand in the air, standing before
Speaker 1: a joint session of Congress investigating the Iran Contra scandal.
Speaker 5: Do you solemn this way that in the testimony you're
Speaker 5: about to give will be the tooth, the whole tooth,
Speaker 5: and nothing but the truth.
Speaker 1: So help you God, I do, please me shill. Some
Speaker 1: of you might know him from his short tenure as
Speaker 1: the head of the NRA or frequent appearances on Fox News.
Speaker 1: You might remember President Reagan saying this on your television
Speaker 1: back in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 6: First, let me say I take full responsibility from my
Speaker 6: own actions and for those of my administration. As angry
Speaker 6: as I may be about that activities undertaken without my knowledge,
Speaker 6: I am still accountable for those activities.
Speaker 3: But the sales were uncovered by the press. Step Reagan,
Speaker 3: the North whale began to stress because what they did
Speaker 3: was technically high thereason.
Speaker 1: In the end, several dozen Reagan administration officials were indicted
Speaker 1: with eleven convictions, including the Secretary of Defense, two national
Speaker 1: security advisors, the Assistant Secretary of State, chief of the
Speaker 1: CIA's Central American Task Force, chief of Covert Ops CIA,
Speaker 1: former Air Force Major General Richard Seacourt, and of course
Speaker 1: Oliver North. Sounds like justice will not exactly the next
Speaker 1: president and former CIA director under Nixon, George H. W. Bush,
Speaker 1: pardon all of them. The president's cronies walked sound familiar.
Speaker 4: Oh North, he's a soldier and a hero and the lost,
Speaker 4: and now he's on Fox news News.
Speaker 1: I fucking love that. We already know the end of
Speaker 1: the story. But that's not the good part. It's the journey.
Speaker 1: Cookie's journey always at the crossroads of history, one way
Speaker 1: or another. So how does a half American, half Nicaraguin
Speaker 1: party girl from New Orleans with absolutely no journalism experience
Speaker 1: break the biggest story of the eighties. That's what journalista
Speaker 1: is all about. I'm here right now to introduce my
Speaker 1: very very good friend. She's like my family member, Cookie Hood.
Speaker 1: Good Morning's stay, Good morning Cookie. I want to talk
Speaker 1: for a minute about how this started between us. I
Speaker 1: got a call from a friend who said that they
Speaker 1: had a friend who had a crazy story that would
Speaker 1: be a great movie. I looked you up. I put
Speaker 1: Cookie Hood in Google and it went nowhere.
Speaker 2: For me, which led you to believe Eve, I thought
Speaker 2: you were.
Speaker 1: Full of shit. I get a box in the mail.
Speaker 1: It's from Cookie Hood, and I'm like, hmm, what could
Speaker 1: this be. I opened this.
Speaker 2: Box and it was a treasure troth it was. It
Speaker 2: was filled with photographs, press passes, newspaper clipping.
Speaker 1: Letters from famous people, singing your prayers words.
Speaker 2: I sent you the receipts.
Speaker 1: Yes, and you had a picture of like laying on
Speaker 1: a couch next to Ed Bradley, and you know, all
Speaker 1: kinds of Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter Carter. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: fun story to tell, and I'm just really glad we're
Speaker 1: doing this together. Are you excited.
Speaker 2: I'm stoked, stoked, I'm stoked. Mike Wallace once said to me, Cookie,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna give you the best piece of advice. Always
Speaker 2: cover the story, never be the story, and as you'll
Speaker 2: be able to tell in this podcast, I was the
Speaker 2: story a lot of times, so I was breaking Mike's
Speaker 2: number one rule. But he said to me a few times,
Speaker 2: you know what, it's you. It's okay that you're the story.
Speaker 1: You should be the story. All right, Well, let's get
Speaker 1: into this before Cookie changes the world. She has to
Speaker 1: go through some serious bullshit. Let me take you back
Speaker 1: to December twenty seventh, nineteen seventy four. Cookie is just
Speaker 1: sixteen years old.
Speaker 2: One of my friends. We went to his mountain retreat
Speaker 2: where his family lived. He decided to bring back a
Speaker 2: pound of weed to take back to Monagua for New Years.
Speaker 2: And I'm going to be getting dropped off in my neighborhood,
Speaker 2: which is a very wealthy, cloistered neighborhood. We're driving in.
Speaker 2: It's after dark as we're passing in front of the house.
Speaker 2: Coming in the other direction are two taxis, poor people taxis.
Speaker 2: They stop in front of the house and we're side
Speaker 2: to side with them. All the doors fly open. Masked
Speaker 2: gunman jump out, They shoot the chauffeur's bodyguard. We're all
Speaker 2: looking at each other like, what the fuck is going up?
Speaker 1: This is how the New York Times described it.
Speaker 2: The next day, leptist gorillas invaded a Christmas party for
Speaker 2: the United States ambassador and seized about twenty prominent Nicaraguans
Speaker 2: as hostages to be exchange for political prisoners.
Speaker 1: For a little context, I turned to Justin Woolf, PhD,
Speaker 1: professor of Latin American history at Tulane University right here
Speaker 1: in New Orleans. His first book was The Everyday Nation, State,
Speaker 1: Community and Ethnicity in nineteenth century Nicaragua. That's a mouthful.
