In 1968, to protect her from the violence in the country, Montenegro was sent to live with her sister in West Palm Beach, Florida where she finished high school and was exposed to feminist thought and Marxism for the first time.

She returned to Nicaragua and though she passed the university entrance exams, her parents chose to send her brother to school abroad, rather than educating a woman.

[8][7] She struggled to overcome the fear that her family name evoked in the Sandinista movement[6] and became estranged from her mother when she refused to intervene in the death sentence of Franklin, when he was caught.

[5] For her historical essay, "Memorias del Atlántico" (Memoirs of the Atlantic) that was published in 1986, she won the José Martí Prize for Journalism in 1987 in Havana, Cuba.

[2] In 1995, she founded[2] and became the executive director of the Centro de Investigaciones para la Comunicación (CINCO) (Center for Communication Research)[10] which evaluates how sex, gender, and power affect Nicaraguan society.

[9] That same year, she became one of the main organizers and founders of the Partido de la Izquierda Erotica, PIE (Party of Erotic Left) with lawyer Milú Vargas and poet Gioconda Belli.

[19][10][25] The “campaign to criminalize feminists for their struggle to reinstitute the right to therapeutic abortion" united feminists from Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, who sent an open letter to Ortega's administration denouncing the attempts to silence activists.

She also criticized a proposed inter-oceanic canal project, maintaining that it would threaten the quality of the water in Lake Nicaragua and environmental health.

[18] Upon being asked how she became a revolutionary, Montenegro said that she would never forget the book that had changed her life: she was 16 years old when she read Born Female: the High Cost of Keeping Women Down by Caroline Bird.