Dear Readers:
On Sunday night I returned from a week long visit to Nicaragua. This was my first trip back there since my first visit in 1986 at the height of the war with the U.S. backed Contras. The official purpose of my visit was to work with a group called Etica y Transparencia (Ethics and Transparency) which has led the citizen election monitoring efforts there for the past eight years and is now seeking to expand its activities to other projects aimed at building democracy and civic participation in Nicaragua.
One week is too little time in any country to offer a deep or dependable analysis of much of anything. So what I offer here is more of a personal and impressionist portrait of what I saw there. My first trip to Nicaragua twelve years ago changed my life in major ways, as it did many people I know who went there during that time. I offer you the following in that spirit.
Happy reading!
Jim Shultz The Democracy Center
"Their caskets
are open, their faces deeply scarred by the Contra
land mine that
killed them yesterday driving on a road just 50
kilometers from
here. Two Nicaraguans, and three volunteers, from
France, Sweden
and Germany. The makeshift funeral hall is filled and
it is hard to
absorb that each of these men had a family, friends, a
life. It
is also difficult to absorb from this horror that the United
States provided
the mine which killed the young men (my age) for whom
300 to 400 people
now sing. What am I supposed to tell people
when I get home?"
Personal journal entry
Matagalpa, Nicaragua
July 29, 1986
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 1998 - MANAGUA, NICARAGUA
I am resting with my back leaned up against a decaying concrete pillar sitting on the sandy pitted floor of what remains of Nicaragua?s national cathedral. Destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1972, the cathedral has been left with its caved-in ceiling and blown out windows, a ruin open to the air.
When I first arrived on Sunday night it was the air that I first remembered - thick, tropical, warm and humid, with a mild but constant scent of smoke. I later learned that the smoke was from the annual burning of sugar cane about 20 kilometers from the city, but it smelled of a nearby fire put out but still smoldering. A metaphor for something here.
As I write I can hear the sounds of the afternoon (men moving folding chairs from some church event held here in the ruin, the engines and horns of passing cars and buses, children?s voices at a distance). These sounds are also interrupted by the echoes of loud explosions. It is probably police warnings or tear gas being fired at a large street demonstration weaving its way through the city today. The doctors are on strike because they haven?t been paid their salary from the government in a long while and other workers have joined them. USAID officials warned me against taking a walk in Managua today, but I?ve come anyway.
When I was in this cathedral 12 years ago Nicaragua was in the midst of the Sandinista social revolution and at one of the most violent points in the Contra war launched by Ronald Reagan and Oliver North to pry the Sandinistas out of power. I still remember vividly the funeral for the five men killed by a contra land mine on a road near where we had also traveled that same day. About a year later I saw that same makeshift funeral hall again, on television from home in the U.S., when it was used for the funeral of Benjamin Linder, a young American volunteer killed by the Contras.
Managua has a very different feel than it did 12 years ago. Some of it is symbolic. A block from here sits an enormous sculpture, perhaps two houses tall, a powerfully muscled man who holds low in his right hand a farming pick and high aloft in his left hand a rifle. The base reads (translated to English), "Only the peasants and the workers will go to the end." I remember the statue from 12 years ago - new, immaculate, a symbol of Nicaraguan power and pride against the U.S. war. Today it is watermarked, broken, neglected and 30 yards behind it sits a bright, freshly painted yellow billboard for Bell Atlantic with a cell phone almost the height of the statue. From the gun to the cell phone.
Nicaragua is no longer at war. A dozen years ago the streets of Managua were dotted with green army vehicles carrying conscripted soldiers north toward "la montaña" (the mountain) and the fighting. On this trip I have seen a striking number of men in their thirties missing arms or legs or their sight, a legacy of the war. Today in place of army vehicles the streets of Managua are dotted with fresh new Pizza Huts, McDonalds and modern Texaco and Shell stations. Maybe these are the things that Nicaraguans want, or maybe these are the things that U.S. business is intent on delivering here for the very few that can afford them.
A dozen years ago, in spite of the war and the U.S. economic
embargo at the time, there were some good and powerful changes
happening in Nicaragua. A movement of very idealistic
young people launched large and energetic programs that
eliminated polio, reduced infant mortality by a third, and
boosted literacy from 50% to 87%. This was such a
far cry from the years of neglect by the Somosa dictatorship
that came before. It is also very different than what
is going on in Nicaragua today.