Speaker 1: He knows his shit, but he looks a lot like
Speaker 1: the bass player from zz Top.
Speaker 7: It was a Christmas party in honor of the US
Speaker 7: Ambassador to Nicaragua, Shelton Turner, and so the lot of
Speaker 7: diplomatic big wigs, a lot of members of the Somosa
Speaker 7: family and government were all there. It was a big
Speaker 7: celebration in the midst of kind of tragedy and misery
Speaker 7: all around. I've got the earthquake in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 7: and so the party is a let them eat cake
Speaker 7: kind of moment. Here's an event that will highlight for
Speaker 7: the Santinistas kind of terribleness of the regime. It allows
Speaker 7: them to make a splash. It allows them to convince
Speaker 7: the regime that they can strike a blow. Now, as
Speaker 7: it turned out, the US ambassador who had been there
Speaker 7: had left the party early.
Speaker 1: And for Cookie, it wasn't just a bunch of big
Speaker 1: wigs and politicians. It was personal.
Speaker 2: I had family, aunts, uncles, neighbors in that party. So
Speaker 2: Moses starts sending all the guardia, all the soldiers there
Speaker 2: to surround that house. And there was some shooting going
Speaker 2: back and forth, and we're like, man, this is some
Speaker 2: serious shit.
Speaker 1: The soldiers gun's drawn, pull them out of their car
Speaker 1: at gunpoint, throw them to the ground, and begin searching
Speaker 1: it for weapons. The friend who brought the weed, he's
Speaker 1: shitting his pants about Now.
Speaker 2: My cousin says, don't say anything. I'm going to do
Speaker 2: the talking. Don't speak Spanish. We want them to think
Speaker 2: that you're just an American. And we see this guy
Speaker 2: pull out, I mean, the biggest bag of weed.
Speaker 1: The Samosa garsmen think these kids were sent there to
Speaker 1: be a distraction from the Sandinista commandos attacking the party.
Speaker 2: My other friend and my other cousin, who were underground Sandinistas,
Speaker 2: they knew they were fucked. They took the four of us,
Speaker 2: pushed us into a military vehicle, took the weed, and
Speaker 2: just whisked us away.
Speaker 1: The soldiers take them to the same prison where the
Speaker 1: guy who brought the weeds brother was murdered by the
Speaker 1: Guardia a few years earlier.
Speaker 2: And he starts crying in the vehicle, saying, we're never
Speaker 2: going to get out of this alive.
Speaker 1: Samosa declares martial law and no one can give any
Speaker 1: orders except the dictator himself.
Speaker 2: Being arrested was a shock in and of itself, because
Speaker 2: I was always in a family and in a bubble
Speaker 2: that nothing could ever.
Speaker 6: Happen to me.
Speaker 2: All you have to do is make a call, you're
Speaker 2: out of trouble. But here I am being thrown into
Speaker 2: a prison. I had only heard at that time that
Speaker 2: you know, women were raped, and you know whatever.
Speaker 1: This prison is a very dangerous place. Cookie and her
Speaker 1: friends are interrogated through the night. The Guardia trying to
Speaker 1: get these teenagers to spill the beans on the Sandinista attackers.
Speaker 1: Then some fucking crazy shit happens.
Speaker 8: There's been a big kidnapping on the West Coast. The
Speaker 8: victim is Patricia Hurst, the daughter of newspaper executive Randolph
Speaker 8: Hurst and a granddaughter of the legendary William Randolph Hearst.
Speaker 9: Patricia Hurst is nineteen at a sophomore at Berkeley. She
Speaker 9: and her fiancee were in her apartment near the campus
Speaker 9: last night when a woman and two armed men burst in,
Speaker 9: beat and bound her fiancee and a neighbor dragged Patricia
Speaker 9: down the stairs, threw her into the trunk of a car,
Speaker 9: and drove off.
Speaker 10: The Hurst newspaper heiress has been missing for nineteen months.
Speaker 10: First she was kidnapped, then she announced that she had
Speaker 10: joined ranks with her kidnapper, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
Speaker 10: She was later indicted in connection with the San Francisco
Speaker 10: bank hold up and labeled a fugitive.
Speaker 2: The Samosa guardsmen were not the brightest people, and this
Speaker 2: commandante just got in his head that I was Patricia
Speaker 2: Hurst because she was a wall at the time. I'm
Speaker 2: a white American. He just thinks he's hit the lottery.
Speaker 1: It was a story that dominated the news for a
Speaker 1: couple of years. Pretty girl, daughter of a famous newspaper tycoon,
Speaker 1: kidnapped and turned into a domestic terrorist. And to be honest,
Speaker 1: she did look a lot like Cookie.
Speaker 2: Once that commandante started saying, it's Spanish. Yes, she's Patricia Hurst.
