Education
National Autonomous University of Nicaragua.
National Autonomous University of Nicaragua.
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.
Murillo was born in Managua, Nicaragua.
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 Louisiana 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
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 Louisiana 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. From 1988 - 1990 she served as the Director of the Institute of Culture.
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 joined the Sandinista National Liberation Front in 1969.