RAFAEL WHO DOESN'T GO TO SCHOOL
In the cathedral I found myself followed around by a little boy named Rafael, 10 years old, the same age as my son Miguel. He is barefoot, his clothes are torn and dirty, his hair waves in five different directions at once. He insists on giving me a guided tour of the ruined church where he seems to spend a lot of his time. Unsurprisingly he sticks to me like velcro for the rest of the afternoon until we finally end up at one of the small open air cafeterias along Managua?s nearby lake. My offer to buy Rafael some lunch slowly draws another four children to our table and turns into a little party of chicken, rice, beans and platanos (fried bananas) - their first meal of the day.
"Do you go to school?"
"No"
"Why not?"
"I have the
shoes, but I don?t have the clothes, the books, or the other
things you have
to have to go to school."
The story is pretty much the same with each of the children. An article I clipped from the Miami Herald on my flight down from the U.S. reported that 11% of Nicaraguan children were out of school, many of them, including little ones, forced to work to help their families in an economy with 53% unemployment. In Managua there are about 3,000 children working on the brutally hot streets during the day, many selling small plastic bags of water to the cars stopped at traffic lights. On the weekend in Matagalpa, a smaller town in the mountains, I met more kids who work on the street. One was a five year old, Roberto, covered from head to toe in black shoe polish, part of the small roaming flock of shoe shine children that hover in the central plaza looking for customers.
THE GIRL WITH THE CHICKEN ON THE BUS
To know Latin America is to ride on its buses. You?ve ridden on them before because they are almost all discarded yellow school buses from the U.S. This one still has Lakeside School District painted on the side. The seat that fit just fine when I was nine years old now smashes my knees half-way to my chest.
About a half hour into the trip from Matagalpa down the hill to Managua, the bus makes one of its many stops to pick up new passengers. Those getting on this time include a girl that looks about 11 (the same age as my daughter Elly) and her mother. The girl is dressed in her Sunday best, a red nylon dress with flower trim at the waste and hem and bright red and white puffs at the sleeve. In her arms she gently carries some slow moving bundle that looks like it might be an infant. When I finally see its feathered brown head I see it is a chicken, wrapped in blue plastic - either a gift or dinner or both for whomever she and her mother have set off to visit.
Later as we bump further down the road a short man in a blue baseball cap boards the bus with another not-an-infant in his arms, a cooing baby monkey with large black eyes. Nicaraguans get such a broad smile on their face when they see the bus finally arrive to pick them up, like fortune has shined upon them. On the bus people talk to each other and the Spanish conversation mixes with the ancient Neil Diamond music blaring from the bus radio to create a bizarre and bumpy blend of cultures. Even if just in the music, somehow the presence of the U.S. seems always to hover over life here.
PARTING THOUGHTS
What is different about Nicaragua now? The war is over. Crime is worse. There is more affluence. There is more desperate poverty. Twelve years ago the billboards were about getting vaccinated and learning to read and the airport was old and funky. Today the billboards are for cell phones and consumer goods and the airport is new and modern. A dozen years ago, despite the war, Nicaragua felt like a grand, often flawed, often brilliant experiment in how to develop a nation through some method other than the standard U.S. model of - integrate into the world economy first, help the poor second. Today Nicaragua seems to have adopted that U.S. model, as has most of Latin America.
Still, there is an undercurrent of hope and a dedicated network of people and organizations dedicated to building up Nicaragua. They are improving its democracy. They are trying to get the poor the health care they need. They are nurturing community-based projects to integrate the former soldiers from both sides of the war back into a peaceful Nicaragua.
One of the people I met in Nicaragua was Alexandro Bendaña,
a leader in the Sandinista party which is now forms the
main political opposition. I shared the symbolism
of the decaying statue and the giant cell phone. He
nodded, thought a minute and said to me, "but the statue
is still there." And so it is. The smell of
smoke in the air is many things. It is the legacy
of the war that still leaves its scent on Nicaragua a decade
later. It is also embers of the ideas and works from
that time that have enduring value, which have not died
in Nicaragua?s memory and which struggle still to find a
permanent place in the fabric of Nicaragua?s future.
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