Speaker 2: The Spanish just came out of me. I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: you idiot, I'm not Patricia Hurst. And then he says,
Speaker 2: this bitch speaks better Spanish than you and I she
Speaker 2: speaks like a local. After being interrogated all night, then
Speaker 2: we're thrown into cells. We are now realizing that our
Speaker 2: name and our status means shit. No name throwing I
Speaker 2: know him, you know, we're friends of Samosa, We're related
Speaker 2: to some didn't mean shit, so we knew we were
Speaker 2: in trouble. They bring us all together and they take
Speaker 2: us outside into a courtyard and stand us up against
Speaker 2: the wall. And I'm just looking at this and I'm like,
Speaker 2: this doesn't look good. This is a firing squad. And
Speaker 2: then that one guy, the one that brought the weed,
Speaker 2: just still crying. We're never going to get out of
Speaker 2: this is the lie. My brother was killed here and
Speaker 2: I was like, can you just shut the fuck up, dude.
Speaker 1: The soldiers raise their weapons ready to fire. Commandante gives
Speaker 1: the teenagers the one more chance to confess what they
Speaker 1: know about the Sandinistas. And remember, these kids don't know anything.
Speaker 2: My friends and family they know I'm wild and crazy,
Speaker 2: but no one, absolutely no one is going to believe
Speaker 2: that I was killed by a firing squad.
Speaker 1: Wow, We'll be right back. Welcome back, terrorist attacks, hostages, murder,
Speaker 1: firing squads. Before we find out what happened to cookie,
Speaker 1: a little background. The United States had occupied Nicaragua for
Speaker 1: years and left in nineteen twenty five after putting the
Speaker 1: first Samosa dictator in power, Augusto Sandino, the opposition leader,
Speaker 1: says no way, and all hell breaks loose. The US
Speaker 1: Marines come back. Sandino wages a gorilla war and is
Speaker 1: successful and pushes the Marines out of Nicaragua. I have
Speaker 1: a question for Justin Wolf, what the hell happened after.
Speaker 7: The US Marines leave and there's this kind of effort
Speaker 7: to negotiate a peace and for the Sandinistas. Under Sandino
Speaker 7: to put down their arms and kind of come into
Speaker 7: the government. There's this key meeting with the new government
Speaker 7: to kind of negotiate and to the Saninistas in a sense.
Speaker 7: But at the end of that event, as Sandino and
Speaker 7: his key lieutenants are leaving this kind of negotiation party, is.
Speaker 1: There an agreement made?
Speaker 7: There there's an agreement, but Somosa doesn't believe that the
Speaker 7: agreement will hold. Somosa orders his men to detain Sandino,
Speaker 7: his brother, as well as a couple of his other
Speaker 7: key lieutenants. They take them out to today where the
Speaker 7: international airport in Monagua is and they execute them.
Speaker 1: Sandino's murder creates the Sandinista movement as we know it today,
Speaker 1: but it's his defiance and courage standing up against the
Speaker 1: US occupiers and wealthy elites that makes him a hero
Speaker 1: to the poor in the working class.
Speaker 7: The Santainistas of the sixties and seventies. They are going
Speaker 7: to kind of recuperate the legend of Sandino and the
Speaker 7: vision of the Somosas as the kind of implacable enemy
Speaker 7: the people.
Speaker 1: Back to the firing squad. No Cookie and her friends
Speaker 1: didn't die. The story doesn't end in front of a
Speaker 1: firing squad. They shoot over their heads, scaring the crap
Speaker 1: out of them.
Speaker 2: My family in Generals were trying to get through to
Speaker 2: Samosa to tell them let the kids out. We want
Speaker 2: to go pick them up and bring them home. We
Speaker 2: don't know that that's happening. That comen Dante, who at
Speaker 2: that point knew that we were going to be released,
Speaker 2: that we really were who we were friends of. Samosa
Speaker 2: just said, I'm gonna fuck with these kids, you know,
Speaker 2: scare the fuck out of them so that they don't
Speaker 2: fuck with us anymore.
Speaker 1: How did it feel when they were pointing guns at
Speaker 1: you like they were going to shoot you?
Speaker 2: I just kept saying, this can't be happening. It's like
Speaker 2: those movies where somebody who's innocent is being accused of
Speaker 2: being guilty, but he's not, and he spends the whole
Speaker 2: movie trying to convince the people that he's not guilty.
Speaker 2: That went on for a few hours. Of course, I'm
Speaker 2: thinking I'm talking the soldiers out of shooting us.
Speaker 1: Was that the first time you ever had a gun
Speaker 1: pointed at you?
Speaker 2: Hmmm? Maybe, maybe not, who knows. It was definitely a shocker.
Speaker 1: The next day The New York Times reported on the
Speaker 1: results of the negotiations.
Speaker 11: The Nicaraguan government agreed today to release twenty six political
Speaker 11: prisoners and fly them to Cuba in exchange for the
Speaker 11: lives of a group of prominent politicians and business leaders
Speaker 11: seized by leftist gorillas at a Christmas party here Friday night.
Speaker 11: A government spokesman said that the eight gorillas and the
Speaker 11: freed political prisoners are all believed to be members of
Speaker 11: the Sandinista National Liberation Front. The gorillas had also demanded
Speaker 11: a five million dollar ransom.
Speaker 2: Somosa, as ruthless as he was, he had one weakness,
Speaker 2: and his weakness were his friends and his family. So
Speaker 2: he was not gonna lie wow his friends or family
Speaker 2: that were in that house to be harmed. A smart
Speaker 2: dictator would have killed everyone in that house, Sandinista's, the
Speaker 2: hostages would have been killed. Everybody would have been killed.
Speaker 2: So he created the future of his own demise.
Speaker 1: Something tells me Cookie would have been a good dictator.
Speaker 1: So her family finally gets through to Samosa, and Cookie
Speaker 1: and her friends are released. She's driven home, back to
Speaker 1: the neighborhood where the whole thing started. She gets there
Speaker 1: just as the bus arrives to pick up the commandos.
Speaker 1: It's filled with the recently released Sandinista political prisoners and
Speaker 1: the million dollars they got from Somosa.
Speaker 2: So again my vehicle crosses with this vehicle and I
Speaker 2: could see these political prisoners, and a couple of them,
Speaker 2: actually quite a few of them later became very famous
Speaker 2: and very important to our story.
Speaker 1: Do you want to name one of them?
Speaker 2: Danielle Ortego.
Speaker 1: Ortego goes on to become the leader of the Sandinistas
Speaker 1: and head of the new government after the revolution, and
Speaker 1: of course public enemy number one to the Reagan administration.
Speaker 1: Professor Wolf tells us why this is so important.
Speaker 7: The last major Saninista offensive is in nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 7: and it's a disaster. Almost every Saninista member who's engaged
Speaker 7: in that event dies. It's like really bad. So you
Speaker 7: have this very successfully planned action. You have the success
Speaker 7: of getting leaders from within the Saninistas who'd been captured out.
Speaker 7: You get money, which is key if you're buying arms
Speaker 7: and all of that kind of stuff. Plus they've gotten
Speaker 7: their message out in public. Censorship is one of the
Speaker 7: key tools right of the dictatorship. There might be things
Speaker 7: going on there may be opposition groups, there may be
Speaker 7: plans to change the country, but if nobody knows about
Speaker 7: it because of censorship, you're kind of stuck.
Speaker 2: Now that underground revolution that was going on has now
Speaker 2: come to light. And funny story, one of the hooded
Speaker 2: guys that was in that house, My aunt, who I
Speaker 2: was staying with at the time, was one of the hostages.
Speaker 2: She asked this hooded terrorist, can I go to the bathroom?
Speaker 2: And he answers her, of course, Donia Telma, of course,
Speaker 2: missus Thelma. He knew her, he knew who she was,
Speaker 2: and she recognized the voice. Didn't know who the voice was,
Speaker 2: but knew that voice. That's when it started to become
Speaker 2: obvious that there were some rich kids involved in this revolution,
Speaker 2: all of them friends of mine. A lot were killed,
Speaker 2: and so it's becoming obvious not just to me, but
Speaker 2: to everyone that there's something brewing here. It isn't just poor,
Speaker 2: humble people that are in the mountains fighting the revolutions
Speaker 2: now in the city.
Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about the crazy childhood you had.
Speaker 2: Well, my father was an American, my mother was from Nicaragua.
Speaker 2: My dad was an executive with the airlines.
Speaker 1: Tucker airlines.
Speaker 2: It was an El Salvador airlines that flew throughout Central America.
Speaker 2: The journalists used to call it take a chance airlines
Speaker 2: because you never knew. And my mother stay at home,
Speaker 2: but she came from a very, very wealthy family in Nicaragua.
Speaker 2: So I was raised in both countries, and the summer
Speaker 2: vacation times were different in each country. Here in Nicaragua,
Speaker 2: so I was literally in school all year long here
Speaker 2: and there. I guess the biggest difference was when I
Speaker 2: would be living here. Even though we lived well, you know,
Speaker 2: do your chores.
Speaker 5: You have to do this.
Speaker 2: You have to be able to know how to work.
Speaker 2: Whereas on my mother's side of the family and living
Speaker 2: in Central America, it was all maids and chauffeurs and
Speaker 2: nannies and cooks. But I managed somehow to always find
Speaker 2: the party.
Speaker 1: And your family was close to the dictator Simosa.
Speaker 2: Absolutely I played with his kids. I played with the
Speaker 2: children of generals. And obviously my family and friends were
Speaker 2: all from that one percent that owned and had everything.
Speaker 2: Ninety nine percent had nothing, but I didn't see it.
Speaker 2: We lived in a bubble, and the bubble was parties
Speaker 2: on the weekends. If you were dating someone. You couldn't
Speaker 2: go out unless you had a chaperone, sort of antebellum
Speaker 2: thing before the Civil War. It was wonderful because I
Speaker 2: was living and catching the tail end of that era,
Speaker 2: because things were going to change.
Speaker 8: When the earthquake hit, Nicaraguan officials in Miami today issued
Speaker 8: an urgent appeal for blood donors. They said there's an
Speaker 8: immediate need for twenty to twenty five thousand pints of
Speaker 8: whole blood for the victims of Saturday's earthquake in Monogua.
Speaker 8: The United States sending three million dollars in food, medicine, tents,
Speaker 8: purification equipment another aid. Looting continue today and what's left
Speaker 8: for the Nicaraguan capital with troops doing little or nothing
Speaker 8: to stop it.
Speaker 12: Ninety percent of the city has been utterly destroyed. Even
Speaker 12: the few tall buildings which do remain will soon be
Speaker 12: brought down by dynamiting. There is not a single building
Speaker 12: in the downtown section safe for occupancy. The city will
Speaker 12: be leveled, as explained by Nicaragua's former president and now
Speaker 12: Commander in chief of the Armed Forces, Anastasio Somosa.
Speaker 7: So the capital as you now know it will cease
Speaker 7: to exist.
Speaker 4: That is right.
Speaker 5: We are going to live in tents until we make
Speaker 5: an appreciation of the situation and decide.
Speaker 8: The government will have to decide.
Speaker 1: What they're going to do.
Speaker 7: Even though it's a disaster, it's really important for the Sanonistas. Now,
Speaker 7: what we have is the Sananistas who have really shown themselves,
Speaker 7: I think and beyond anyone else, is actually caring about
Speaker 7: the kind of post earthquake disaster, helping people setting up
Speaker 7: soup kitchens, but also organizing people right, trying to say like, look,
Speaker 7: we are never going to get to a better place
Speaker 7: until Somosa is gone.
Speaker 2: The US started sending supplies, you know, for instance, peanut butter.
Speaker 2: I mean, nobody knew what peanut butter was. The poor people.
Speaker 2: They started sending morphine. A lot of people in the
Speaker 2: wealthy families got hooked on morphine. Drugs just blew up
Speaker 2: with the rich kids. But I was already doing drugs
Speaker 2: here in New Orleans. But when I'd go to Nicaragua
Speaker 2: before the earthquake, I was still being the good girl.
Speaker 1: Everything was broken, including the bubble that protected Cookies family
Speaker 1: and the oligarchs that had flourished under the Samosa regime,
Speaker 1: but they were still holding on trying to pretend like
Speaker 1: everything was the same, like the earthquake never really happened,
Speaker 1: business as usual.
Speaker 2: The second change came about every August. First was a
Speaker 2: holidayy in Nicaragua. It was a religious holiday where rich
Speaker 2: and poor didn't work, rich and poor drank.
Speaker 1: To excess grades and that's the.
Speaker 2: Grades horseback riding. But of course only the rich people
Speaker 2: were allowed to be on the horses and on the floats,
Speaker 2: and the poor people, who were allowed to drink would
Speaker 2: be on the periphery watching. They were partying, but they
Speaker 2: were watching us partying to an excess and to a
Speaker 2: degree that they would never have been able to.
Speaker 1: These prades like their own, like little marti gras type
Speaker 1: of things, like.
Speaker 2: A morna guard thing. But you're on these carts, you know,
Speaker 2: that were decorated, and you're just going through the city
Speaker 2: and it's surrounded by poor people.
Speaker 1: The Associated Press describes it like this.
Speaker 13: The ten days of festivities have their roots in the
Speaker 13: eighteen eight vy five discovery of the three inch tall
Speaker 13: statue of Santo Domingo de Guzman, also known as Saint
Speaker 13: dominicue Guzman, the founder of the Dominican Religious Order. A
Speaker 13: peasant was cutting down a tree in what was then
Speaker 13: the outskirts of Manawa when he found the tiny rendering
Speaker 13: of the saint with a tonsure and beard, clad in
Speaker 13: white ropes and a black cape. The statue of faith Will,
Speaker 13: referred to as Papito, is protected by a glass bell
Speaker 13: and carried through throngs of people on the street during
Speaker 13: the celebration all of us Canador Papito, says Carlos Membreno,
Speaker 13: a robust, gray haired transportation worker who sports tattoos on
Speaker 13: both arms. It doesn't matter what do you do for
Speaker 13: a living. He doesn't care about your money, education, or work.
Speaker 13: He only cares about your promise.
Speaker 2: And I think it was that day that I started
Speaker 2: to see the faces of poor people, actually see them
Speaker 2: so literally.
Speaker 1: You're on a float in a parade that was all
Speaker 1: rich people.
Speaker 2: Partying and several floats, like you said, like a parade, and.
Speaker 1: The audience for that are the poor people.
Speaker 2: It's always been that way, but that particular year, because
Speaker 2: there had been some shootings and some revolutionary movement in
Speaker 2: the mountains, Samosa was starting to do a crackdown and decided,
Speaker 2: of course, our rich people and friends and family can't
Speaker 2: be involved. It has to be the poor people who
Speaker 2: really had more to gain by a revolution. So that
Speaker 2: particular year, Samosa prohibited the sale of liquor to poor people. So, yes,
Speaker 2: they were all from work, and yes they were lining
Speaker 2: the streets, but they couldn't drink. And here we are,
Speaker 2: the rich kids, privileged kids, drinking. We're on these carts,
Speaker 2: we're driving through the city and all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: something looks very out of place for me. And I
Speaker 2: asked someone, Christiana Chamorro, who you'll find out later who
Speaker 2: she is. I said, what's wrong. Why aren't people on
Speaker 2: the street drinking? She goes, oh, you did, And here
Speaker 2: alcohol sales were prohibited for the poor. I had already
Speaker 2: been seeing their faces and the anger or the unfairness
Speaker 2: that they were feeling. I said, stop this cart. I'm
Speaker 2: getting off, and they were like, what are you talking about? Here,
Speaker 2: I have another drink. It's going to let me off
Speaker 2: this cart.
Speaker 1: Now, change is coming. A respected journalist is murdered, and
Speaker 1: Nicaragua will never be the same. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Welcome back. We've talked about Cookie's younger life and the
Speaker 1: origins of the dark divisions that created the Nicaragua we
Speaker 1: know today. But this segment is about a crime, a
Speaker 1: heinous act that changed the course of history and cleared
Speaker 1: the path that Cookie never saw coming.
Speaker 8: Romero Romes King Las noticiace in lacion Al La s
Speaker 8: Sinato and doctor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro Cardinali.
Speaker 1: That was Monagua evening news. Pedro Chimorro had been murdered.
Speaker 1: This is what The New York Times said when it happened.
Speaker 11: Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, an editor known for his outspoken opposition
Speaker 11: to the dictatorship of General Anastasio Simosa de Baile, was
Speaker 11: shot to death today in downtown Monagua. The fifty three
Speaker 11: year old editor and publisher of La Prinsa of Monagua,
Speaker 11: the country's only opposition paper, was shot eighteen times by
Speaker 11: three men in a car who forced his auto to
Speaker 11: the curb. Mister Chimorro died on the way to a hospital.
Speaker 1: It's a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Who
Speaker 1: killed Pedro Joaquin Chamorro. Before we get into that, who
Speaker 1: was he and why does he matter?
Speaker 2: Somosa had a mortal enemy. He was a newspaper man.
Speaker 2: His name was Pedro Juaking Chamorro. He was married also
Speaker 2: to a well known society lady Violetta Barrios.
Speaker 1: The Chamorrow's were close family friends, and Violetta became Cookie's
Speaker 1: aunt by marriage just a few years later. Justin Wolf
Speaker 1: gives us a little background.
Speaker 7: The head of the oldest kind of most traditional elite
Speaker 7: family in Nicaragua and really a revered business, intellectual and
Speaker 7: social figure in Nicaragua. The Chamoto family had really been
Speaker 7: important since the eighteenth century in Nicaragua. Chamorro's are presidents
Speaker 7: twice in the nineteenth century again in the twentieth century.
Speaker 7: It's one of those long kind of political dynas families,
Speaker 7: right if we think about the U assets like the
Speaker 7: Kennedys or the Bush family.
Speaker 14: Members of the Congress. It is my great privilege, and
Speaker 14: I deem it a high honor and personal pleasure to
Speaker 14: present to you her Excellency, Yoletta Chamorrow, President of the
Speaker 14: Republic of Nicaragua.
Speaker 1: That was in nineteen ninety one, Violetta Chamorrow, the first
Speaker 1: woman president of Nicaragua, speaking to a joint session of
Speaker 1: the US Congress. If you recall, we met Chamorro's daughter
Speaker 1: Christiana on the parade float with Cookie a few minutes ago.
Speaker 1: They were childhood friends. She was running for president last
Speaker 1: year in Nicaragua and in a fair election the likely
Speaker 1: winner then Daniel Ortega, went full dictator.
Speaker 15: High profile opposition leaders arrested one by one in just
Speaker 15: the last few days, months before a crucial election in
Speaker 15: which strongman President Daniel Ortega is trying to cling to
Speaker 15: his fourteen years of power. As fears grow, this is
Speaker 15: only going to get worse.
Speaker 16: Earlier this week, the pro government prosecutor had charged tomorrow,
Speaker 16: Nicaragua's most competitive presidential candidate with alleged money laundering and
Speaker 16: what it termed as ideological deviations.
Speaker 1: Her crime running for president against Danielle Ortega. She was
Speaker 1: under house arrest until a few weeks ago. That's some
Speaker 1: serious fascist bullshit.
Speaker 7: By the mid to late seventies, Chamorro is not only
Speaker 7: an opponent of Somosa, but he is looking around and
Speaker 7: he is looking, for example, at the Sandinistas, who some
Speaker 7: of his children are members of, and seeing them. Eventually,
Speaker 7: by nineteen seventy seven is probably the only viable path
Speaker 7: forward out of a Somosa run Nicaragua. That's a huge
Speaker 7: shift right the patriarch ar of traditional conservative politics in
Speaker 7: Nicaragua sees the Santinistas not only as viable as a
Speaker 7: meaningful and real opposition, but as actually the only one
Speaker 7: that is organized enough and has a clear enough plan
Speaker 7: to actually defeat Samosa.
Speaker 1: Okay, so who killed Pedro Chimorro. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of suspects, in fact, just about everybody. Let's start with
Speaker 1: the obvious choice, the brutal dictator, anastasi of Simosa. He
Speaker 1: clearly had no problem killing his own people, and like
Speaker 1: any good strong man, he made a lot of people disappear.
Speaker 1: But why would he murder a high profile journalist from
Speaker 1: one of the most prominent and beloved families of Nicaragua.
Speaker 1: Chimorrow decided to go after Simosa in his newspaper Loprenza,
Speaker 1: on television and his speeches. And remember, this is a
Speaker 1: clash of two dynasties, one that dates back to the
Speaker 1: seventeen hundreds with enormous historical and political clout, and one
Speaker 1: with a history of oppression, violence, torture and murder. Something
Speaker 1: had to give.
Speaker 2: So what happened to this person who wanted freedom?
Speaker 5: Well, they murdered him. Who murdered him?
Speaker 2: Forces?
Speaker 1: That was the voice of Pedro Chimorro's wife, violetta future
Speaker 1: president of Nicaragua. Was she right? Somosa clearly had motive.
Speaker 1: Chamorrow had the power and the voice. He was a
Speaker 1: threat to the regime. But Cookie, who grew up knowing
Speaker 1: them both, who as a child actually played with their children,
Speaker 1: has a different perspective.
Speaker 2: I don't think better working ever thought that Samosa would
Speaker 2: kill him. They spoke to each other, they saw each
Speaker 2: other at social affairs. They needed each other. Tomorrow needed
Speaker 2: Simosa to be the bad guy. Simosa needed Chamur to
Speaker 2: be the opposition. As long as it looked like a
Speaker 2: dictator allowed opposition voices to be heard through newspaper and
Speaker 2: some radio stations, it made him look less iron fisted dictator.
Speaker 2: So neither one of them feared their lives from the other.
Speaker 1: Not exactly sculpatory evidence, but if it wasn't Samosa, who
Speaker 1: else had a motive to murder Tomorrow?
Speaker 7: He is being vocal in the press and in his
Speaker 7: own speeches about Samosa, but also families that are in
Speaker 7: the larger circle of the samosas his word, critiquing those
Speaker 7: families and pointing out the crimes or the errors, or
Speaker 7: the violence or the corruption of those families is viewed
Speaker 7: as a personal attack for Tomoto. It was like identifying
Speaker 7: the cancer that needed to be removed. And so of
Speaker 7: course the Samosa's overall, the whole family, the in laws,
Speaker 7: and then the key kind of acted families that were
Speaker 7: part of the larger Samosa circle. They all despised Tomoto.
Speaker 7: They despise being pointed out and lifted up as the
Speaker 7: bane of Nicaragua.
Speaker 2: We owned everything car dealerships, banks, restaurants, shops. Poor people
Speaker 2: didn't own anything.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: There's a funny story of Tomosa driving in the countryside
Speaker 2: and he says to his driver, Oh, that's really a
Speaker 2: pretty ranch. Who owns that? And the driver turns around
Speaker 2: he says, your excellency, you own it.
Speaker 14: Dan.
Speaker 1: Rather doing a piece for sixty minutes, ask Someamosa about
Speaker 1: as many holdings general.
Speaker 5: I've been told that your wealth is in the neighborhood
Speaker 5: of five hundred million dollars and the list is very
Speaker 5: long of Sosa interested you and your family owned You
Speaker 5: own the National Airline? No, we're a shareholders of it.
Speaker 5: You're a major shareholder in the airline. Yes, you own
Speaker 5: the National shipping line. Yes, I founded that, including your
Speaker 5: own port Port Tomoso. Also, we founded that the leading
Speaker 5: television station, Yes, radio station. You own a newspaper. Yes,
Speaker 5: you own the biggest hotel in Managua. No, we're shareholders
Speaker 5: of it. You're a major shareholder, no minority. You own
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands of acres of land. Yes, you owned cattle. Yes,
Speaker 5: you own huge financial interests in banks and insurance companies.
Speaker 8: And you still we could go on and on.
Speaker 2: He owned everything, and he made sure that all his
Speaker 2: friends were taken care of too.
Speaker 1: The wealthy elite had a lot to lose if Samosa
Speaker 1: lost power, and Cookie's family was a part of that.
Speaker 1: Could the motive just be money? I guess it's always money,
Speaker 1: But what about big business? Nicaragua exported sugar, beef, bananas,
Speaker 1: but most of that was owned by Someimosa and his friends.
Speaker 1: The Nicaraguaan government did arrest for suspects, saying they were
Speaker 1: hired by an American whose plasma exporting business was under
Speaker 1: fire by Chamorro's newspaper Loprenza. Of course Simosa had a
Speaker 1: piece of that plasma business as well. It always leads
Speaker 1: back to Somemosa. But what about the United States. We've
Speaker 1: had a stake in Nicaragua since we helped get the
Speaker 1: first Smosa in power back in the nineteen twenties, and
Speaker 1: of course we've assassinated people in the past.
Speaker 2: There's a famous line from Franklin Roosevelt about the first Tomosa,
Speaker 2: the President Samosa's father, FDR referring to Samosa, he's the
Speaker 2: son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.
Speaker 2: All the Somosas were bound to the US. President Simosa
Speaker 2: went to West Point, all of them US educated. Obviously
Speaker 2: investments in this country. At this point, the US is
Speaker 2: still backing the Nicaragua dictatorship.
Speaker 1: Like we backed to O Salvador and Honduras.
Speaker 2: And well, correct fighting communism.
Speaker 1: In the presence of Cuba, right there.
Speaker 2: Maybe were communists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, who makes that Domino theory viable? Viable?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 2: And I think you got the Allende and Chile and
Speaker 2: you know, all these different movements that were put down
Speaker 2: ruthlessly and viciously.
Speaker 1: At this point, we haven't discounted any of our suspects.
Speaker 1: They all have motive, they all have opportunity. They all
Speaker 1: wanted him dead. Is this like Julius Caesar where they
Speaker 1: all put a knife in his back? Are they all
Speaker 1: fucking guilty? Wait a second, I forgot about someone.
Speaker 2: The second generation. Simosa had a son, and he was
Speaker 2: next in line to become president one day. He was
Speaker 2: this flashy military kid. He might have gone to West
Speaker 2: Point as well. He was hanging around with mercenaries. There
Speaker 2: were famous American mercenaries that were coming to Nicaragua. Mike
Speaker 2: the Mercenary, Bob the Mercenary. These were bad people. They
Speaker 2: would wear the bullets across here like Pancho Villa. And
Speaker 2: by this time the mercenaries are drying in tanks in
Speaker 2: the streets. Of course I was friends with them too.
Speaker 1: That's right, Cookie parties with mercenaries. Where were they from?
Speaker 2: US? Just anywhere mercenary needed a job, he could come.
Speaker 1: The US mercenaries killed Pedro.
Speaker 2: We don't know who exactly did. We suspect that it
Speaker 2: was Mike the Mercenary, but it was on the orders
Speaker 2: of Samosa the third He had Pedro Woking Chamorrow assassinated.
Speaker 1: I don't know if Cookie's right about this, but it
Speaker 1: sure makes a better story.
Speaker 2: Of course, we later found out his father was furious
Speaker 2: with him. Why did you do this because that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff just didn't happen to rich people in Nicaragua.
Speaker 2: Sure it happened behind the scenes to poor people and
Speaker 2: revolutionaries and criminals, but that kind of stuff didn't.
Speaker 7: Happen in the end. I actually don't think who or
Speaker 7: it ends up being the important question. The result of
Speaker 7: it is what's really important, which is there's this massive
Speaker 7: reporting in the US about this beloved hero of press,
Speaker 7: freedom and democracy, ped jaquin Chimoto being assassinated in this
Speaker 7: country led by a violent military dictator. So that's the
Speaker 7: way the coverage is being presented. And then four every
Speaker 7: day Nicaraguans, even those who were not really political. It
Speaker 7: is both the murder of this very popular figure, but
Speaker 7: also this idea that if he can be murdered, what
Speaker 7: won't they do.
Speaker 11: This is how the Washington Post summed it up. At
Speaker 11: a crucial moment. The Chamorro murder has dramatized for foreigners
Speaker 11: the lawlessness and political tension long known to Nicaraguan's The
Speaker 11: Samosa family has tried to run the politics and economy
Speaker 11: of the country as its personal preserve, cleverly co opting
Speaker 11: support and brutally destroying opponents. Whether the transition to the
Speaker 11: post Simosa arrow will be violent or peaceful cannot be told.
Speaker 11: What can be said is that, regardless of who killed him,
Speaker 11: Pedro Chimorro died of Patriot's death.
Speaker 1: The assassination of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro changed everything. It lit
Speaker 1: a flame under the long simmering revolution. The Santa de
Speaker 1: Nisas were back in business in a big way. That
Speaker 1: people who came out in the streets united in opposition
Speaker 1: to Simosa. It was the beginning of the end of
Speaker 1: a dictator. It made headlines around the world. Cookie didn't
Speaker 1: know it yet, but her life was about to change.
Speaker 2: Next time on Journalista, Pablo gave me half a pound
Speaker 2: of cocaine for the wedding, so I brought my girlfriend
Speaker 2: from New Orleans, flew her in and we spent the
Speaker 2: whole day before and the whole day of grinding it up.
Speaker 2: We started off with one graand bottles and realized quickly
Speaker 2: that's likely to be enough, So we went and got
Speaker 2: two gram bottles, filled up one hundred of them. When
Speaker 2: the people arrived at the door, that's what they were
Speaker 2: given with a bow on it. You know, this is
Speaker 2: your party.
Speaker 1: Favor The Journalist of podcast features the stories and voice
Speaker 1: of Cookie Hood narrated by Steven Step. Produced by Sean J. Donnelly.
Speaker 1: Executive producers Jason Waggensback, Roy Laughlin, and Ellen k. iHeart
Speaker 1: Executive producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Step.
Speaker 1: Music by Jay Weigel, Associate producer in sound design Steven Tanti.
Speaker 1: Sound mixing by Jesse soln Snyder. Featuring the voices of
Speaker 1: radio personality Ellen K. Lloyd, Shirt, Loyola University Professor Pablo Sabalis,
Speaker 1: special guest Tulaine History Professor Justin Wolf Special Thanks to
Speaker 1: Esplanade Studios, The Ranch Studios, Jason Gerwitz, Kyle Frederick, Zach Slack.
Speaker 1: This is a production of Journalista Podcast LLC and iHeartRadio